Consider this: When people in the same party get together to talk about plans for laws or governance or strategy, we call it a caucus meeting. But when people from different parties do exactly the same thing, we call it a secret backroom plot.
Apparently it's peachy keen for our parliamentarians to get together, hash through an idea, and propose a new piece of legislation without presenting it first to the public in an election campaign--but only if everybody involved in the deal is wearing the same colour scarf.
Is that really the message we want to send to the people who govern us? Wall off the parties and make sure no one leaves their bubble? No talking to each other unless it's antagonistic, and even then, preferably only in Question Period? Because when we use rhetoric like that, that's exactly what we're saying.
And we wonder why nobody in this country can make a democratically elected minority parliament work to save their lives.
Thursday, December 04, 2008
On the backroom
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6 comments:
You'll have heard by now that Parliament has been prorogued.
Does parliamentary democracy have any meaning in Canada anymore? You can't get defeated in a confidence vote if Parliament never actually meets.
Never mind the Canadian public being ignorant of basic civics; that ignorance seems to extend to the head of state as well.
Your people will have their chance -- twice over, in fact.
There'll be a new Throne Speech in January, and a budget.
And then either the Coalition will govern, or we'll go to the polls. And if Harper doesn't get a majority then, the Coalition will get a chance to govern anyway.
And in the meantime, I'm sure nothing important will happen with the world economy. It's not like the big automakers who drive the industrial heartland are going to go bankrupt in the next couple of weeks, right?
That's in Washington's hands, not Ottawa's.
Incidentally, for the moment -- I must stress that temporal qualifier -- the population is on the PM's side.
That may change. But right now, the latest polls (Ipsos, EKOS) show a majority of Canadians would have preferred another election to a swift transition to rule by the Coalition.
If only we governed by polls, eh? Yet there are good reasons we don't.
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