It my ever present desire to find common ground, I present to you the following conclusion of the book Turning Points: The campaigns that changed Canada, 2004 and before, by Ray Argyle, as its seemed timely to the discussions occuring at the Shotgun. Before I get there I shoud point out that this author claimed, in the section immediately preceeding, that Pierre Trudeau was the greatest Prime Minister and I pointed out earlier in my blog that he claimed that the 1995 referendum was pretty much all PM Mulroney's fault. Needless to say then, Mr. Argyle is no Conservative partisan. Now with that preamble out of the way here is the quote (pg 481-482)
...The great lesson of these turning points is that there is still much unfinished work in the building of the Canadian democracy. While Canada has a scrappy parliamentary
system, it also harbours serious impediments to democratic self-government. Fortunately, there are ways to deal with these without changing the constitution, which no one wants to do. The Prime Minister's near-dictatorial control of Parliament and the public service must be reduced. The public should be allowed a choice in the selection of not just Senators, but also the Governor General. A fixed date for federal elections and a system of proportional representation in choosing MPs would further democratize Canada. The dispersal of federal decision-making more broadly throughout the country also would complete Canada's transition from an elitist state to a popular democracy, as well as leading to greater public involvement and more open and better public policy.
If you were asked to to name a country where one person appoints the stand-in for the head of state, selects the members of the governing cabinet, and names the jurists who will sit on its supreme court, you'd be forgiven if you picked a third world oligarchy or some other dysfunctional democracy.
translation: half-assed
The correct answer of course, is Canada, where we combine a parliamentary democracy with a constitutional monarchy...
can you feel that bridge of consensus being built?
and end up placing virtually untrammeled power in the hands of a single individual, the Prime Minister. A small measure of this power is demonstrated in the fact that the Prime Minister has the power to personally decide who is to fill no fewer than 2,350 federal appointments. These include all the senior non-elective positions in the Canadian establishment, from the Governor General to members of the Senate, the Supreme Court and such quasi judicial bodies as the Canadian Radio and Television Commission, the Refugee Appeal Board and the Canadian Citizenship Court.
An internal study conducted for the government made the case forcefully: "While the House (of Commons) abounds in representation, it has little power." The real power is with the cabinet that "retains a virtual monopoly on the use of democratic authority." Canadians are left with the feeling, the report adds, that Ottawa is "remote, self-serving, inaccessible, non-responsive, occasionally inept, excessively adversarial and increasingly irrelevant."
So you can see that valid points have been made on both sides of the argument over at the Shotgun. If we can move beyond the personal and get to the ideas maybe we can get somewhere.
