Irresponsible government in Canada.

In his final day in the House of Commons last year, Canadian Alliance M.P. Lee Morrison said he was leaving with no regrets:

"I will not regret leaving what has become, under Liberal management, a totally dysfunctional institution. I will not miss the thrill of making well-researched speeches in a virtually empty room. I will not miss working long hours on irrelevant ministerially guided committees. I will not miss the posturing. I will not miss the emasculated government members howling because they do not understand the difference between intelligent heckling and boorish noise. Perhaps it is their subconscious recognition of their own political impotence that drives them to act like hyperactive children."

In the middle of the 19th century, Baldwin and Lafontaine had to struggle to wrest a modicum of power from the British Crown and give us responsible government. At the beginning of the 21st century, only a minority of our legislators know what responsible government is.

At Runnymede in 1215, the English barons forced King John to agree to Magna Carta, the keystone of English liberties. Our King Jean has no barons to oppose him. He seems to believe that he rules by divine right; anyone who opposes him is subject to at least a symbolic decapitation. The election did not chasten him; he is at least as arrogant, obtuse, and dictatorial as before.

The Prime Minister controls the levers of power at every level, from appointments to expenditures. Even the Cabinet is no longer an effective arm of the executive branch of government; it has now joined Parliament as an institution being bypassed. Chretien's two chief assistants, Jean Pelletier and Eddie Goldenberg, attend Cabinet meetings, set Cabinet agendas, and even send back Cabinet proposals. As Donald Savoie, author of the recent study Government from the Centre: the concentration of power in Canadian politics, writes that even the Cabinet no longer serves as a decision-making body, but instead acts as a focus group for the Prime Minister.

Proposals rejected

When Parliament resumed in January 2001, the Alliance presented a twelve-point plan to "make Parliament more responsive to Canadians." It contained a number of sensible proposals, and therefore the Liberals scoffed at it. As Andrew Coyne noted in the National Post, while his paper was carrying a number of articles on parliamentary reform, the Liberals gave some of the rawest displays of contempt for anything like this that they had ever shown. They invoked closure for the 69th time since 1993 to repeal their own reform of unemployment insurance, and they forced their members to vote against a proposal from their own platform--to establish an independent ethics counsellor answerable to Parliament, not to the Prime Minister.

The Liberals showed no sympathy with such sane proposals as appointing some committee chairmen from the opposition instead of invariably from the party in power; allowing free votes, instead of regarding virtually every vote as a vote of confidence, and demanding that members of their caucus support it; and lessening party discipline.

Robert Fife, Ottawa bureau chief for the Post, stated with reason that "there cannot be true reform of Parliament unless the Prime Minister and other party leaders relax their iron grip on MPs...."

House of Commons

Other parliamentary reporters have made it clear that the House of Commons has lost almost all sense of the dignity and decorum appropriate to it. While one honourable member delivers his well-prepared speech, almost no one is listening; some are talking, some are coming or going, some are clacking away at their desk-top computers.

As historian Michael Bliss wrote in the Post on February 16, "something has to give." He added, "the question for the Liberals is what will the explosion look like when it comes?" In one long and forceful paragraph, he summed up what is wrong with our national political institutions, including the daily disgrace of question period and the daily irrelevance of the House of Commons. One of his hard-hitting points was the moral squalor of the Liberals voting against one of their own campaign promises.

And here he came to the main issue: without moral vision and leadership, the people perish. We may add that Jean Chretien is only the last in a line of five Catholic prime ministers who have tried to separate their religious and moral principles from their politics, and so have guided the Ship of State firmly onto the rocks.