Irresponsible Government
Foreword
Until the 1930s, it was the convention and indeed the law in Canada that an MP, on appointment to Cabinet, had first to resign his seat and run in a by-election. The reason: his role had changed, from being a watchdog on the government to being a member of it. As such he was obliged to ask his electors’ permission.
Contrast that to the present day. The idea of members of the governing party acting as any sort of effective check on the prime minister or Cabinet is so far removed from current practice that I doubt many Canadians could even imagine it. Nowadays, as Brent Rathgeber writes in this eloquent lament for what we have lost, they are more cheerleaders than watchdogs. They do not see their role as to hold government to account; indeed, they see themselves as part of it. They “show up at government funding announcements in their ridings,” he writes, “often with oversized novelty cheques (sometimes bearing the party logo) bragging and taking credit for the pork that has just been delivered.”
What we have lost, in short, is “responsible government,” the great achievement of pre-Confederation Canada. Government is no longer responsible to Parliament in any meaningful way. Opposition MPs lack the tools, and government MPs lack the incentive, preferring to angle for one of the many scores of offices in the prime minister’s power to bestow. “Canada,” Rathgeber writes, “has had responsible government since 1848, and a constitution since 1867. The latter remains substantially unaltered; the former has been almost completely destroyed.”
The critique is neither exaggerated nor new. Indeed, similar complaints have been heard for decades; what is new, however, is that the present government came to power promising to restore what previous governments had undermined. But Rathgeber is no ordinary critic. The decline of Parliament, the neutering of MPs, isn’t an abstract complaint to him: as a Conservative MP, he lived it. He saw how the system has broken down close up, from the inside. And, exceptionally, he chose to do something about it, first by resigning from caucus in protest, and now with this book.
As he describes, nothing in our present system works as it is supposed to. The dominance of the executive over Parliament, and of party leaders over caucus, pervades everything, from how we nominate candidates to how we elect party leaders, from how elections are conducted to how Parliament works, or fails to. Other checks and balances — the media, the bureaucracy, the courts — are no substitute for a democratically elected Parliament, accountable to the people and as such in a unique position to demand accountability from government.
Notably, Rathgeber makes clear the real-world consequences of this, such as the decades-long failure of Parliament to control public spending, or, in the extreme, scandals like the Wright-Duffy affair, in which a sitting legislator was paid tens of thousands of dollars to keep quiet about a matter embarrassing to the government: the logical consequence of a system where all power resides in the Prime Minister’s Office.
“Irresponsible government,” he writes, “has not served Canadians well.” But before they can be persuaded to demand change, “the electorate will need to be convinced that reform is in their best interest in a tangible way, not merely at a conceptual level.”
Rathgeber offers several recommendations for reform. Of these, the most intriguing is his suggestion that members of Cabinet be appointed from outside Parliament — a hybrid of the American and Canadian systems, in which the government would be accountable to the Commons but not of it. If MPs had no possibility of becoming ministers, he reasons, they would be less inclined to servility, more inclined to perform the watchdog role as of old. I am reflexively hostile — smaller cabinets would achieve much the same purpose, surely — but the idea can’t be dismissed outright.
And certainly any would-be reformers would do well to start with the analysis offered in these pages: as clear-eyed as it is forthright, a passionate call to arms, for a democracy in need of defenders.
Andrew Coyne is a columnist with Postmedia; his columns appear in the National Post, the Ottawa Citizen, and other papers in the chain. His writing has also appeared in Maclean’s, Saturday Night, the Globe and Mail, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Time. Coyne appears frequently as a commentator on television political affairs programs, including the “At Issue” panel on CBC’s The National.
INTRODUCTION
On June 5, 2013, I resigned from the Conservative caucus of the Canadian House of Commons. I was elected as the Conservative MP for Edmonton-St. Albert in October 2008 and re-elected in May of 2011. Prior to my election to Parliament, I had served one term in the Alberta Legislature, and for a little more than a decade before that I was a trial lawyer. I have also worked inside government, mostly during my university years, most notably as an executive assistant to a Saskatchewan cabinet minister. I have also been employed as a student employment counsellor and as a research officer for the Public Prosecutions Branch and Labour Relations Board of the Government of Saskatchewan.
I am a conservative. Accordingly, I have an inherent mistrust of government and government institutions. I believe that government is necessary, as there are many projects and public works that can only be achieved effectively as a collective. However, I believe said projects are fewer than are commonly believed. Although government is necessary, I continue to believe that the government that governs least governs best.
As a result, I believe that modern governments at all levels have grown too big, have attempted to do too much, and have grown too expensive. Social engineering and well-intentioned attempts at improving the human condition have led to a “government knows best” philosophy guiding the modern nanny state.
Although attempts at reducing poverty and income disparity are both laudable and have, to some extent, been successful, many other government initiatives and programs are neither. The result is government institutions that consume greater and greater portions of private resources, while simultaneously digging themselves deeper and deeper into debt. For a hundred years, the Government of Canada could generally pay its bills as they came due. However, the modern welfare state, with its requirement for greater program spending and an expensive bureaucracy for administering its universal social programs, has burdened Canada with more than $600 billion of debt.
Provinces, including my home province, resource rich Alberta, now routinely run deficits. Even municipalities have gotten into the debt financing business. My home, located in Edmonton, will see its property taxes increase by 5 percent this year, while the city pays off a $2.2 billion debt.[1] This is occurring while municipal infrastructure, primarily roads and bridges, continues to deteriorate.
Meanwhile, Canadians continue to pay taxes in ever increasing amounts. Taxes continue to absorb over 40 percent of the average Canadian’s salary.[2] Worse, when one level of government lowers one tax or another, another level of government will happily fill the newly created gap.
These practices are not sustainable. The myth that a government can continue to spend in excess of its revenue has been dispelled. Welfare states such as Greece, Portugal, and Spain have all had to renegotiate their debt loads and have had to implement extreme austerity measures as a condition for refinancing. Closer to home, the City of Detroit has actually applied for bankruptcy protection from its creditors. Yes, a city on the Canadian border has petitioned for bankruptcy! Detroit, a city smaller than Edmonton, is carrying a debt load more than nine times that of Edmonton and can no longer pay its bills as they come due.
Many Canadian cities face money challenges; but, I know of none that have similar solvency challenges. However, government debt is an issue at every level. The Government of Canada, for example, currently allocates eleven cents of every tax dollar toward interest.[3] Federal income taxes could be reduced, or, alternatively, program spending could be increased, by 11 percent if governments over the last half-century had exercised more fiscal discipline. Meanwhile, municipalities, such as my hometown of Edmonton, spend upward of 13 percent of tax revenue collected on debt