At the time this article was published, Bob
Rae Leader of the New Democratic Party in Ontario Legislative Assembly. This was
a revised version of a speech delivered to the 25th conference of the Canadian
Region of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association in Quebec City in July
1985.
As the originator of non confidence motions
which led to two changes of government in the past four years, I suspect some
people will find a certain irony in my addressing the subject of confidence.
But I hope my experience and what we have attempted to do in Ontario will
change some ideas about confidence and about our system of government.
I believe in parliamentary government. I am
also a realist and recognize that what we really have today is not
parliamentary government but something I call Executive Government. In our
system the executive and legislative functions are combined but as anyone who
has served in Cabinet will tell you, power has become more and more centralized
in the office of the Prime Minister. We have what amounts to a kind of
presidential government within our parliamentary system.
This poses a problem. In our legislatures and
in the House of Commons we have an awful lot of talented people whose talents
are going unused; who are left on the margins of the political system; who are
told about political decisions long after they have been made and who are
simply asked to vote whenever the government decides what has to be done.
Executive Government, has combined with the increasing rigidity of the party
system to produce a surprisingly inflexible and irresponsible system of
government.
When one party has a majority in Parliament,
the Executive uses the confidence convention to bring its own members into
line. Government backbenchers are told that the Government cannot be seen to
suffer a defeat or a loss of face over an issue. I have never been a member of
a majority party so I cannot describe their feelings of frustration. But I am
told by those who have been through it that the government, more and more, sees
every issue as a matter of confidence, even if it is not a question of
government suffering a defeat.
The notion of confidence has also been used
and abused, I believe, in minority situations in order to beat minority parties
into submission. The idea of loss of confidence is tied to the government's
exclusive right to call an election. We have given enormous power to the executive.
We do not realize how much perhaps, because it is the only system that we know.
In this age of polling and of modern political science the unilateral right to
decide whenever an election is going to be called, constitutes a tremendous
advantage for the government.
Confidence in Ontario
The confidence convention is a doctrine that
has gotten right out of hand. It is, however, a practice that can be changed
and we have changed it in Ontario and I want to describe the changes we have
introduced or proposed. As a result of the election in May 1985 we were in a
rather unique situation of negotiating with the Liberal Party the terms under
which they would replace the Conservatives as the government. There were many
options considered as whether power could be effectively shared and how a
transition would take place in a way that would protect the interests of both
parties, the Liberals and my own party.
In our situation, we felt it was crucial for
us to combine two things. The first was stability. My main consideration as a
leader of the third party was to convince people that a minority government
could provide stability and that a minority government could work. If people
always associate minority government with instability, if they always associate
it with an instant election, then it is very unlikely that the people will vote
for the third party because it creates instability. Therefore, we as a party,
have an enormous stake in stability in the system.
My observation of previous similar
situations is that once they have put the government in, third parties do not
have an awful lot of flexibility because they are basically in the hands of the
government as to when an election is going to be called. We wanted as much as
possible to take that unilateral power away from the party that would be
forming the government.
We also wanted, as a third party, to
maintain our identity and influence knowing that we were not going to be
getting the advantages of the government, that is to say cabinet seats and an
ability to direct affairs from the executive branch. Therefore, it was in our
interest to expand the power of the legislative branch. It was in our interest
to extend the powers of Parliament.
In June 1985 the McGrath Report on
parliamentary reform suggested that at the federal level it may be necessary
for the executive to unilaterally give up some of its powers. My observation in
politics is that people do not unilaterally give up anything. In this business,
you have to take it away from them and you have to be in a position where you
can, in fact, do that. The only time we would be in that position was before
the formation of the government. As soon as the government was formed, our
powers would be decreased and the government's powers dramatically increased. When
the two parties were in opposition and were negotiating the terms under which a
new government will be formed, our leverage was considerable. Therefore, it was
in our interest to work out the best possible arrangement to maintain our
bargaining situation.
Basically, we said to the Liberals that we
wanted to try to negotiate a change that is technically within the rules and
traditions but that also breaks new ground. I can tell you we did a lot of
interesting historical research. We discovered that governments had been
defeated many times, not only on bills at second reading which were considered
to be matters of some importance by the government, but on individual bills of
supply, on individual budget bills on third reading, on all sorts of measures
without considering it to be a vote of confidence. We discovered that
confidence is whatever the government says is confidence. That seemed to be the
rule.
There are, of course, explicitly worded
motions of confidence. You have a vote on the Throne Speech which is
traditionally worded as a vote of confidence by the Opposition when they amend
the Throne Speech. There is also a vote on budgetary policy which is invariably
turned into a motion of non confidence such as the one which I moved when the
Joe Clark government was defeated in 1979. But apart from these motions, I do
not think there is anything that is confidence. I really do not. I do not think
defeats on other motions have to be bound up with the survival of a government
in a minority situation. This involves a change of mind and attitude on the
part of the government, on the part of the Opposition parties and on the part
of the public because it is a question of changing people's mind about what
parliamentary government is all about. Are we ready to allow a measure to come
forward and allow a government to say: "This is the direction we think we
should go but we are certainly prepared to accept defeat or amendment as
well"? Everybody has to accept the fact that there is nothing terrible
about a government proposing something that does not get passed.
Right now, we are all in a mind set where it
is the job of the government to propose and the job of the Opposition to
oppose. Parliament does not govern. There is a complete clash that takes place
in which question period is the classic example. Nobody asks a question in
order to get an answer. That is not what question period is all about. The
governing aspect of Parliament is almost non existent because Parliament does
not see itself in that way. So, my basic interest, now, is in seeing that in
our case, in Ontario, that we do, in fact, have a role in governing; that we
are, in fact, going to be consulted; that there is, in fact, nothing wrong with
the Government being defeated following consultation before or after the
introduction of legislation. Committees should work, not because they are given
a lot of makeshift work but because there are going to be amendments to
legislation. The government has to say "You guys want to get involved and
help us to solve this problem. That is good for everybody." I am not
interested in going through life with my elbow on the horn. I do not think that
it is a very useful function for an opposition politician to play. There is an
awful lot more for us to do without necessarily being members of government. We
have to try to create ways for that to happen. I think the public expects it,
the public wants it and I think it is something we have to respond to.
In Ontario we now have this arrangement
whereby the New Democratic Party has agreed with the Liberals and said:
"We are giving you confidence for two years. We are not going to use non
confidence as a method of playing Russian Roulette and you cannot use it
either. You have to voluntarily suspend your power to seek dissolution until
this two year period is up". That is part of the agreement we have
reached. The other part is that the Government will not consider a defeat on
any matter, including an individual budget bill, to be a matter of confidence.
They will not use that as an excuse to go to the Lieutenant Governor and ask
for dissolution. To make this work will demand a different pattern of behaviour
in the legislature and some different expectations from the public. The more I
study this problem the more I think we have to learn how to make our
legislatures more genuinely representative and how to make them work effective
so that everybody in the legislature will count. Shortly after the change of
government I had an exchange in question period with the new Premier who said:
we did not have any responsibility, so it did not matter what we thought. That
attitude may work in a majority Parliament but it does not work in a minority
Parliament because I know that I am on the hook and he is on the hook too. In a
sense, we are all on the hook if we are going to make it work. This is really
where we have admitted, as an Opposition party, that we do have some
responsibility for what happens in that Parliament. We cannot pretend that it
is not our baby as well.
I think that public opinion is far ahead of
party opinion. It was Burke who referred to parties as these little platoons.
There is that sense of regimental loyalty. All members of a party caucus know
the resentment we instinctively feel at those people who decide to wander off
and exercise their personal conscience. Nothing disturbs you more than having
somebody who is elected on the basis of a party platform going off to do
whatever he thinks is right because he has had some communion with his
conscience. As party leader, my gut instinct is to believe that caucus members
should stick to the principles of solidarity and majority rule. Now I am
beginning to really reflect on whether that is always right. Perhaps one of the
reasons why political parties themselves have less credibility. I remember, for
example, some cases when it was tough for me to convince good local politicians
to get into the provincial scene. Not because they did not think they could
win, but because they did not feel it would be personally as rewarding as the
work that they were doing. As one of them said to me: "Look, I have worked
20 years to play a role on City Council. I can have an influence. I can go by a
park and I had something to do with building that park. I can go to a housing
site and say this housing site would not be there were it not for me. " If
she became a member of our party and a member of the Legislature and served in
Opposition, what could she point to? "What could I say? I asked the right
questions for 20 years. Is that going to be carved on my tomb stone?"
I do not want to see the party system
disappear. I think the Americans have some problems because of the decline of
their parties. But I do think that our party system has become too rigid. It is
not conducive to the best government of which we are capable.
Conclusion
Our party learned some important lessons
during its period holding the balance of power federally from 1972-1974 and in
Ontario from 1975 to 1977. We decided not to play games; not to run around
threatening to defeat parliament every day if they do not do everything we
demand.
The public really is not interested in Bob
Rae coming out of the House of Commons or the Legislature every day and saying;
"If the government does not do this, it is going to be the end of the
government," That kind of crying wolf which is what you get into in those
minority situations ends up just annoying the public who say: "Enough of
this instability. Let us have the stability of the majority government"
and we always lose in that situation.
We lost in 1974 and we lost in 1981 in
Ontario. So, what we are trying to do is make minority government flexible and
stable. If we can convince people that it is flexible and stable, my hope is
that people will choose it as an option in the next election. lye have a stake
in convincing people that minority government can work for them.