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"THE GOVERNMENT
 IS THE SERVANT
 OF THE PEOPLE
 AND NOT ITS MASTER"

Winston Churchill
Oslo 1948

The Future of Canadian Parliamentary Democracy  

By Peter H. Russell

A group of about forty scholars spent the first weekend of April at the Kempenfelt Bay Conference Centre on Lake Simcoe discussing the present condition of our system of parliamentary democracy and how that condition might be improved. The group was made up mostly of political science professors and some students of political science from the University of Windsor, the university which organized the conference. The academics included some of the senior scholars in the field (five former Presidents of the Canadian Political Science Association), some in mid-career and others just beginning their careers. All regions of Canada were represented. Two American scholars and a Senator from Nigeria engaged in parliamentary reform in that country were also in attendance.   

As your Chairman and one of the older scholars in Canadian political science, I participated in the Round Table talks. And my, did we do a lot of talking! There were none of those long boring papers that academics usually read to one another when they gather. Instead, we just talked to each other, most often in small groups on specific topics and then assembled around the big round table to hear what others were saying. 

The organizers hope that the major themes discussed at the Round Table will be brought together in a book accessible to the general public. In the meantime, Professor Lloyd Brown-John, the co-ordinator of the Round Table promises to assemble the students’ notes on the various discussions and post them on the Society’s website. This will give any of you who are interested a more detailed account of our conversations.

While there was no consensus that our democratic system is in crisis, there was a shared sense that it is in poor health and losing the respect of citizens. Plummeting voter turn-outs, the concentration of power in the hands of Prime Ministers, Premiers and their advisors, the seeming irrelevance of parliament, the failure of our federal system to respond to the concerns of cities, and the younger generation’s disengagement from the conventional institutions of politics were all pointed to as part of the malaise.

Of course it was easier to identify problems than to formulate and agree on remedies. Electoral reform was identified as the institutional reform with the most momentum. There was much support for an electoral system such as New Zealand’s, or Germany’s, or the one proposed for the UK by Lord Jenkins, that retains constituency-based MPs while at the same time ensuring parties are represented in parliament according to their popular strength. While adopting such a system would not cure all our democratic ills, it would make voting more meaningful and produce parliaments in which policy would have to accommodate a broader spectrum of interests. 

There was also agreement that national parliaments function best with two chambers, both of which have legitimacy. Such bicameral parliaments prevent governments from stifling debate and make for a more deliberative legislative process. Much interest was expressed for putting pressure on Ottawa to make Canadian bicameralism more democratic by having provinces emulate Alberta and elect the persons the Prime Minister should appoint to the Senate.

Plenty of other proposals were canvassed for reviving the vitality of parliament and improving election practices. One reform which would be easy to achieve if we thought enough of parliamentary democracy to spend a little more money on it is to return to our practice of enumerating voters before an election rather than relying on out-of-date voters lists. In our last federal election a shocking number of our most marginalized citizens were left off the voters’ lists.

Well, these were a few of the ideas – some very practical, others more theoretical and far-reaching - that the Round Table considered in its diagnosis and prescriptions. I hope that our talks and the book it produces can help to arrest the retreat of our parliamentary democracy and stimulate its advance.       

Peter H. Russell is the chairman of the Churchill Society for the Advancement of Parliamentary Democracy.  He is a professor emeritus of Trinity College where he taught political science from 1958 until his retirement in 1996.  He has published extensively on Canada’s constitutional politics.