Canada Responsible Government

Reform of the House of Commons is needed, but the tenets of responsible government and the idea of efficiency and inherent trust in government, as well as a need to present such a front on the ever-growing culture of media intrusion and supremacy, dictate that current trends of prime ministerial superiority and sovereignty cannot be completely eschewed in the push to increase the accountability of both majority and minority governments.

“Is it because the Canadian political culture demands far too little of MPs in this parliamentary function?” (Aucoin and Jarvis 2004, 77).

This statement is made in reference to an assertion made earlier (Aucoin and Jarvis 2004, 74) that the realm of acceptability of the Canadian manifestation of responsible

This statement is to an extent irrefutable, knowing the history of responsible government’s development and failures to properly and sweepingly change the aforementioned dynamic by entrenching policy. However, Aucoin and Jarvis subsequently present a measure of subjectivity to augment their observations, opening them up to scrutiny that, when applied, serves to undermine their merit as judges of the role of the House of Commons in Canadian political efficacy. The 2004 parliamentary committee testimony of Professor Ned Franks, of Queen’s University, indicates dissatisfaction with that the failure of MPs and ministers to account to Parliament for their responsibilities, and thus the sullying of the concept of “responsibility” within the government (as quoted in Aucoin and Jarvis 2004, 75). Although Aucoin and Jarvis subsequently co-opt this into a proposal for proportional representation (Aucoin and Jarvis 2004, 77), their decision to question the role of “Canadian political culture” in preserving accountability, as illustrated at the beginning of this argument, raises the possibility that a concept more overarching into convention than mere electoral reform, and more intrusive into the role

This possibility is seen to be based in truth, as in another policy brief compiled for the same organization by Aucoin, Jennifer Smith and Geoff Dinsdale explicitly endorses methods of reducing the Prime Minister’s stranglehold on the choice of public servants and entrenching MP accountability toward their own constituents more so than their party (Aucoin et. al. 2004, 72). These concepts, attempts to entrench accountability by regulating political culture rather than by redirecting the path to Parliament, were realized in the forms of Prime Minister Paul Martin’s guidelines to remove the “democratic deficit” from Parliament (Aucoin and Turnbull, 2004, 429), and the Reform Act, 2013, tabled by Conservative MP Michael Chong, of Wellington-Halton Hills.^ Chong had previously achieved notoriety for his decision to exit Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Cabinet on the basis that he could not agree with Harper’s resolution for Québec to be recognized as a “distinct nation within a united Canada,”^ thus lending him the reputation of being an “independent thinker” (Diebel