A response to Andrew Potter

This is a response to this article by Andrew Potter, which suggests that Parliament is failing and the Liberal party in particular is not doing its job as the Official Opposition.

He wrote:

What this means is that the job of an MP is itself pretty frigging simple. The House of Commons has two main jobs: Make a government, and hold it to account. It does this Siskel & Ebert style, by giving thumbs up (offering support) or thumbs down (withdrawing confidence). Literally everything else a non-government MP does is either an embellishment of this function (e.g. sitting on committees) or a distraction from it (the much-vaunted “constituency work”). The key benefit of this simplicity is that it makes the lines of accountability crystal clear. The government does stuff, the rest of the House holds it to account. At election time, voters can decide how they feel about it.

My main criticism is that it’s not as easy as he suggests to clearly understand the role of MPs in our system. A recent report by the organization Samarra report was entitled: Welcome to Parliament: A Job With No Description suggests as much. It is based on research done through MP exit interviews and as the title suggests it points out the difficulty in defining the role of MPs, given their various responsibilities to constituents, their party, their leader, etc..Andrew Potter's suggestion that he knows what the role of an MP is, raises my eyebrows given that MPS themselves don't seem to agree fully.

(NB:I haven't yet read the report myself, but I heard a talk about it on The Agenda)
Now perhaps it is easier to define the role of the opposition, but I see just as much conflict in their role, given their responsibility of "opposing" but also presenting an alternative to the government and also holding them accountable.

His main complaint in some ways seems to be that they didn't follow his advice, a few weeks back which suggested that the Liberals should withdraw confidence continually until Bev Oda resigned or they forced an election.

Partly I think this response is based in the weakness of the Liberal party right now, and I think the biggest problem the Liberals face is not having a strong sense of grassroots support. Their traditional role as the “natural governing party’ enabled them to circumvent the need for grassroots support because they exercised the traditional patronage appointments and the trappings of power, but since Trudeau destroyed the Liberal brand in Western Canada, and their traditional areas of support are under attack by Conservatives (particularly the ethnic constituencies). This coupled with their slow response to changes in the financing of political parties has removed their fundraising advantage.

However a talk this week got me thinking about the other aspect to this, is that Potter's argument highlights the interesting, but difficult nature of a Westminster Parliament. I went to a talk this week entitled " which was bout the changing nature of the Westminster Parliamentary system. It was a reminder of some of the academic discussions which are going on about our system, and the "three moving parts", Parliament, the Public Service and the political executive (or what we commonly call "the government", i.e the PM and cabinet)

The talk highlighted one of the difficulties of a system built on convention, which is that it only works as long as there are shared conceptions and understandings, and as these break down, the system doesn't work as well.

This notion of share understanding is key to where I think Potter's argument falls down. If everyone agreed on the rules that he asserts, it would be easy. However in Canada we are in a period of flux, where these traditional conventions are breaking down. If the Conservatives invoke cabinet solidarity and defend actions that in the past might not have been defended, it changes the shared understandings and conventions.

While the talk presented some interesting thoughts on the common challenges faced by Westminster systems across the world, notably, Canada, the U.K. Australia and New Zealand and how each of the system is adapting to these challenges.

It was pointed out that Canada seems to be the country that lurches more from change to change, rather than slowly adapting, as the U.K. and Australia and to a certain extent New Zealand does as well though they radically changed their electoral system in the early 1990s and adopted at MMP proportional representation system.

In this context it was interesting to see that in response to the changes brought about by increased political fragmentation (interesting this is the first time that there is a minority government across all four countries) and the breaking down of conventions, New Zealand has actually written out a book codifying in one place an understanding of the Westminster system. I believe Australia has also done so, while the U.K. is also embarked on a similar project, which fascinatingly enough is being done by their Clerk.

Perhaps this is what we need to establish the ground rules, which would help the opposition better understand their role, and perhaps also the role of MPs.