Everybody talks about empowering backbench MPs. But nobody seems to mean what they say. At any rate, in today's Globe and Mail Brian Laghi and Jane Taber report that Michael Ignatieff has announced that he'll protect sitting Liberal MPs from primary challenges provided they turn up enough members and enough donors to the party's coffers. Not that we're using centralized control mechanisms to reduce MPs to servants of the Leader's Office, you understand. It's just that if you simply hold your seat your way, well, shucks, see ya later buddy. Know what I mean?

During the campaign, the Tories said no deficits; wouldn't be prudent. Now they insist that only hair-raisingly huge deficits are prudent. As, apparently, is leaking your budget so it won't terrify people on the day. It's as if "prudent" were a magic word that justifies anything you decide to do. Except they didn't really decide to do this. Spending rockets up in good times and bad and when revenue drops off big deficits gape and none of it is the result of financial or political calculation. It's structural features of the budget the politicians neither control nor understand so they babble gravely in an attempt to look relevant. Happy budget day.

I see that Michael Ignatieff is double-talking tough on the new Tory budget, telling his first caucus meeting as leader

"This budget has three simple tests that it must pass. Will it protect the most vulnerable? Will it save jobs? And most important of all, will it create the jobs of tomorrow?"

The Ottawa Citizen added that "While Mr. Ignatieff did not directly threaten to defeat the government over the budget, Toronto MP John McCallum, the party’s economic policy critic, told reporters that Mr. Ignatieff has frequently said a Liberal vote against the Jan. 27th budget ‘is still very much a possibility.’”

Such appalling verbiage manages at once to be substanceless spin (what sort of infinitely flexible ruler is "protect the most vulnerable"? Especially when you're dug in on the hill of "very much a possibility") and to contain a grievous error: Does anyone now seriously think governments, rather than entrepreneurs, "create the jobs of tomorrow"?

Out in B.C. they've finally summoned up the courage to lay polygamy charges against breakaway Mormons. Now let's see if all the right-thinking leftists who insisted that courts should not let elected legislators show disrespect to the romantic and sexual choices of consenting adults when it came to gay marriage will rally to the cause of polygamists and, if not, whether they'll honour us with the reasoning behind their apparently contradictory positions.

Apparently it’s time to stick a fork in our system of parliamentary self-government. MPs just passed an Opposition money bill and no one cares that there’s no such thing. Last week the three Opposition parties teamed up to pass Dan McTeague’s private members’ Bill C-253, letting parents contribute $5,000 per child per year to a Registered Education Savings Plan and deduct it from taxable income. It flatly contradicts Section 54 of our Constitution: “It shall not be lawful for the House of Commons to adopt or pass any Vote, Resolution, Address or Bill for the Appropriation of any Part of the Public Revenue, or of any Tax or Impost, to any Purpose that has not been first recommended to that House by Message of the Governor General in the Session in which such Vote, Resolution, Address or Bill is proposed.”

Is there anything unclear about this wording, repeated essentially verbatim in Standing Order 79 (1) of the House of Commons? Apparently so, if you’re an MP or the Speaker of the House. Soon after being introduced in 2006, C-253 was challenged because of 79 (1), but that Nov. 1 the Speaker ruled, “It is permissible for a private member’s bill to introduce a tax exemption, or to propose a delay in the reporting of income. Therefore, I find that Bill C-253 is properly before the House.”

How can this be? The annotated Standing Orders of the House of Commons, published under the same Speaker’s authority in 2005, begin their explanation of 79 (1) with “In our system of parliamentary government, the Sovereign, as represented by the Governor General, and acting on the advice of His or Her responsible ministers, is charged with the management of all revenues of the State and the payment of all public expenditures.”

Individual tax relief is one thing. But a measure that for reasons of broad public policy reallocates what could well be billions of dollars a year is definitely “management of all revenues of the State.” If private members’ bills can do what Mr. McTeague’s does, what can they not do under 79 (1) and Section 54?

Especially as C-253 is not really a tax bill. When the tax code is fiddled to convey specific benefits to people who do specific things at the expense of the overall balance sheet, it constitutes spending no matter how it is disguised. For years Canadian governments pretended otherwise, not least so they could report considerably lower total taxation and spending in their budgets than were recorded in the definitive Public Accounts. But finally in 2003 the government gave in to pressure from Auditors General and others and started correctly treating so-called tax expenditures as expenditures, not taxation.

Mr. McTeague’s bill clearly fits that category. So even given the Speaker’s ruling on taxation, C-253 remains profoundly constitutionally obnoxious.

The resulting debate has been too obnoxious to quote, from squabbles over who was giving the middle class more money to bizarre jibes about ethnicity to the Liberal finance critic saying his party would not topple the government over C-253 because it wasn’t yet Easter. But I will cite Mr. McTeague’s outburst that Tory opposition to his bill “really lays bare for all to see what kind of government we’re dealing with. Can you imagine if they had a majority?”

Utter bosh. The whole problem here is that the three “opposition” social democratic parties do have a majority, and are willing to use it to spend public money in large amounts, but won’t take responsibility for keeping spending in line with revenue. What do any of them think the “responsible” in “responsible government” used to mean?

History confirms that, as you’d expect, the problem of government is not getting it to spend. It is keeping it from spending too much, or spending a reasonable amount so foolishly that it nevertheless neglects its core duties. Thus Parliament evolved not to force cheapskate monarchs to loosen the purse strings, but to prevent them from having to pawn the crown (Edward III once did). And here the purpose of Section 54 becomes as clear as its wording: a parliamentary legislature exists not to govern but to scrutinize government. It can’t do both, and if it tries it will end up doing neither.

The Tory government seems to be killing C-253 with a counter-measure attached to a confidence vote. But Mr. Flaherty told the Commons: “We are presented with a private member’s bill that risks plunging the federal government back into deficit” when the real objection is that C-253 abdicates the key role of Parliament, usurps that of the Crown and smashes the Constitution to do it.

If no one knows or cares, it’s done, folks. Carve it up.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

LONDON, England - The symptoms of parliamentary decline are by now unpleasantly familiar. I don’t just mean the way Question Period, regardless of the subject or authenticity of the outrage, often prompts the reflection that brawling alley cats do have a certain dignity. Consider this list of symptoms from a recent report: the rise of parties and partisanship, the concentration of power in the PMO and the way government business has taken over the Commons, the rise of special interest groups, sensationalist media hungry for sound bites not substance, constitutional changes that sideline Parliament and a habit of entrusting important issues to non-political arms’-length bodies instead of elected MPs. Depressing. But what can you do?

Well, you can start by raising an eyebrow or two on hearing that my list is from a July, 2000, report on the British Parliament by a panel chaired by Lord Norton of Louth. Possibly it does not encourage you to hear your neighbour’s ornate and venerable roof seems to be caving in as well. But if we have these problems in common, it offers a way to get some perspective on their causes and possible cures.

I say problems rather than crisis in deference to those who say parliamentary self-government has caromed from one difficulty to another for centuries, so “there is room for improvement” is not, and need not prompt, a call to man the barricades. But that there are problems would be fatuous to deny.

There are also solutions. Trust me. I could drop a very large pile of them on your desk if I weren’t obsessively taking notes from the various British studies that contain them. Incidentally, while here in England I have learned a charming term for those with weird hobbies, “anoraks,” taken from the garments habitually worn by those obsessed with train-spotting rather than the repair of governmental institutions. Arguably I qualify. But I cling to sufficient normalcy to insist that when proposing remedies, ingenuity is no substitute for practicality.

Until you are clear on what government is meant to be doing, and why it is having trouble doing it, your solutions are liable to be eccentric rather than sensible. For instance, those in Britain tempted by a written constitution ought certainly, in my view, to study our own recent Canadian history to grasp the dangers of rushing into such a thing with more zeal than understanding, and with more self-conceit than either.

Thus, in an attempt to exchange my anorak for one of the togas or frock coats habitually worn by the statues that surround me as I write, in a pub just west of Westminster Palace, I declare that government is meant to protect the lives and liberties of citizens from other threats without itself menacing them. I further insist that the best way ever found of approximating that outcome, indeed the only way, is to have a strong executive held firmly in check by a strong elected legislature.

Our system is manifestly in disrepair in this regard. Our executive seems strong in a clumsy kind of way, although there is some question whether it can really achieve much beyond securing re-election by spending irresponsible quantities of money on programs of dubious merit. But our legislature is clearly not strong; whatever the reason, it does not exert an effective check on the executive. These days, on the crucial budget vote, the Official Opposition seems to abstain as a matter of course. You would have trouble explaining why to William Gladstone or Pitt the Elder.

Of course you might protest that you have no intention of attempting to explain the matter to either of these august gentlemen, who are not merely dead, but dead foreigners. What have they to do with me?

Well, go back to my list from the Norton Report. If the problems painfully familiar to us are also painfully familiar to anoraks in Britain, it suggests that we should not focus unduly on those things that supposedly make Canada distinctive. A similar institutional structure and history, including the recent dramatic expansion of government’s expenditures and its ambitions, have given us not merely architecturally similar parliament buildings but similar symptoms of decay behind the beautiful neo-Gothic facades. It stands to reason for the most part the causes of our problems are likely to lie in those things we share. Thus to find solutions we should take a broad and comparative view, geographically and historically, rather than a narrow and parochial one.

Plus I’d rather talk to a dead William Pitt than watch a live modern Question Period that some British observers have told me is, even to them, positively shocking.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]