It's the second time Reform has caught the Liberals on a line change. In June, the House passed a snap Opposition resolution that for a time suspended the government's power to limit debate by closure. All well and good. But if backbench MPs are again to play a significant role in our Parliament, it will take more than a few changes to House rules.

The constraint that binds the ordinary member to the party line is not found in Beauchesne's (Rules and Forms of the House of Commons of Canada, at better bookstores everywhere), but in his own ambition. If he wants to be promoted to his party's front bench, it is not enough that he be talented: he must also be loyal. Actually, it's not even strictly necessary that he be talented.

The loyalty that matters is not to the party, but to the leader. He alone has the power to appoint members of the cabinet or shadow cabinet, as well as committee chairmen, whips and other parliamentary plums. The aspiring member, if he keeps his nose clean, can hardly avoid stumbling into one or other of these positions, so many have they become.

But only if his nose is clean.

Thus the campaign for changes that would empower individual MPs falls afoul of Catch- 22: to pass such measures would require -- Mr. Kenney's coup aside -- the approval of the very prime minister whose own powers would be thereby diminished. Even if the rules of the House were changed along the lines desired, such as opening up more legislation to free votes, so long as a member's career chances depend upon the favour of his leader nothing much would have been achieved. Most "free votes" are still pretty rigid party-line affairs.

To some extent this is inevitable. I don't think you'd want to take away the power of the prime minister to choose his own ministers. Cabinet-making is a delicate art, a balancing of region, gender, language, race -- oh yes, and talent -- that is necessarily the work of a single author. In any case, it hardly seems fair for the media to raise such a fuss over the authoritarian tendencies of Jean Chretien or Preston Manning. Authoritarianism is what leaders do. You might as well ask a rabbit not to mate.

But if the party leader chooses his lieutenants, could not the same apply in reverse? The power of appointment may be the source of the leader's ascendancy over caucus, but what really cements it is the means of his own selection: by a vote of the whole party membership, the "grassroots." Armed with this mandate, he is effectively beholden to no one, or not until the periodic leadership review, in which he has the singular advantage of running unopposed.

In Britain, by contrast, the leader is chosen by the parliamentary caucus. Ditto for the leader of the Republican or Democratic party in the U.S. Congress. There is thus a balance of power between the leader and the led: even as he holds their future in his hands, they in turn hold his. Mr. Chretien or Mr. Manning can disperse caucus rebels by pointing to the results of his latest love-in with the membership. Margaret Thatcher could not; neither, latterly, could Newt Gingrich.

The historian Christopher Moore, in 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal, traces the decline of Parliament to the decline of the individual MP, and the decline of the individual MP to the rise of the "elected" party leader: a practice that began with Mackenzie King. Before, the caucus chose the leader, who was accordingly more solicitous of members' views.

This may seem like heresy in this democratic age. But , as the ludicrous Tory leadership race reminds us, the current system, in which the college of electors commonly consists of busloads of elderly drunks or hospitality suites full of teenage ones, where anyone can buy a vote with a $10 membership and the winners buy wholesale, is hardly a model of the democratic way. At best it is Bonapartism. At worst it is Joe Clark.