It may be easy to forget, but Stephen Harper used to champion the supremacy of Parliament.
As recently as 2005, Harper remained enormously critical of parliamentary misconduct when Paul Martin’s minority Liberal government made use of every trick available to avoid or delay a confidence vote.
In a speech delivered on May 3, 2005, the Conservative leader gave a concise and persuasive defense of parliamentary democracy. “The whole principle of a democracy is that the government is supposed to be able to face the House of Commons any day on a vote,” he said. “This government now has the deliberate policy of avoiding a vote. This is a violation of the most fundamental principle of our democracy.” That speech is now particularly surprising given the events of December 2008, and those that have unfolded in recent weeks.
As both a citizen activist and an MP for the now defunct Reform Party and its short-lived successor, the Canadian Alliance, the future Prime Minister campaigned against the injustices of Liberal governments throughout the 1990s, and was a leading proponent of parliamentary reform and the democratization of the Senate.
Since he began his tenure as Prime Minister, Harper has abandoned his goal of a transparent and accountable Parliament. The current scandal over the release of documents concerning the torture of Afghan detainees is only yet another illustration of a government that has taken the practices of secrecy, dishonesty, and power consolidation to new extremes.
Towards the end of the fall session a majority of MPs voted that the government should release a series of documents and memos related to the alleged torture of Afghan detainees after their release by Canadian forces. That order was refused.
Harper’s sentiments from 2005 regarding Canadian parliamentary democracy have increasingly become alien to their author, who last December used prorogation as a tactic to avoid a self-inflicted defeat by an opposition reacting sensibly to a partisan budget it could never have accepted.
Simultaneously, Harper and members of his caucus called the opposition arrangement “treasonous” and “undemocratic,” despite having entered into a similar coalition agreement with both the Bloc Quebecois and the New Democratic Party several years prior. Once again, the Prime Minister has prorogued Parliament, delaying the return of the House by several weeks. This time, he didn’t even have to visit Rideau Hall in person—he phoned.
The move is widely seen as part of a three-pronged strategy. First, it allows the Conservatives time to regroup after a shaky end to the fall session and to use the coming Olympics as an opportunity to advertise their brand. Second, with such a time lapse, the opposition parties will have difficulty keeping the Afghan detainee issue alive. Third, it allows the Conservatives to stack the Senate with more partisan appointees, giving them an unprecedented majority in the Second Chamber and control of its valuable committees.
Each component of this strategy mirrors a different cause once championed by the Prime Minister. Shameless self-aggrandizement, a lack of transparency and openness, and the appointment of cronies to an undemocratic and unaccountable Senate were all once (rightly) criticized by Harper, who now embodies each practice to a far greater extent than his Liberal predecessors.
Putting aside the marked hypocrisy and dishonesty implicit in these practices, the Prime Minister’s conduct in recent weeks (and in December 2008) raises serious questions about the very functioning of Canadian democracy. In contrast to the American republican system, our federalism lacks the checks and balances of an elected President and two separate houses. In Canada, the diverse and complex organ of Parliament is supreme.
In the Westminster tradition on which Canadian democracy is based, the Prime Minister must at all times be accountable to elected representatives, something our current leader once understood. Not only would prorogation transgress the most fundamental principles of our democracy, but it would also set a dangerous precedent in which the legitimate democratic rights of the majority are subject to the political convenience of the few.
