[LINK] "Few countries can claim such a pathetic Parliament"

[rfmcdonald]

The Globe and Mail's John Ibbitson is unimpressed with Canada's democracy, the proroguing of Parliament being just another step down the path towards something Bad.

It is a small symptom of a grave condition. Our Parliament has become the most dysfunctional in the English-speaking world, weaker and more irrelevant than the U.S. Congress or the parliaments of Britain, Australia or New Zealand.

If Britain is the mother of Parliaments, her Canadian daughter is a fallen woman. Government MPs are cowed; parliamentary committees are too often irrelevant. Three consecutive minority governments haven't strengthened the powers of the House to hold the government to account; instead, they've encouraged new methods by which the Prime Minister's Office seeks to centralize authority.

[. . .]

Canadian MPs cower at the hands of the party whips, and parliamentary investigations are so ineffectual that the only hope of getting to the bottom of anything is to pressure a prime minister into calling a public inquiry.

British MPs are considerably more autonomous than their Canadian counterparts – ironically, because there are so many of them. The British House of Commons (barely) holds 646 MPs, compared with the 308 in the Canadian House. There are typically around 23 ministers in a British cabinet, compared with the 38 in the current Canadian cabinet.

Many British MPs know that they will never make it into the cabinet, and so feel much freer to take on their own party leader. When Tony Blair brought a motion to authorize British intervention in Iraq, 59 of his own Labour MPs voted against him. Last year, one or more Labour MPs voted against their government on 30 per cent of bills.