Frances Russell is a Winnipeg-based freelance journalist and author. She is a regular contributor to the Winnipeg Free Press and is the author of two award-winning books. Her career has spanned nearly 50 years and includes time as a reporter and political columnist with the Winnipeg Free Press, the Vancouver Sun, the Globe and Mail and United Press International, in Ottawa. She also provided occasional columns and commentary for CBC-TV, CBC Radio, CBC Newsworld, the Ottawa Journal, the Edmonton Journal, the Toronto Star, Canadian Forum Magazine and Time Canada.

Canada has the most dysfunctional and undemocratic parliament in the British Commonwealth. Canadians have been reduced to electoral democracy, not parliamentary democracy.

Democratizing the Constitution — Reforming Responsible Government, a new book by political scientists Peter Aucoin, Mark D. Jarvis and Lori Turnbull, defines electoral democracy as “a system in which the electorate decides who forms the government and the prime minister then governs as a virtual autocrat until the next election … The concentration of powers … cannot be permitted to remain in the hands of a single individual who is able to undermine democratic governance at his or her will.”

Turnbull, associate professor of political science at Dalhousie University, attributes much of the problem to our close proximity to the U.S.

“We don’t have a really clear understanding of what parliamentary democracy means,” she said. “We generally confuse what should be going on with what is going on in the U.S. And we’re manipulated when politicians confuse those terms because we get a lot more information about congressional democracy than we do about Canadian democracy.”

The book proposes a solution. Canada should follow the lead of its sister Commonwealth countries Britain, Australia and New Zealand and codify the principles of parliamentary democracy to ensure the players — voters and politicians — understand the playbook and stay within the rules.

“The other systems have rules about prorogation and dissolution, especially dissolution,” said Turnbull. “And a lot of other systems don’t use prorogation at all. They just have a parliamentary calendar.” Unlike prorogation and dissolution, a parliamentary calendar levels the playing field, binding government and opposition equally.

The current occupant of 24 Sussex has unleashed a torrent of deliberate misinformation about the tenets of parliamentary democracy in his amazingly successful drive to further confuse Canadians about the manner and traditions of their form of government.

Canadians don’t elect a government or a prime minister. They elect a Parliament. But Prime Minister Stephen Harper has described the parties who form Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition as “losers”.

Under the British parliamentary system, however, opposition parties are not only not losers, they can — and often do — form governments by coalescing (another dirty word in Harper’s lexicon) to defeat and replace a governing party which is short of a majority of seats.

Harper’s Blitzkreig on parliamentary democracy began in 2008. “Harper, in less than two years, made three unilateral decisions showing clearly how a Canadian prime minister not only can exercise unconstrained power at whim to prorogue and dissolve Parliament but also to declare on what he would accept or not accept as a vote of confidence,” the authors write.

Harper’s first unilateral decision was to call the 2008 federal election despite his own new fixed-date election law, framed precisely to prevent a prime minister from doing what he was about to do — dissolve Parliament to exploit good polling numbers.

His second was to prorogue parliament in December, 2008 to escape parliamentary defeat by a coalition of opposition parties, a defeat he deliberately provoked by slashing their parliamentary funding.

His third was to prorogue Parliament once more in December, 2009 — this time to escape parliamentary accountability regarding allegations that Afghan detainees had been tortured.

Unlike in the U.S., which steeps its children in American history throughout their educational careers, in Canada the teaching of history and government is a hit-and-miss proposition in provincial school systems. Not only is there no common historical perspective, but some provinces don’t teach history at all except as part of “social studies.”

Generations of Canadians have grown up with only the sketchiest ideas of the fundamental differences between Canadian parliamentary democracy and American presidential-congressional democracy.

The mix of constitutional uncertainty, disagreement, confusion, and outright illiteracy in the electorate — and even among many pundits and politicians — about the conventions of responsible government facilitated the government’s survival throughout Harper’s assaults on Parliament’s foundations, the authors say.

“As with the election call in 2008, there is no evidence that the prime minister was much concerned about public opinion over his abuse of prorogation. If anything, it appears that having successfully employed the first prorogation as an effective partisan tool to avoid defeat in the House, Conservative strategists seized on it as a handy tool for further use.”

The authors say the only remedy is to write things down. That’s what the Americans did in their 1788 constitution. “And that’s the thing that Australia and New Zealand and Britain have done that we haven’t done,” said Turnbull.

They propose three areas of reform involving the Constitution, Parliament and political parties.

Constitution — Require that the House of Commons be summoned within 30 days of a federal election. Establish fixed election dates every four years binding both the prime minister and the governor general, unless a two-thirds majority of MPs approves a motion to dissolve Parliament. Require the consent of a two-thirds majority of the House of Commons to prorogue Parliament. And adopt a constructive rule on non-confidence — one that establishes confidence in the government can only be withdrawn through an explicit non-confidence motion that must state which opposition leader is capable of forming a government.

Parliament — Limit cabinet to 25 ministers and parliamentary secretaries to eight. Use secret preferential ballots by committee members to select committee chairs. Adopt a schedule of opposition days that cannot be changed unilaterally by the government. And cut partisan political staff by 50 per cent.

Party — Restore the power of party caucuses to dismiss the party leader, including a sitting prime minister, and appoint a new interim leader. Remove the party leader’s power to approve or reject candidates for election in each riding.

Paul Thomas, professor emeritus of politics at the University of Manitoba, calls the debasement of Canada’s Parliament under the Harper Conservatives “stark.” He cites such recent developments as: the government forcing committees to meet in secret and muzzling opposition MPs from revealing anything that occurred to protect the government; drafting 400-page omnibus budget bills and ramming them through Parliament in marathon sittings allowing little or no debate; compelling opposition MPs to appear before committee to be interrogated because they offended the government; and controlling and managing the parliamentary press gallery.

Our system is based on the assumption that prime ministers and cabinets will respect constitutional traditions and unwritten conventions — not to mention democratic norms — and agree to be bound by them, Thomas said.

“So there’s always a presumption of a certain amount of restraint on the part of the prime minister. He has, not all the power, but most of the power, and he can make a lot of things happen and prevent other things from happening and if he’s bound and determined like Harper is, then you get someone who is more systematic, sweeping and more consistently controlling.”

Thomas said the government is determined to dominate the agenda, to engage in news management and to prevent unforeseen events from arising through Parliament. “It’s more systematic and across the board. They don’t see Parliament as a useful part of the governing process. They see it as a nuisance.”

In terms of its power and effectiveness, he said, Canada’s Parliament is now “at the bottom of the heap … it has lost tremendous ground in terms of public support and confidence.

“(Y)ou have one rogue prime minister who is bound and determined to wield power ruthlessly, intimidate his enemies, beat up on them, attack public servants, manipulate the access to information law, develop communications strategies, use opponent research, all of these techniques. And there’s a whole school of this being taught in U.S. universities. It’s called Political Management.”

Lori Turnbull wonders why the opposition parties even bother to show up, particularly at committee. “I wouldn’t,” she said. “Harper would initially say they were pulling a stunt. But after a few weeks, it would send a clear message, particularly if the opposition (was) united about it.”

University of Toronto professor emeritus of politics Peter Russell describes Canadian democracy as “very weak.” Canada now has what he calls “presidential prime ministerial parliamentary government,” he said, adding that unless Canadians do something soon to save their parliamentary democracy, “they will have presidential government, period.”

The leader now controls caucus and cabinet and runs the show, he said. It’s reached a point where the prime minister’s political staff has more power than the cabinet.

“We have a 35-year-old ‘communicator’ telling a veteran 55-year-old cabinet minister when to stand up and when to sit down,” Russell said.

He has just returned from Australia, where things could hardly be more different. He attended the parliamentary session in which Australia’s position on admitting Palestine to the United Nations General Assembly was debated. Unlike in Canada, the Australian prime minister and the leader of the opposition both sit on an angle so they can see their caucuses.

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, like Harper, opposed Palestinian membership. “But as the issue rolled on during the week, she was ‘rolled’ in the cabinet,” Russell said. “It’s a crude word but it means she didn’t carry the cabinet. They were split and when that happens in Australia they go to caucus.

“And the entire caucus voted on the Palestinian recognition issue. They too were split. And that was why Australia abstained.”

That is the core of parliamentary democracy, otherwise known as parliamentary supremacy.

And it’s simply unthinkable in Harper’s Canada.

Click here to view other columns by Frances Russell.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.