Power to the people

Michael Bliss makes the best analysis I've seen about our constitutional evolution:

Once again, our political class has unleashed tensions and passions that threaten the future of Canada. How did this happen? One main cause of the problem is a significant misunderstanding of the way our constitution has evolved. Today's elected politicians have an outsized appreciation of their own power.

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The old doctrine of Parliamentary sovereignty held that so long as our MPs face voters from time to time in elections, the members of legislatures who command majority support can do practically anything they desire. That's why the Meech Lake proposals were thought to be achievable, and why it was first proposed that son-of-Meech, the Charlottetown Accord, did not have to be submitted to the Canadian people. Similarly, our current coalitionists believe that a majority in our duly elected Parliament can make Stephane Dion (or any other MP) prime minister of Canada without an election, and keep him there for months or years.

Canadian public opinion was outraged by both Meech and Charlottetown. Eventually, the politicians were forced to take the Charlottetown accord to the people in a 1992 national referendum, where it was massively defeated. Canadians didn't want constitutional change -- and they said so once they got a vote on the matter.

Sadly, instead of taking the lesson from this precedent that, in a modern democracy, the will of the people trumps Parliamentary deal-making, the architects of the 2008 coalition trotted out the same old assumptions about Parliamentary freedom, and how little the popular will matters. Their conceit has been that they can legally succeed in what millions of Canadians see as the overturning of the outcome of a democratic election, and do it without giving Canadians the ultimate say in the matter.

This is a huge error of both political and constitutional intelligence. Constitutions are living bodies of precedent, convention, comity and adaptation. Canada has evolved a long way since the era when Sir John A. Macdonald opposed universal suffrage and condemned democracy as an American disease. No constitutional expert -- certainly, no governor-general--can ignore the democratic conventions that have emerged and evolved throughout the 20th century. These conventions have been moving constantly in the direction of shifting sovereignty from Parliament to the people.

...I am certain that if Mr. Harper loses the confidence of the House at the end of January, and chooses to request a dissolution of Parliament and an election to test voters' will, the Governor-General will grant it. The coalition-without-election idea, I believe, is as dead as the Charlottetown Accord, not least because, now as then, so many Canadians have been deeply angered by the arrogance and egos of parliamentarians whose understanding has failed to evolve beyond the pages of out-of-date constitutional textbooks...

I would simply add that turning over power to a coalition completely dependent on the support of separatists would be a radical change in Canadian governance; that change should not occur without a new election in which voters have the possibility of such a coalition clearly before them.

Mark C.

Posted by markc at December 6, 2008 06:46 PM