CKNW Editorial
for September 27, 2001

During my agonizing daily stint on my treadmill I often watch a video to help pass the time … and I often watch that wonderful British comedy, Yes, Prime Minister which, as I’m sure you know, is a wonderful spoof of British politics. In fact it is true enough to life that an Australian cabinet minister said that while it might be a comedy in Britain it was considered a documentary in ‘Oz.

In a couple of episodes the Prime Minister becomes quite worried by what he hears from the Chief whip about trouble on the back bench or even in his cabinet. And it got me to thinking – Yes Prime Minister, while a great bit of fun, has no relevance in Canada because we don’t have the same parliamentary traditions. Now that might sound strange because we’re all taught that our system is patterned on the British system and that indeed, we are bound by British parliamentary tradition. That simply isn’t so.

We are now in the midst of a crisis. Not, I grant you, in the same degree of trouble that Britain found herself in in 1940 but still a time when Canadians dearly want leadership, strong leadership in which they can have faith.

On May 10, 1940 the Germans invaded the Lowlands, Luxembourg and France just as the House of Commons was debating a confidence motion on the actions that Britain had taken the previous month in Norway. The news from France was such that the motion took on quite a different colour. At that time Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had a majority of over 200 but when the vote was taken, he had won by only 81 votes with over 100 Tory abstentions. While I have no doubt that a Jean Chretien would have crowed that he’d won a famous victory, Chamberlain knew different.

But why would he know that he was in trouble with such a huge majority?

The answer is what separates the Canadian system from the one it devolved from. Simply put, party discipline in the UK is a very much different thing than it is here.

Mr Chamberlain knew that his position was intolerable. It took him a few hours to get it, but he soon did and he put out feelers to the Labour Party as to whom they might support in a coalition government and we know that the answer was Churchill.

In 1990, Margaret Thatcher, who had won three straight elections and who had a substantial majority, was toppled by her backbench. How could that happen?

For one thing there was machinery in place, namely an automatic leadership review that allowed the parliamentary party a chance to topple here but it still seems strange to us Canadians that British leaders, in seemingly unassailable positions, can be thrown out.

It is a different ethic. The British House of Commons is supreme and the Member of Parliament a person with considerable dignity. It’s something to be a British MP no matter what your political stripe. Churchill always said "I am a child of the House of Commons" meaning, without question, that the institution itself meant far more than any political party or faction.

When political parties began to develop in the UK they were loose knit affairs and to some extent have stayed that way. In the late 1800s and early 1900s there was a Party called the Unionists that wanted Northern Ireland kept in the United Kingdom and both some Liberals along with most Tories considered themselves Unionists as well.

When Canada got what is rather strangely called "Responsible" government – which doesn’t mean that the government behaves responsibly at all – they inherited the party system without inheriting the spirit of independence that so characterized the British MP. Where the British leaders tried to enforce their will by use of the whip, they often failed. By Margaret Thatcher’s day the government had become used to losing votes and, if necessary, calling for votes of confidence later. John Major, with a paper thin majority, famously did this in 1996, winning by a whisker.

There is also the tradition in Britain that one does not cling to power by one’s fingernails. After the election of 1950, for example, Clement Attlee had a small majority of about ten as I remember – had he been a Canadian Prime Minister or Premier he would have used every imaginable stratagem to hang on but he knew that he didn’t have the people with him so in 1951 he called an election which he lost. (Ironically, his party had a larger share of the popular vote than did the winning Tories.)

The way the House of Commons in Britain has developed means that governments have to woo the support of the backbench instead of being able to demand it, or else, as here.

I don’t know that there are really too many conclusions to draw from all this except that we should stop being hypnotized by the way the game seems to be played in Canada and understand the reality – which is that the MP is, as Trudeau rightly characterized him, a nobody. In every single breath he takes he does precisely what he’s told. There’s no point in going to a Liberal MP and complaining about the demonstrable lack of leadership by Jean Chretien … or his shady dealings in his riding … because there is nothing the MP could do if he wanted to. He is thoroughly bought and paid for because that’s how the system works.

In Britain the Government whip uses threats, promises, urgings, pleading, reason, logic … whatever tool he can to get an MP to vote for the government. Most times he does … but very often he doesn’t. In Ottawa the whip simply keeps track of who’s away and pairing arrangements, because he knows that there is no chance in the world that a government MP would cross his Prime Minister.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter that the system is rotten and on every vote the fix is in … but what certainly does matter is that we the people understand that this is how it works in Ottawa and not pretend that somehow we have a British style parliamentary system.