Oh, maybe I should. I'll talk to you after.
I imagine the reason I'm here is that in January I wrote a letter that snowballed beyond what I'd expected. It ended up being signed by close to 300 academics, for the most part professors of law, political science, and some of us oddball philosophers.
It made a couple of points, which I think over the course of the last four or five months have become part of the public debate. Indeed, I think one of the gratifying things about the letter is that probably a lot of what I'll say in going over, very briefly, what's in the letter will be boringly redundant to you now. I think perhaps it wasn't so much in January when we wrote the letter.
I wouldn't want to insult you by going into too much detail about it, but the point we wanted to make to Canadians is that we have a very peculiar parliamentary system. I guess they're all peculiar, but the particular peculiarities of ours means that the way in which different powers are held in check as opposed to the American system does not depend so much on painstaking rules being spelled out, black on white, but rather on conventions, some of which go back hundreds of years in the British parliamentary tradition, and also on the very important notion of trust.
Particularly important powers are vested in the office of the Prime Minister, much greater power is vested there than in the power of the presidency in the United States. As we saw in the last few months during the health care debate, you can be a popular president with majorities in both Houses and yet not be able to get anything done.
Relatively speaking, a lot more power is vested in the office of the Prime Minister, even in the context of a minority government, such as the ones that we have had over the course of the last few years. The notion of trust is therefore extremely important in that those powers are understood to be abusable. They aren't checked by rules that can be pointed to, black on white. They can be abused, and the trust of Parliament and the trust of the Canadian people through their representatives are based on the understanding that they will not be abused.
When one thinks about it, prorogation is quite a considerable power, though nobody knew the word before about a year and a half ago or they confused it with Polish meat-filled delicacies.
As opposed to adjournment, as opposed to calling it a recess, it really is the ability to hit the reset button, as it were, start things from scratch. It is understood that in the life of a government that will be necessary. One can come to the end of the natural life of a legislative agenda, even if all the bills haven't been gone through. One feels sometimes that a government does need to hit the reset button.
Where trust connects with this issue is that there has to be an appreciation on the part of both the population at large, whose trust in this institution is extremely important, and on the part of parliamentarians that when the reset button is hit, it is done because something of that order has occurred, and there is an understanding on both sides of the floor that there is no useful purpose left in pursuing the legislative agenda that was announced in the previous throne speech.
I think that in the last few years we have seen a worrying abuse of that power, a slide toward the use of that power for more partisan, tactical purposes.
In retrospect, 20/20 hindsight, this might have been something that we could have come to expect. We have come into a period of minority governments, first a Liberal minority government and now a Conservative minority government, which will last for how long? It is natural to expect the office of the prime minister and the governing party to reach for the tools that are at their disposal to offset the relative lack of power or lesser power that the fact of being a minority government entails as opposed to being a majority government.
One can't really imagine a situation, other than rebellion within the ranks of the governing party, that would lead to a prime minister using the power to prorogue in the way that has been done.
I'm not a political scientist, but my armchair understanding of the political forces at play suggests that we are entering a period of successive minority governments in the medium term. We really have to think long and hard about something that we didn't have to think long and hard about in a period of our history when majority governments were the norm.
I think that although harsh words were spoken when the prorogations occurred last year and the year before, in retrospect one can realize that for a government trying to stay afloat, for a government involved in the cut and thrust of parliamentary affairs, it is a natural thing to just reach for whatever tools are there in order to offset the sort of relative powerlessness or lesser power that minority status affords. But given the importance of this important power's being perceived by parliamentarians and by Canadians at large as being used for the common good rather than for tactical purposes, we felt that it was necessary to call the attention of Canadians—and we weren't the only ones to do so—to the fact that something perhaps quite technical and fiddly was going on that had much larger ramifications in the potential it had to offset the very subtle, unspoken, unwritten balances and checks on powers that are written into the fibre of our institutions, as opposed to spelled out in clear rules.
I went through—and I'll stop with this—the briefing paper that was prepared for this committee and found out that the prorogation power is said to be the...is it the ugly duckling, or the silent partner...? There's very little written about it. We have to rely on conventions, we have to rely on traditions, we have to rely on our sense of the ways in which this power can and cannot be used to serve the common good.
Perhaps I'll speak one last sentence, if you'll allow it. In the intervening months an interesting spate of proposals has come out, both from academia and from the opposition parties—the NDP and the Liberals—about rules that might be put in place to address this problem.
I'll just sound a skeptical note about this type of approach. While it's something that is quite natural as a reaction, one that I thought of after the prorogation—what rules can we put in place just to make this harder?—I was led to the following thought, which I presented when I was invited by the Liberal Party to one of their meetings held during the prorogation period: essentially, that any system of rules can be gamed. Any system of rules can fall foul to the cut and thrust of partisan politics. I have yet to encounter a set of rules that can't be gamed. When I presented this a couple of months ago, I used a hockey analogy invoking Sean Avery. I won't do that now, although I could, if I were asked in questions.
So I think that at the same time as we think about what rules can be put in place, we have to be quite lucid about the fact that rules and procedures probably won't be enough and that what is needed is something like a new political culture of minority governance that, in a way, infuses the ethos of parliamentarians just as much as it does the rules.
When I look at the proposals that have been put forward, a lot of them are extremely plausible at first glance. But to the extent that they involve throwing the ball back into Parliament, the play of partisan forces can just end up taking over there as well. So here is a bit of a skeptical note about some of the roads we might think about travelling. We may need a new set of rules, but we can't ignore the much more difficult task of thinking about how we can create a new culture of governance, a new ethos of governance, for the minority situations that seem to be with us for the foreseeable future.
I'll stop with that, and thank you very much.