A blog to give a voice to our concern about the continued erosion of our democratic processes not only within the House of Commons and within our electoral system but also throughout our society. Here you will find articles about the current problems within our parliamentary democracy, about actions both good and bad by our elected representatives, about possible solutions, opinions and debate about the state of democracy in Canada, and about our roles/responsibilities as democratic citizens. We invite your thoughtful and polite comments upon our posts and ask those who wish to post longer articles or share ideas on this subject to submit them for inclusion as a guest post.
Contact us at democracyunderfire@gmail.com

Sunday, November 27, 2011

Statscan to stop charging for data.

Embassy Magazine (recently) broke the story that all of Statistics Canada's online data will not only be made free, but released under the Government of Canada's Open Data License Agreement (updated and reviewed earlier this week) that allows for commercial re-use.


(T)here may be tougher news on the horizon for StatsCan. With every department required to have submitted proposal to cut their budgets by either 5% and 10%, and with StatsCan having already seen a number of its programs cut, there may be fewer resources in the organization to take advantage of the opportunity making its data open creates, or even just adjust to what has happened.........

The winners from this decision are of course, consumers of statscan's data. Indirectly, this includes all of us, since provincial and local governments are big consumers of statscan data and so now - assuming it is structured in such a manner - they will have easier (and cheaper) access to it..........

The first thing everybody will be waiting for is to see exactly what data gets shared, in what structure and to what detail.........

Therein lays the rub, announcements are all very fine but exactly what will be included and how long will it be until all data is available is something we must wait and see what happens. All to often both government and other users are basing their decisions on data that is anywhere from a few months old to 5 or 6 years old, we all know that statistical information on (for instance) family incomes from the 2006 census is utterly useless in todays economy. Given the governments failure to retain the mandatory portion of the long form census care must be taken to get too excited about free data that may be less than accurate due to poor input data.
All in all its a step in the right direction but we wonder how the reduction in revenue coupled with the across the board departmental cuts will impact their ability to collect and analyze data.

NOW how about data from all the other government departments being made freely available, particularly on where and how all out tax dollars are being spent AND access to documents requested through freedom of information requests being actually provided in a timely and open manner. Opening up access to Statscan data whist handicapping their ability to collect accurate data and making it ever more difficult to get information and data from other government departments may just be another one of those Harper regimes smoke screens. Time will tell!


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Sunday, November 20, 2011

Not Important?



There are two rules at the centre of Parliamentary democracy. First, any politician given actual responsibility must have an elected mandate. Second, government is accountable to all politicians with an elected mandate. “ So says The Fifth Estate in a rebuttal to a recent article by John Ivisin. In doing so he make a number of important observations about how our parliament is supposed to work and how it is being increasingly subverted into a meaningless & dysfunctional shadow of its former self.
I agree with everything said and have therefore re=posted this article in full (My bold):-



A few days ago, I suggested that the main achievement of the Harper regime was something few people had noticed yet: a new style of democracy, à la George Bush and Hugo Chavez, where only the election results matter: once you’re elected, the rule of law no longer applies. Now John Ivison of the National Post has taken up the same point. Well, sort of. You see, Ivison is an irredeemably moronic pro-big-government flake (a journalist?) without an apparent shred of critical thinking ability or even basic knowledge of how Westminster democracy works.
There are two rules at the centre of Parliamentary democracy. First, any politician given actual responsibility must have an elected mandate. Second, government is accountable to all politicians with an elected mandate. Now, all majority governments skirt with violating this principle, all the time. They break laws. They stonewall investigations. They lie to journalists. And occasionally they close down debate in Parliament in order to ram a bill through.
According to Ivison, that’s fine and dandy. He says the government has a “right” to pass legislation, because it won the election. This “right” trumps the whining crybabies in Parliament who want to debate the bill. According to Ivison, in other words, Parliament is an irrelevant talk shop. Now, certainly the vast majority of MPs agree with him that there is no need for maturity, intelligence, or any remotest shred of independent thinking in their workplace. But they are wrong. And so is he.

It will probably come as a great surprise to people as apparently oblivious and ignorant to basic concepts of representative democracy as national newspaper columnists, and Post ones in particular, but no government has the “right” to pass a law. It actually has no rights. You can check, in the Constitution. What the Prime Minister has is the responsibility to ensure the consent of Parliament to pass the laws he wants to pass. Today, all political parties claim the right to command this consent whenever they want it from their members, and those members agree, and almost nobody calls them on their bullshit. I challenge anyone to explain how democracy could be anything but dysfunctional when party discipline reigns supreme.

But what we are talking about now goes beyond party discipline. The Conservative government has stated in practice, if not by policy just yet, that Parliamentary discussion is no longer relevant. They have done this by demonstrating that any time the opposition parties make some token opposition in Parliament, they will invoke closure on the debate and hurry the bill through. Their supporters, like Ivison, cheer them on as they do this.
I’ll be the first to admit that Parliament has become a rather sad spectacle, but the solution from authoritarians like Stephen Harper and quisling tools like Ivison is to do away with the instituion entirely and say that Parliament just doesn’t matter: what matters is Ivison’s totally fictitious, bogus, trumped-up “government rights” to do whatever they want in between election campaigns. I’m not sure they’ve thought through the long-term consequences of this. Because the major consequence is to take Parliament out of the equation entirely and simply agree that the prime minister can do whatever he likes.
Here’s how Parliamentary democracy is supposed to work: the prime minister is any person who can get a majority of MPs to agree to accept his leadership. That’s it. Political parties and all their ilk are traitorous leeches who corrupt this process and turn Parliament into mere showmanship. In this, the NDP and the Liberals are no less guilty than the Conservatives. But just the same, right now it is a Conservative government which is going one further step and suggesting that Parliament has no role in debating legislation except to meekly stand by while the Prime Minister’s Office dictates legislation.
People like Ivison presumably feel this doesn’t matter because the all-powerful leaders in the PMO will always return to the ballot box every four years or so, and then if voters have been too harassed by the government, they can get their revenge. But in an age of declining election turnouts, it’s worth asking how long it will be before a Prime Minister given the sort of pre-eminent power Ivison thinks he should have decides that it’s not really worth going back to the ballot box anyways.
That future autocrat won’t be Harper, despite some particularly upset leftist bloggers saying last May that we’d just seen Canada’s last election. It likely won’t even come during Ivison’s chosen career as apologist for authoritarianism. But so long as we accept that Parliament is subordinate to the Prime Minister’s Office rather than the other way around, that day is coming.
I’m very sorry that these plain facts about democracy will no doubt be unwelcome to those anti-democratic forces who insist that we have to shut down debate so that we can pass the laws now, now, now, fast, fast, fast, and “get things done” and “bring change” and so on and so forth ad nauseam. That’s not how democracy works. Democracy is not about making sure the leader can act quickly and without opposition. If that’s the sort of government you think is superior, there are plenty of them in the world, and you’re welcome to move to whichever one you think will make you happiest. Personally, I suggest this one.
Origionaly posted at http://sixthestate.net/?p=2718

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Sunday, November 6, 2011

The Floor Crossing Delema

“The floor crossing tradition reflects the importance of preserving the independence and mobility of members of Parliament to vote with their feet when they feel it is in the best interests of their constituents or the country to do so.”
And that is exactly the point – sometimes an MP needs to vote with their feet. Party leaders can become drunk with power or abusive. Party cultures can change around them despite their best efforts. And it also gives primacy to the party and not the individual MP, even though our entire system is predicated on the role of the individual. We vote for individual MPs – not a party slate.

So said Dale Smith in a recent post........

And therein lays the dilemma when political partys with whom a particular MP is affiliated will not countenance any independent thought or action that does not follow 'the party line' it can leave an MP who truly does represent his constituents (a rare animal indeed) little choice if he or she is to remain true to their original commitment.

Dales full post follows, he is right on the money with this one.......

Yesterday the NDP had second reading debate on a bill that would attempt to ban MPs from “crossing the floor” to another party. Mathieu Ravignat, the bill’s sponsor (though the same bill has been introduced repeatedly by Peter Stoffer but never actually debated), said he felt the bill would somehow restore Canadians’ faith in our democracy.
“This bill also reflects a fundamental objective of my party, which is to do politics differently in order to renew people's trust in elected officials,” Ravignat said in debate.
And of course, he brought up David Emerson and Belinda Stronach to illustrate his examples of people who supposedly traded away principle for power. Except that people forget that Stronach actually had legitimate reasons to cross the floor, from the iron-fisted discipline that was being imposed on a party, that resisted her attempts to bring cultural change from within, that used human rights – and especially gay rights – as tactical wedge issues, and which marginalised her from the discussions despite giving her a relatively high-profile critic position. But hey, she crossed the floor just for a cabinet seat! She must have been grasping for power! Except that the government could have toppled the very next day, which was something she was fully prepared to accept.
Nobody mentions Scott Brison crossing the floor in debate. Unwilling to become the token gay poster boy for the “tolerance” of the new Conservative Party, Brison found a party that respected his fiscal conservatism and social progressivity (seeing of course that his former party, the Progressive Conservatives, ceased to exist). But do the defenders of this bill bring him up? No, of course not.
And of course what David Emerson did was reprehensible, no matter that he may have justified it as being in the best interests of his constituents to have a representative in Cabinet. Nobody denies that. But he also knew the consequences of his actions, and didn’t run again. At the same time, voters in the ridings held by Stronach, Brison, and others who did cross the floor, returned their MPs to Parliament, obviously feeling that their reasons were sufficient.
The bill itself has a number of technical flaws and loopholes, and is aimed at making MPs who want to leave their party be forced to sit as an independent, and that they be forced to resign and hold a by-election before they became a member of another party. Never mind that they could simply vote with the party they wished to cross to until the next election and run then. They could even join the caucus and simply not pay their $5 membership fee to become an official party member until such time as the next election, when they’d have to face a nomination race anyway (which they may not win – such things have happened to floor-crossers in the past).
But technical flaws aside, the bill doesn’t actually do anything substantive to address Canadians’ faith in politics or renew trust in elected officials. In fact, what it does is say that an MP is no longer to exercise their own judgement and independence, and that they must in fact submit themselves to the tyranny of the party.
“According to the Library of Parliament, there have been approximately 194 floor crossings since Confederation,” said Conservative MP Michelle Rempel in speaking out against the bill. “The floor crossing tradition reflects the importance of preserving the independence and mobility of members of Parliament to vote with their feet when they feel it is in the best interests of their constituents or the country to do so.”
And that is exactly the point – sometimes an MP needs to vote with their feet. Party leaders can become drunk with power or abusive. Party cultures can change around them despite their best efforts. And it also gives primacy to the party and not the individual MP, even though our entire system is predicated on the role of the individual. We vote for individual MPs – not a party slate. As such, we are placing our faith in the judgement of those MPs. If their conscience demands that they walk out of a party that they can no longer stand with, we have given them the authority to do so with the proviso that when the next election comes around, we must hold them to account for that decision.
This bill affirms that MPs cannot be trusted to exercise their own judgement on the basis of one bad apple, and attacks made on the character of a select few others, which don’t necessarily reflect the reality of their situation. This is a sad statement for any sitting MP to make because it admits that they themselves cannot be trusted. It also seeks to capitalise on any voter anger of the “betrayal” of a floor crossing while tempers are still hot, which serves nobody’s best interests. Knee-jerk reactions are not the means by which we should hold our elected officials accountable.
Gimmicks like this bill don’t serve to restore trust – it just reaffirms cynicism. And that’s the last thing that we need right now.

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