Mr. Speaker, since the hon. member opposite spent so much time talking about the past, perhaps I will start my speech today with a quote from Edmund Burke dating back to 1774. The Vancouver Sun used this quote on May 21, 1994 to criticize the electronic referendum on the Young Offenders Act that I ran in my riding of North Vancouver.
Edmund Burke said:
Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.
Mr. Burke made this statement more than 220 years ago, long before the information age. The level of education then was probably pretty low and it probably would have been doing a disservice to constituents to take their opinions to Parliament. In the 1990s people are well educated and well informed. A modification of Mr. Burke's statement is in order.
I would like to see modern politicians saying: "Your representative owes you not his industry only, but also his commitment to alert you to the affairs of government that affect you so that you may become informed and so that you may instruct him how to represent you".
The problem is that even if every member in the House agreed that his or her first duty is to represent his or her constituents, we would still have to overcome the hurdle of repressive party discipline that we have already seen illustrated in recent times. We cannot change our present, benevolent dictatorship into real democracy until we come to grips with that situation.
When I was in my late teens and early 20s I belonged to the Young Nationals in New Zealand. I worked at many elections, helping really good candidates to get elected to go to Wellington for which members can read Ottawa. I really hoped they would make a difference.
It was disappointing to me to find that excellent candidates got elected but as soon as they got to Wellington, they were unable to represent their constituents' views. They had to toe the party line. They never voted against the party under any circumstances. At the very least, the strongest statement any of them could make was simply to abstain.
In those olden days there were no computers or fax machines or CNN. Governments pretty well controlled what we knew about the world. Even then, I dreamed of a day when voters would be able to have a much greater say in the decision making of their governments.
We have reached a point in time now when the information age has made it possible for my dream to become reality. We are on the verge of a revolution in democracy, despite the unwillingness of the Prime Minister to see the writing on the wall.
Frankly I doubt whether our parliamentary system can survive the information age in its present form. It must adapt and change more quickly than it has ever done in history to cope with the new power each of us will have as voters. Reading the precedents from Beauchesne the way the government whip often does is going to have less and less relevance in the future.
I can recommend to members a comedy that appears on television on Sunday nights on The women's network. It is called "No Job for a Lady". It is based on the experiences of a rookie woman MP in England. Whilst the program is pretty funny, it is a fairly accurate portrayal of what happens in this place.
The writers obviously have a good knowledge of the workings of the House of Commons. They have no difficulty showing viewers that committee meetings and travel junkets have very little use other than to keep MPs busy between votes. They make no bones about the fact that the system is completely controlled by the Prime Minister and that the wishes of the voters are irrelevant to the process.
There is growing awareness that the present system is becoming less and less relevant in modern times. Let me read a segment from an article written for the Financial Post recently by Rafe Mair, a talk show host on radio in Vancouver:
Surely we must now all agree that the system the Fathers of Confederation devised of pasting a parliamentary government on to a federal system no longer suits us and our present difficulties. Our system, with victory to the "first past the post," means a minority becomes an official majority which can do as it pleases for five years. It usually oppresses the majority and certainly oppresses all minorities such as B.C. and Alberta, a clear lesson of the election of 1993-
The main argument against changing our system is that it will result in weak governments. If by "weak" it is meant that the prime minister will not have his way unless the Commons, voting freely, agrees, then I will take weak government. Surely the collective wisdom of all MPs and their leaders is greater than that of a caucus which must agree or lose the perks of power-
For under our system, power is from the top down. The party in power must, to stay in power, stay united no matter how bad things get. The party leader becomes a dictator-for it is he who appoints cabinet ministers and parliamentary secretaries. He controls the patronage. Every backbencher is held in check by his own ambition to get into cabinet; each cabinet minister is held in check by his desire to stay there.
If Chrétien proves incapable of handling our crisis how do we change him?-He can't be relieved of office unless the majority of Liberal MPs choose to share power, most unlikely given the track record of majority governments in Canada.
The leader to save Canada from its perils may be sitting in the present Parliament-it might even be the Preston Manning or Jean Charest-but we will never know unless the centrally dominated Liberal caucus wants it to happen. And it is an immutable political law-