FRESH LOOK NEEDED

Vol 13, No 14
Needed: a fresh look for Parliament

Ethics Commissioner Bernard Shapiro has decided that Vancouver MP David Emerson didn't violate the Parliamentary Code of Ethics by jumping into the Conservatives Cabinet immediately after being elected as a Liberal, and that Prime Minister Harper is also guiltless. But New Democrat MP Pat Martin says his party will introduce legislation to make such floor-crossing illegal.

There's a much better solution.

The Ethics Commissioner agreed that no one should be able to tell the Prime Minister who will be in his Cabinet. Quite right. But imagine a situation in which the MPs were elected by proportional representation (as recommended in March 2004 by the Law Commission of Canada) and further, the re-arrangement of Parliament to allow multi-party Cabinets (which some European nations already have).

Multi-party cabinets would eliminate a much of the adversarial atmosphere of Parliament. There could be no partisan political secrets in Cabinet; and the House would become a real forum for discussion of public policy, instead of the outrageous partisan quarreling that now dominates Parliament. Most important, the primary business of the Cabinet would be to administer the affairs of the nation properly, rather than always keeping one eye on the next election.

In such an environment, the Prime Minister would be free to canvass the whole House for the best-qualified people for Cabinet posts; and, of course, it would also remain possible to put people of special expertise into the Senate to enable them to sit in Cabinet. However, such appointments should also bear the responsibility of sitting in the House during Question Period, so that the whole Ministry would be accountable to the elected representatives.

The layout of Parliament ought to be changed, too: the present House is arrayed, by tradition, in two banks of seats, facing each other from two sword-lengths distance-dating back to the days when MPs wore weapons into the House; this distance was to prevent disputes on the floor from breaking into duels.

But face-to-face seating across the floor still exacerbates an already-adversarial environment. Instead, the Member's seats should be arrayed in semi-circles facing the Speaker's chair. Similarly, Senators should be seated by region, not by party.

There's a joke in French that says the word "Parliament" is compounded of two French verbs: "parler" to speak; and "mentir" to lie. But to function properly, and in the public interest, Parliament should reflect only the gerund of "parler"-speaking.

Partisanship far too often interferes with the proper role of Parliament as a place of discussion-and the public interest too often gets lost in those partisan squabbles.