The U.S. Congress returned to work Wednesday. So did the British MPs at Westminster. Parliamentarians will reassemble in Canberra on Feb. 2. New Zealand's House of Representatives will be on the job a week later.
But Canada's House of Commons and Senate will remain dark until early March because of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's decision last week to have Parliament prorogued.
It is a small symptom of a grave condition. Our Parliament has become the most dysfunctional in the English-speaking world, weaker and more irrelevant than the U.S. Congress or the parliaments of Britain, Australia or New Zealand.
If Britain is the mother of Parliaments, her Canadian daughter is a fallen woman. Government MPs are cowed; parliamentary committees are too often irrelevant. Three consecutive minority governments haven't strengthened the powers of the House to hold the government to account; instead, they've encouraged new methods by which the Prime Minister's Office seeks to centralize authority.
If the idea is to produce responsive parliamentary government, then you’ve got to give the MPs something to do.— Campbell Sharman, University of British Columbia
Prime ministers have been growing more powerful since the days of Pierre Trudeau. Maybe the rising power of the provinces forced Ottawa to centralize authority in response; maybe modern government became so complex that parliamentary deliberation became an anachronism. Maybe Parliament declined as politics became more partisan, and politics became more partisan as Parliament declined.
“This prorogation can be seen as a reflection of the decay of Parliament's relevance that has been taking place over the last generation,” maintains Peter Dobell, founding director of the Parliamentary Centre, an Ottawa-based institute that promotes parliamentary government around the world.
But whatever came before, Stephen Harper's decision to have Parliament prorogued for the second time in a year establishes a potential precedent, in which prorogation can be “used strategically to bring an end to a session when the going gets tough for the government,” observes Lori Thorlakson, a political scientist who specializes in comparative government at University of Alberta.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper attends the opening of a new U.S. border crossing in St. Stephen, N.B., on Friday, Jan. 8, 2010.
No other legislature among what Winston Churchill called the English-speaking peoples would tolerate such treatment. And since Westminster-style parliaments tend to have weaker legislatures than those in other developed countries, our House of Commons could be described as the weakest of the weak.
Watching the health-care debate south of the border, you might think that, however messed up Parliament Hill might be, it can't compare with Capitol Hill. The House of Representatives is full of gerrymandered districts; it can take tens of millions of dollars to run a Senate campaign; legislation is stuffed with pork aimed at securing crucial votes; bills are routinely eviscerated or defeated because of powerful special interests. Congress has spent almost a year crafting health-care reform legislation, which still hasn't reached a final vote.
Nonetheless, Congress does pretty much what the framers of the American Constitution set it up to do: act as a check on the administration. Representatives don't hesitate to vote against the party line if they feel a piece of legislation doesn't serve their constituents' interests. Senators are powerful voices who can rival presidents in their ability to drive or derail an agenda.
As well, “the powers of the Senate and the House are superbly advanced by the fact that they have investigative powers” to summon elected and appointed officials to explain themselves, observes William McKercher, a specialist in American politics at the University of Western Ontario.
Dysfunctional short-termism … sees momentary political advantage trump the common good.— Jon Johansson, Victoria University, New Zealand
