:
I call the meeting to order, please.
We have two witnesses today, and we have two hours for our meeting. We're starting a little late and there is another committee right in here at one o'clock, so there is no chance for us to go over today either. I know that because I have to be here for that committee meeting too.
I welcome you all. I welcome our witness.
We're here pursuant to Standing Order 108(3)(a) and the motion adopted by the committee on Thursday, March 11, 2010, on the study of issues related to prorogation. This is the 13th meeting of the procedure and House affairs committee.
I thank you for all your hard work.
Mr. White, if you'll give me just another minute before I get you to start, I have some news.
Michel, our regular researcher, is not here today. Michel's wife had a baby girl, named Rose, last night--
Some hon. members: Hear, hear!
The Chair: --a sister to her brother Charles. The baby was eight pounds. The baby is already keeping him up late, of course. The real work starts for him now.
We'll wish him well when he comes back, and if I have the permission of the committee, maybe we'll send him a letter, wishing him well and congratulating his wife on all the hard work too.
With that, Mr. White, we're happy to have you here today. I'll give you a chance for an opening statement and then we'll circulate around to the different parties to ask you questions. We'll go as close to noon as we can with you. And we thank you for travelling here and sharing information with us today.
Please, go ahead.
:
It's always a pleasure.
I'll just start with a bit of a brief I've prepared.
On January 23 a curious thing happened. Across the country, thousands of Canadians from all walks of life came together in the name of a routine parliamentary procedure that, up until a year ago, many had never even heard of.
[Translation]
We represented various political circles, unified by our interest to preserve democracy and keep the government responsible. Even if we were encouraged by politicians, we owe our success to our ability to organize ourselves, to debate and discuss on the Internet and in our committees.
[English]
Much has been made about the legitimacy of political engagement through social networking. Some have disparaged the 226,000 proud Canadians who signed into the “Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament” Facebook group. They said it was incredibly easy to simply click a “join” button, which is true, although I would add it is no more difficult than marking an X on a ballot, but none here would doubt the importance of the latter.
The low barrier of entry to online political participation is actually one of its strengths. Contacting members of Parliament, demonstrating, and circulating petitions can be intimidating at first. For many, CAPP was their first experience in political involvement and many are now self-professed political junkies. To any politician who pays more than lip service to citizen engagement, they should be encouraged by this and work towards finding ways to bring these tools to their constituents.
[Translation]
We showed that Canadians are very interested in our democracy and the way our Parliament works. We are not against prorogation as such, but we are against the flagrant abuse of power that was displayed in December 2009. It is now the responsibility of the House to find a solution to ensure that this does not happen again.
[English]
I recognize that any truly binding regulations would require opening up the Constitution, for which there does not seem to be an appetite. I favour proposals to introduce new conventions through the Standing Orders or legislation. Proposals to date have considered a maximum length for prorogation, when it can be called, and if it should require a vote.
At the foundation of any new convention should be that the House, the body that represents the will of Canadians, be given the power to decide when it does and does not sit. You cannot simply introduce a convention and expect it to stick. A convention, by its nature, is a voluntary practice reinforced through tradition and repeated use. Indeed, much of what guides our government is convention alone, an agreement by its actors to behave civilly and treat one another with respect in the interest of serving Canadians. Perhaps that's why we're in trouble.
The most common objection I've heard to CAPP is “So what? Who needs Parliament anyway?” This must give you cause for reflection, that some see your role as destructive at worse, and irrelevant at best.
Prorogation hit a nerve because it touched upon the greater issue of Parliament, and of democracy, and how the two play out in Canada. Even if you supported the 's decision--which I can respect--you owe it to the nearly quarter of a million Canadians to at least acknowledge their concerns. If Parliament does not take its role seriously, then people have every right to become cynical.
We need an opposition focused on the issues, not chasing scandal for the sake of political goal-scoring. We need a government that answers questions directly instead of deflecting or shifting the blame.
All of that being said, I do have reason for hope. The very fact that I sit here before you today is proof that the government is taking this issue seriously. A recent motion brought forward by the member for Wellington—Halton Hills addresses the issue of decorum in the House and hopefully will lead to new conventions on respect in and for the chamber.
Last week's decision from the Speaker called upon all parties to work together, presenting an opportunity to renew your commitment to serving the best interests of Canadians. Prorogation has kicked off what will hopefully translate into greater citizen engagement with the democratic process. You can help to foster this by working together on a solution to protect and strengthen the role of Parliament in the decisions that guide and shape our nation.
Thank you.
:
The thing with the Facebook groups is that once they hit 5,000 members, you actually can't change things around a bit. I was very interested in actually changing the name of the group to reflect the broader mandate.
What was really interesting about the group is that it really did kick off a lot of other discussion and questions about the role of Parliament and government, questions such as the role of the monarchy in Canada, proportional representation, other forms of voting, and that sort of thing. So I was really hoping to change the name of the group to reflect that. Unfortunately, it remains Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament.
I think there are about 217,000 members still. Of those, though, I would say there are probably only a few dozen who remain active, and the issues that are discussed today tend to be things that have come up during that week. For instance, there was a discussion as to the Afghan detainee documents for quite a while, and recent issues such as Mr. Ignatieff's call for the Governor General's term to be extended. Any issue of the day gets brought up and discussed and then eventually fades away. So it remains active. People remain interested in prorogation to see what happens with it.
I've told people on the boards that I'm going to be here and many of them are excited. It's really encouraging to see that, to see that their efforts and their concerns are being addressed. So I thank all the members here today for taking that quite seriously.
:
I can talk personally and that will give you some perspective on it. Again, I'm politically aware. I follow politics and read the news and everything like that. So back in 2008 I was aware when Mr. Harper had asked to prorogue in face of the coalition attempt. Honestly, at that point, in regard to all the actors in that situation, I wasn't very impressed with what was going on, so I didn't choose to get involved. That was when I was not apathetic, but very much more cynical than I am today.
That's why I personally didn't get involved then, but I do think it was actually what happened in 2008, because it was one year right after the other again. I think a lot of people grumbled about it in 2008, but they also grumbled about the idea of the coalition, so they balanced each other off, if you want to look at it that way.
In 2009, to see it happen again without that other opposite end of things, personally that's why I decided to get involved. Again, I read it, I was frustrated. It was actually Andrew Coyne who came up with the idea. I read it on his blog in Maclean's. I thought that would be a great idea. And for whatever reason, it grew from there.
Personally, my involvement with it and the way I've been able to articulate and not be a quack about it is because I'm not particularly partisan.
:
May I answer in English? I really have no hope of sitting on the Supreme Court.
Some hon. members: Ha, Ha!
[English]
Mr. Christopher White: I'd actually been working on that joke.
I think what's really interesting about what's happened is that a lot of people are starting to really think and reflect—I'm speaking personally, as well, here—about the different actors in Parliament. Again, it's correct, the opposition is not simply there; they're as critical to the proper functioning of the Government of Canada as the governing party.
I think what's interesting is that a lot of people have actually started taking more interest in procedure and that sort of thing and actually started thinking more. It's quite interesting to see. The main idea we have of Parliament is question period, the yelling and the heckling, and all of that. But then to see a fairly collegial atmosphere among different actors or different parties is quite refreshing.
I think people are taking more notice of that and paying more attention to what goes on in committees. Again, there was the question as to whether prorogation was requested in order to prevent the Afghan committee from asking questions. So people started thinking about what committees do and what their role is. It has been quite encouraging that there has been a lot more discussion, and people are considering that. Even on the CAPP forum, I have people asking questions, and then they'll go to the Parliament website and take out the little bits of information, post it and discuss it. It's been really encouraging to people.
It's not until you have your voice taken away that you really realize how important it is to be able to have that. I think that what's happened here has actually been quite good in some ways. It's gotten a lot of people to wake up and start paying a lot more attention.
:
Were people aware that it was the third time the government had used prorogation since it was elected four years ago, in order to silence the opposition or to avoid accountability on some issues?
The reasons were almost the same the three times Parliament was prorogued. If we look at what the previous governments did, we see that there were four prorogations in 10 years. So we can say that this use is abusive.
If there is prorogation when parliamentarians are on holidays, for example during the Christmas holidays or summer break, would you look favourably on parliamentarians being called back to the House to debate explaining to the people what is really happening in order to stop this kind of cynicism? We are told we are on holidays, we should be happy, we are in our riding and we do nothing. Often, the people do not know what the members do; they are not aware of all the work that goes on in the riding offices, unless they need to see a member for such and such a matter. What do you think about that? When we heard about prorogation, we were a little insulted about not being able to come back to Parliament. The prime minister decided to prorogue Parliament, and we had no say in it. We also have no voice.
Have you perhaps thought about a formula where parliamentarians could come back to the House when there is a need for debate? The House could be prorogued, but there could still be the need for a debate.
:
Thank you very much, Chair.
Christopher, it's good to see you again. Thank you for coming.
It occurred to me while you were talking, if our ages were reversed, I could be Christopher's son. That will give him something to groan about.
Let me just say to you that you're very impressive. It's not easy to come in here in front of a group of parliamentarians, particularly given some of the antics we do get into. I think it's fair to say that, particularly to a lot of younger Canadians, you're a folk hero, and I hope you wear that appropriately, because you now are part of the community of leaders who people look to in terms of the direction in which we ought to be going as a country. I appreciate what you've done so far, and wish you well going forward, and hope you stay involved somewhere in public life. I think there's a role for you, it's pretty apparent.
One of the things that was interesting—picking up on where Mr. Reid was going in terms of the phenomenon of social networking—was the question of whether there would be a transference of activism from sitting in one's home any time, night or day, regardless of the weather, and just clicking and suddenly you're an activist, versus the call for January 23 in the middle of winter to actually come outside and put yourself out in the elements to make your point. And lo and behold, they appeared.
I was in Gore Park in downtown Hamilton on January 23, and it was packed. It was speakers in the back of the pickup truck, it was about as grassroots politics as you're ever going to see. There was just a natural outrage that people felt, as you well put it, that something had been taken away from them, that they had something and it was taken away.
You've been following the advice, and you're obviously very learned in your own right, and you'll see that there's some question of whether we could do anything, short of a constitutional amendment, that would actually stop it. You mentioned we have a legislative route, we have our Standing Orders, and a constitutional amendment would put a stop to it. We'll probably wrestle with disincentives and different things, but in large part--and that's the point you made--if we do it through the Standing Orders and legislation, it's going to be the political price that a Prime Minister of the day would pay, as opposed to the actual penalties, because they can factor those in. What they can't factor in is where the public is going to be.
So my question to you is, do you think that's enough? Do you think there have been enough civics lessons, that people get it enough that if the Prime Minister were to ignore either legislation or the Standing Orders, which don't have the same anchor as a constitutional amendment, people would react to that and say that the Prime Minister is not following the rules and would get it that this is wrong, or are we putting in place a paper tiger here?
I want to continue on a point from my colleague David Christopherson. Very briefly, it was the issue of people having claimed that the coalition government agreement between the Liberal Party of Canada and the New Democratic Party of Canada was unholy, was illegal, was unconstitutional, etc., and that many Canadians, not knowing what our constitutional parliamentary democracy is and how it actually operates, actually bought into that.
We have elections that are taking place in another parliamentary democracy today, in the U.K., and for weeks now there have been discussions that have been seen as perfectly legitimate that the Liberal Democrats might form a coalition with the Labour Party or with the Conservative Party, and there has been absolutely no discussion that such discussions or even the possibility of it materializing is unholy, unconstitutional.
So I would like to know if CAPP has in any way used that over the past couple of weeks, and maybe going into the future, to bring that kind of education to both its members and anyone else who may go on the site to look at it and then visit it.
:
Again, I honestly have not been too active on the CAPP forum lately, and certainly the idea is to just to keep people discussing. We don't want to be putting out the idea of a coalition with the intent of hopefully propping up any parties or anything like that.
But I think it is quite interesting that we have sort of this confusion and that some people would perhaps try to exploit that. I think what's going on in Britain right now is quite interesting and the fact that they are seriously considering it. We copied and pasted their system of government, right, so if they can make it work, then there's the possibility that we can as well.
Again, I would hate to see any government try to confuse Canadians as to the legitimacy of different ways of governing. I mean, all political parties by their nature are coalitions of some sort, played out very obviously with the merger of the two Conservative parties. In the nineties there was kind of a split going on in the NDP, and there are always the different factions within the Liberal Party as well. So parties themselves are coalitions.
Parliament itself in order to pass anything requires some form of consensus. I am certainly not alone in thinking that we are all kind of headed down this road of continual minority governments. So coalitions, whether they are formal or informal—we have seen the NDP support the current government, we have seen the Liberal support in some ways by abstaining and what not—are going to continue, and we need to really understand and educate Canadians about that.
Thanks very much, Mr. White, for coming here.
I also want to tell you that I liked your line that you were practising, that you're not applying for the Supreme Court. I might with your permission use that from time to time.
To follow up with some of the general conversation that is going on, I'll just comment, I guess, first on the coalition. The difference, I believe, between the discussion that's happening right now in the U.K. election and the last time coalition was discussed here in Canada following the 2008 election was exactly that, that the coalition came to light following the election as opposed to it being discussed in the lead-up to the campaign. I think that's maybe why there's a different attitude in the U.K., because people are anticipating what might happen. If they have objections to it they can voice them prior to the election as opposed to having something perhaps sprung on them afterwards.
I guess that leads me into the question I really wanted to ask. How much of an educational mode did your group have? In other words, I got from your comments and your presentation that many, if not most, of the people who joined your Facebook group really didn't consider themselves to be politically active prior to joining.
So I would think that the learning curve must have been reasonably steep if you got into discussions like constitutional amendments. I'm just wondering how much of a role did you or did other members of your group actually play in educating or informing those members who were not previously politically active or knowledgeable about what might be entailed to curtail or to stop or control prorogation.
We're going to stop there.
Mr. White, thank you so much for coming today. The fact that you're an anthropology student means you could probably suggest to us why we behave the way we do.
You mentioned a couple of other things that I think both bear repeating. You asked a question: "Can a Facebook debate actually become a convention?" Perhaps in the future this is the technology we're heading to, and maybe we will have to be researching that at this committee.
I really want to thank you, because you said that people have become aware of procedures and that it's becoming a bigger thing in the world out there. We think that's because of this committee and the great work that it does. So we thank you for bringing that to Canada's attention.
We'll watch your site, if you'll watch our committee, and we'll see where we end up with this.
:
Oh, maybe I should. I'll talk to you after.
I imagine the reason I'm here is that in January I wrote a letter that snowballed beyond what I'd expected. It ended up being signed by close to 300 academics, for the most part professors of law, political science, and some of us oddball philosophers.
It made a couple of points, which I think over the course of the last four or five months have become part of the public debate. Indeed, I think one of the gratifying things about the letter is that probably a lot of what I'll say in going over, very briefly, what's in the letter will be boringly redundant to you now. I think perhaps it wasn't so much in January when we wrote the letter.
I wouldn't want to insult you by going into too much detail about it, but the point we wanted to make to Canadians is that we have a very peculiar parliamentary system. I guess they're all peculiar, but the particular peculiarities of ours means that the way in which different powers are held in check as opposed to the American system does not depend so much on painstaking rules being spelled out, black on white, but rather on conventions, some of which go back hundreds of years in the British parliamentary tradition, and also on the very important notion of trust.
Particularly important powers are vested in the office of the Prime Minister, much greater power is vested there than in the power of the presidency in the United States. As we saw in the last few months during the health care debate, you can be a popular president with majorities in both Houses and yet not be able to get anything done.
Relatively speaking, a lot more power is vested in the office of the Prime Minister, even in the context of a minority government, such as the ones that we have had over the course of the last few years. The notion of trust is therefore extremely important in that those powers are understood to be abusable. They aren't checked by rules that can be pointed to, black on white. They can be abused, and the trust of Parliament and the trust of the Canadian people through their representatives are based on the understanding that they will not be abused.
When one thinks about it, prorogation is quite a considerable power, though nobody knew the word before about a year and a half ago or they confused it with Polish meat-filled delicacies.
As opposed to adjournment, as opposed to calling it a recess, it really is the ability to hit the reset button, as it were, start things from scratch. It is understood that in the life of a government that will be necessary. One can come to the end of the natural life of a legislative agenda, even if all the bills haven't been gone through. One feels sometimes that a government does need to hit the reset button.
Where trust connects with this issue is that there has to be an appreciation on the part of both the population at large, whose trust in this institution is extremely important, and on the part of parliamentarians that when the reset button is hit, it is done because something of that order has occurred, and there is an understanding on both sides of the floor that there is no useful purpose left in pursuing the legislative agenda that was announced in the previous throne speech.
I think that in the last few years we have seen a worrying abuse of that power, a slide toward the use of that power for more partisan, tactical purposes.
In retrospect, 20/20 hindsight, this might have been something that we could have come to expect. We have come into a period of minority governments, first a Liberal minority government and now a Conservative minority government, which will last for how long? It is natural to expect the office of the prime minister and the governing party to reach for the tools that are at their disposal to offset the relative lack of power or lesser power that the fact of being a minority government entails as opposed to being a majority government.
One can't really imagine a situation, other than rebellion within the ranks of the governing party, that would lead to a prime minister using the power to prorogue in the way that has been done.
I'm not a political scientist, but my armchair understanding of the political forces at play suggests that we are entering a period of successive minority governments in the medium term. We really have to think long and hard about something that we didn't have to think long and hard about in a period of our history when majority governments were the norm.
I think that although harsh words were spoken when the prorogations occurred last year and the year before, in retrospect one can realize that for a government trying to stay afloat, for a government involved in the cut and thrust of parliamentary affairs, it is a natural thing to just reach for whatever tools are there in order to offset the sort of relative powerlessness or lesser power that minority status affords. But given the importance of this important power's being perceived by parliamentarians and by Canadians at large as being used for the common good rather than for tactical purposes, we felt that it was necessary to call the attention of Canadians—and we weren't the only ones to do so—to the fact that something perhaps quite technical and fiddly was going on that had much larger ramifications in the potential it had to offset the very subtle, unspoken, unwritten balances and checks on powers that are written into the fibre of our institutions, as opposed to spelled out in clear rules.
I went through—and I'll stop with this—the briefing paper that was prepared for this committee and found out that the prorogation power is said to be the...is it the ugly duckling, or the silent partner...? There's very little written about it. We have to rely on conventions, we have to rely on traditions, we have to rely on our sense of the ways in which this power can and cannot be used to serve the common good.
Perhaps I'll speak one last sentence, if you'll allow it. In the intervening months an interesting spate of proposals has come out, both from academia and from the opposition parties—the NDP and the Liberals—about rules that might be put in place to address this problem.
I'll just sound a skeptical note about this type of approach. While it's something that is quite natural as a reaction, one that I thought of after the prorogation—what rules can we put in place just to make this harder?—I was led to the following thought, which I presented when I was invited by the Liberal Party to one of their meetings held during the prorogation period: essentially, that any system of rules can be gamed. Any system of rules can fall foul to the cut and thrust of partisan politics. I have yet to encounter a set of rules that can't be gamed. When I presented this a couple of months ago, I used a hockey analogy invoking Sean Avery. I won't do that now, although I could, if I were asked in questions.
So I think that at the same time as we think about what rules can be put in place, we have to be quite lucid about the fact that rules and procedures probably won't be enough and that what is needed is something like a new political culture of minority governance that, in a way, infuses the ethos of parliamentarians just as much as it does the rules.
When I look at the proposals that have been put forward, a lot of them are extremely plausible at first glance. But to the extent that they involve throwing the ball back into Parliament, the play of partisan forces can just end up taking over there as well. So here is a bit of a skeptical note about some of the roads we might think about travelling. We may need a new set of rules, but we can't ignore the much more difficult task of thinking about how we can create a new culture of governance, a new ethos of governance, for the minority situations that seem to be with us for the foreseeable future.
I'll stop with that, and thank you very much.
:
In general, in thinking about ways in which to create over time an ethos of governance in a perhaps long-term minority situation wherein different parties will succeed one another in being in power in a minority situation, I think anything that would exacerbate the conflictual nature of Parliament would be a bad thing.
We're not used to minority government. When you look at European countries in which it's a fact of daily life, coalitions are a fact of daily life. The British, our cousins in parliamentary tradition, are going through an election right now, and the spectre of a hung Parliament and of a possible coalition—1974 all over again—is feeding a kind of terror.
I don't think that need be the case. I think there are perfectly functional European democracies that have, through different routes, arrived in a situation in which coalition-building is a necessity. But coalition-building is made a lot easier when people haven't been cast in the kind of conflictual situation that a binding standing order might exacerbate.
I think in a way it might take a longer time to create the more consensual way of dealing with the powers vested in the Prime Minister by doing it without the quick fix. I think we ought to be wary of quick fixes, of magic bullets that will solve this problem once and for all, and certainly of ones that might make the situation worse, because at the risk of repeating myself....
Something just beeped. Have I been talking too long?
:
As am I. I'll have to carve this in my gravestone or something.
You made a really interesting point about political culture being at the nub of the problem here. I think you're right. I think we have a political culture that assumes majority governments; it's used to majority governments; it expects certain kinds of actions and defines decisive leadership on the basis of what a majority government would produce.
I have a couple of recent examples. I get letters every so often from constituents who say: “You guys have been the government now for several years. Why haven't you passed your legislation getting rid of the long-gun registry? You say you support that; I'm beginning to doubt your sincerity.” I have to write back and say, “I am supportive, and so is the government, but the majority of Parliament isn't, and that's the way the system works.”
I had something similar occur recently, when someone who was quite conversant in the political system wrote to me and said: “What's up? Why did you let that piece of legislation go through the House of Commons about making Supreme Court justices bilingual?” I had to point out that the majority in the present House of Commons wanted it and that all the Conservatives there voted against it; that it's not actually something we're supporting, but that this is what happens when you have a minority government.
This is not really something that we as politicians can make happen. It's a broader question.
What would lead us around, or is there anything that will lead us around, to having a change in our political culture and in the expectations we have of our politicians, be they opposition or government MPs?
:
I think that one of the answers is probably time. I think you're perfectly right. We've had minority governments in this country now for a period of six years, which is a blip, the blink of an eye, and I think it's perfectly natural for people who have been literally raised politically in a culture of majority governments to ask, when they achieve power: “What is there at my disposal here that can permit me to act as if I had a majority?” The power to prorogue is among the various things that you can....
But I think the genius of the Canadian people, if you'll allow that expression, is such that what they seem to want in this period in our political history, and we may come out of it, is more consensual government; government that makes comprises, a government that is forced, as it were, to listen to the other side.
I was attending a lecture back at my university. Probably everybody here will be unhappy to hear this. A number cruncher from the political science department was trying to evaluate the probability of either the Liberals or the Conservatives achieving majority status, given a certain number of assumptions, which are pretty robust, about that. It's a very low probability.
People who were elected for the first time three or four years ago are a new generation of politicians; it's not as if we have to wait 30 years. There's a generation of politicians coming up that I think is going to be coming with a different set of assumptions from the ones the actors who are presently at the top of the game have been coming in with. To a certain degree, this sort of thing—just a change in the circumstances in which people work and the fact that they won't be reaching back for the assumptions that were perfectly reasonable to hold through to the beginning of this millennium—will probably have more of an impact than any set of rules that we are able to come up with. Again, any set of rules can be gamed, no matter how cleverly they are designed, if people have as their primary intention to use them to their partisan benefit and turn a minority into a majority-like situation.
In answer to your question—and I know it's not probably satisfactory for a committee like this, which likely does want to come up with a sort of silver bullet answer to the question—I think time is probably something that will work in our favour in this respect, if indeed we are at the beginning of a medium- to long-term period in which minority government will be the norm rather than the exception. But I don't think this is a bad thing, because the changes that accrue over time because of changes in circumstances and changes in the culture of this House will probably be more robust. They will probably be bred in the bone deeper than if we try to do it through rules.
My students know that I rarely give a talk without making a hockey analogy. May I?
:
The reaction I got was amazing on every level. At first, writing that letter was really an exercise to clarify my own thoughts. I must admit, I was shocked and outraged when a second prorogation was announced in the space of one year. I wanted to explain my reaction to myself—I am a philosopher, after all—to find out whether it was just an unjustified outburst or, on the contrary, whether there was something I could put into words, which would justify why I felt that something fundamental and not just transient had happened. I sent the letter to two or three people. It was during the holidays, a time when people do not necessarily read their e-mails right away, but there was a snowball effect that really took me by surprise. Without wanting to organize any sort of campaign myself, I gathered almost 300 signatures from professors. But beyond that, when the letter was published, I was really pleasantly surprised by the e-mail responses and the invitations I received to speak publicly not only in university settings but also in community settings.
It is certain that we did not expect the topic of prorogation to trump reasonable accommodation or more sexier topics and to mobilize the people. To my surprise, there was a real interest, a real willingness to understand the rules—that should please our chair, here. I heard people asking me repeatedly, for example, why those things were not taught in school and how could kids get out of school without understanding the basics of how our parliamentary institutions work. We should teach that to our children so that they will be more vigilant than we were.
So, up to five months after the publication of the letter, and especially in January and February, the reaction was very strong, both from the media and the so-called chattering classes, but also from the general public. I was very encouraged to see that the people were listening and they were ready to tackle really technical questions. I think they perceived danger. Sometimes, we can disagree with one government or another on policies it might bring forward, but we will not put up a fight because of that. In this case, we perceived, perhaps initially not very well expressed, that this went beyond a disagreement on policies. It was something that had to do with the fundamental way in which our institutions operate, and the reaction was very encouraging.
The fact that we do a host of other things when we are not in class does not necessarily show up on people's radars. We do administrative work and we make sure we follow up with students. It is the same with parliamentarians and their work. I think we need a public relations exercise for that.
I lived in England for four years when I was a student. So I have personal reasons for following the British elections, other than the fact that I am a political junkie. The current election is 100 times more interesting than those I saw when I was there. A majority government is essentially a government that comes to power and runs the country for four years. Conversely, a minority government allows the people to get more involved on human, strategic and political levels.
In England, right from the beginning of the campaign, news ratings have been phenomenal. People are fascinated. There is talk of 75 constituencies in completely out-of-the-way places in England on which the whole thing could turn. Everyone is an expert. Taxi drivers are wondering what is going to happen in such and such a riding.
The situation we are currently experiencing can be perceived as problematic—perhaps not by the Bloc Québécois—because the traditional parties want to be in power as a majority, I would imagine. I think we should exploit this opportunity to allow Parliament and Canadians to reconnect. That leaves more room for coalition and agreement between the parties. We saw it last year when there was an attempt at a coalition. In addition, that sparks a new interest in the public, simply because the whole situation is more fluid.
In my opinion, we should not let this opportunity slip away.
Thank you, Professor, for your interesting presentation.
I have a similar question that I asked Mr. White before you.
Short of a constitutional amendment, it looks as if we're not going to be able to put a firm blockage in in terms of thou shalt and thou shalt not. However, we have options around Standing Orders and around potential legislation. But at the end of the day, what's really going to work will be a sense among the Canadian people about what they believe is acceptable and unacceptable.
I take your point about the lack of civics lessons on the part of people coming out of our schools. Never mind prorogation, they don't even know the difference between minority and majority, and they want to talk about our president and everything else. It's incredibly frustrating. But given all that, do you think the political disincentives--because we can build in procedural disincentives--will be strong enough to achieve this? Or are we kidding ourselves, in that while this is paramount today, in five years this could all seem like ancient history? And if we flipped into a majority government and didn't have prorogation as a major issue, would we lose that? In other words, if we don't get it right in the rules, people will be saying it isn't right, that we're breaking the Standing Orders.
What I'm likening it to is the law the government passed about elections and then turned around and certainly violated the spirit of its own law, and for the most part the Canadian people weren't bothered.
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For reasons that go back to the discussion I was having with Ms. Jennings, in the context of a tense and very partisan political climate right now you want to be careful about putting in mechanisms that are like “gotcha” mechanisms, mechanisms that have the potential to be one-shot sorts of....
I'm not actually sure Canadians necessarily even want that. One of the things about the system of government we have—and I think Canadians have appreciated this, in looking at the debate south of the border over first health care and now financial reform—is that we really want an executive that can actually do stuff sometimes. It's one thing to be cavalier in the use of one's mandate; it's another thing to be impotent in the ability that one can.... You know, “Elect me because I'll do this”, and then it turns out they can't do it, because there are so many sticking points.
We really do have to count on something that is much more a probabilistic kind of thing than a “gotcha” kind of mechanism, which is raising the disincentives absolutely.
You're right about the election thing. But on the other hand, I imagine that this government would think long and hard now. It did take a hit, although a temporary hit, at the polls. Although one would have thought concerning prorogation or technical rules of parliamentary procedure that Canadians wouldn't be interested in it, especially at Christmas, and although it was.... Well, I don't know; I'm not a pollster, so I don't know exactly what legs it has. I would imagine, given the fact that this lived—the media cycle around this thing was a good few weeks, or even a couple of months—that they would think long and hard before doing this again. After the letter, after Chris's Facebook initiative, there were things the government said that felt to me like trial balloons. At one point, the Prime Minister in one of his interviews tried to routinize it, and said, “You know, I might do this every year. It's no big deal, right?” I don't think that went over. You didn't hear that again in subsequent interviews.
It is a lot to expect that the Canadian population be vigilant 24/7, especially when the playoffs are on, but I think we may have also underestimated them. I think here the role of the opposition.... It's also partly our role, the role of the people who try to keep public attention on public affairs at a certain level; it's a sort of joint role that we all have, the opposition parties, academics, pundits, to make sure that public opinion, even if it does go dormant sometimes, is clearly, on fundamental issues like this, awakened, or that it is “awakenable”. We just have to keep attention on it.
Again, I think it is now the perception of this government—but I'm sure the message has been read by the Liberals as well—that this is something one does for partisan advantage at one's peril, because the population doesn't seem to like this and seems to have principled, moral grounds for not liking it.
One of the most heartening things was getting emails from Conservatives, from people who said, “I'm a Conservative and I don't like this at all.” When it comes not to this policy or that policy or how you feel about the government's view about bilingualism in the court—this is something that has to do with the protection of our institutions, the institutions that we Conservatives, New Democrats, Liberals, Blocquistes, all share—I think it is an issue on which public opinion can be among the sorts of disincentive that we reach for.
This is democracy. If we just assume, about public opinion, “Well, look at what happened with the election thing; we can't count on the public to keep the feet of the politicans to the coals”, it's a depressing message.
Mr. David Christopherson: Thank you.
Thank you, Chair.
This has been very interesting, because you talked on a couple things, not just prorogation but the culture within the House of Commons and the culture among MPs. Part of that culture is also the media. We work in a world here in Ottawa where the media looks for a specific clip or a specific soundbite, and it's not one of a committee like this that gets along and works together; it's one of antagonistism, who can get the best shot out there, who can say the meanest thing and get on the news. And that's the culture we work in outside these rooms.
I had a situation during prorogation. Three weeks before that period I went to California with my 80-year-old dad to see his 92-year-old cousin. While I was there I was working on some cases in Haiti, getting some people out just after the earthquake. The first day of prorogation, a blogger picks up a report from two weeks earlier and says that I'm in California. We went to the media and asked them to correct it, and they didn't. Or they did very little. I got blasted in an article three days later in a local paper saying that politicians are all bad people because they're out holidaying during prorogation, which is absolutely false. If he would have picked up the phone and called me he would have caught me in my office in the riding. But it seems that we've got a culture hear in Ottawa where if I can get one on top of Ms. Gagnon, I have to do that, because otherwise the media won't look at me as a serious contender here in Ottawa. How you break that culture is a challenge.
Where I come back to prorogation on this is I wonder if the protest was the actual prorogation, or was a protest about the culture and prorogation the straw that broke the camel's back?
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I think you're absolutely right that we have to look at prorogation in a bigger context. It's a symptom of a wider malaise, perhaps both within this institution and in the perception of this institution by the Canadian population. This is another reason why the fix is the rules. We might fix prorogation.... Sean Avery can't wave his arms in front of Martin Brodeur any more, because now there's a Sean Avery rule, but he can do other stuff that's just as obnoxious. If we don't change the culture that creates the Sean Averys, then we have a problem.
I'll say one thing about the media, and this goes back to the discussion we were just having. It might feel to you, because they talk about you, that they are all-powerful, but the traditional media are in a state of extreme vulnerability. How many newspapers will there be in this country in ten years? I don't know--not that many. The kids aren't reading the papers any more. Even television.... Traditional media are in a state of crisis. I think what we have to look towards is not so much how we change the media we have; we should look at how we can exploit, and I use that term in a positive sense, the new media that are arising to set them up from the very beginning in ways that are more productive, more non-partisan than they might previously have been.
This is the third or fourth time I've appeared in a committee like this in my life. There's a world of difference between the sound bites you get on the news about what happens in the House and what happens here. Here there are people working together. I mean, everybody should be able to come into one of these meetings to have their sense of the health of our democracy strengthened, but that's not what is going to be reported.
I think we're living through a generational shift in the way in which people in this country, the young people, consume information. They're not consuming information through the traditional media; they are consuming information on the Internet. And I think we have a challenge as a society to make sure that this new channel of information gets set up in a way that is less toxic, less gotcha journalism, and more deep down, going after....
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This is a name game, by the way. That's my middle name.
Here's what I wanted to ask you. I'm going to play devil's advocate about the new media and the other side of it. I'm of that generation for which, you said, it is something we've gone to as opposed to it being part of us. I see it with my 17-year-old daughter. It's night and day.
However, I've been around politics for an awfully long time, too, in all three orders of government, and one thing I know about politicians and politics is that it's very adaptive. Radio came along, and you could argue that at the time it was going to give the public a whole new awareness. And it did, but the politicians adapted. Then TV came along, and it was much the same thing. Politicians adapted. Now we have all the social sites--Twitter and everything. You know, blogs all seem normal now, but it was just a few years ago that they didn't exist, and now people have blog masters. In other words, politicians have hired people.
Whatever the public tries to do in a pure way to talk, we're going to find a way, and the system is going to find a way to get in there and attempt to spin it and manipulate it, if not to affect the outcome, at the very least, then to affect appearance. We're very much like a Hollywood movie set. You have to take a look at what's behind what you're looking at.
There's this notion that it's going to provide a new ability for the public, by itself, to be a different participant in politics. Yet I still see politicians and politics being able to adapt to make it work for them too, leaving us in the same sort of spot after we've gone through a transformative process.
What are your thoughts on that?