For want of a more creative term, let’s call it the Tory Spring on Parliament Hill.
After seven years of disciplined government under prime minister Stephen Harper and his party disciplinarians, there is a stirring among Conservative backbenchers chafing under the control.
Undoubtedly, part of the stirring is because Harper now enjoys a majority government. Unlike the five years of minority government when party discipline was key to government survival, these days the Conservatives have clear sailing at least until October 2015.
So if there is no threat to the government, why muzzle MPs, the restless MPs seem to be asking.
Read Also
Worrisome drop in grain prices
Prices had been softening for most of the previous month, but heading into the Labour Day long weekend, the price drops were startling.
It must look increasingly like simple message control.
First came protests from British Columbia backbench MP Mark Warawa that he had been forbidden by his party to deliver a statement in favour of his private member’s bill opposing gender-selective abortion.
A committee of Conservative and opposition MPs had already decided the bill could not come to a vote.
But Warawa cracked when he was told he could not even make a statement on the issue because the Conservative government did not want the abortion debate raised at risk of alienating Canadians suspicious of a Tory “hidden agenda” on the issue.
The MP appealed to speaker Andrew Sheer, a Saskatchewan Conservative, to give him the right to voice his own opinions without party control.
Remarkably, close to a dozen other Conservatives rose to support him. Not all were on the same side of the abortion issue but all thought an MP with the support of tens of thousands of constituents was elected to be more than a meat puppet for party bosses.
Sheer did the almost impossible, splitting the difference.
He affirmed the right of parties to give him a list of approved speakers for the 15 minutes of House daily time set aside for member statements. This (sort of) kept him on the side of the party pooh-bahs.
However, he said he would not be entirely bound by lists if excluded MPs caught his eye and wanted to speak.
This actually was a challenge to MPs. If you want to defy party brass, you might get recognized to do just that.
Since the ruling, rogue MPs have not been prominent in the Commons, but Sheer clearly sent a message to private MPs. Screw up your courage. This is your House of Commons, too.
Then came the second backbench challenge. Saskatoon-Humboldt Conservative Brad Trost, not known as a Tory rabble-rouser, launched a debate to propose that members of Parliament choose chairs of parliamentary committees in secret ballot rather than the leaders’ offices.
At present, there is a fiction of an election by committee members, but as in North Korea, only one candidate ever is nominated.
Trost went out of his way to say he was not criticizing current chairs or the government but rather trying to improve “the image of democratic accountability” on Parliament Hill.
Again, both Conservatives and some opposition MPs supported him with one more hour of debate to go before a vote. It hardly is revolutionary, but it is another shot across the bow of increasingly strict party control on both sides.
Democratic dissent appears to be breaking out in the Canadian temple of democratic debate.
