A question of trust: parliamentary democracy and Canadian society.

• Author: Smith, David E.

This article looks at seven trends in Canadian politics over the last forty years and how these have affected Parliament and our understanding of the role of Parliament.

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Since the 1970s there have been several major changes that shape our understanding of Canadian politics. The first has to do with Quebec; whatever one's view of what has happened in that province since the late 1960s, no one, I think, would any longer maintain that the Quiet Revolution was confined to catching-up with the rest of the country. As incomplete, inconclusive and controversial as it may be, Quebec has forced Canada to seek to redefine itself: either as two founding peoples or deux nations, distinct society, even multiculturalism and bilingualism. Compared to the certainties or, at least, unquestioned assumptions of the early 1960s, we are, at best and for the time being, a virtual people.

The second change relates to Canada's Aboriginal and First Nations peoples. If the earlier understanding of the place of the Quebecois in Canada has proven to be misconstrued, the same cannot be said of the Aboriginal and First Nations peoples. For in the early 1960s, there was no conception that they had any place at all Forty years ago they did not exist as a force in Canadian politics or as a subject of study in political science. Granted the federal franchise in 1960, the assumption--articulated at the end of the decade in the Trudeau government's White Paper--was that Aboriginal peoples would be assimilated into Canadian society. The pluralism and diversity, now heralded as cardinal features of Canada's constitution and to which the Aboriginal peoples have been major contributors, remained unrecognized.

A third change is in the area of rights. In 1964, the Diefenbaker Bill of Rights was four years old and judged a failure by those who looked for an enhanced affirmation of rights. The judiciary was deemed too passive, too restrained. The rights revolution, and its principal Canadian manifestation in the form of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, had yet to materialize. Necessarily, the Charter-skeptics, who now regularly attack the judiciary for being too active and thus constituting a challenge to Parliament, had yet to appear. After the Bill but before the Charter, language rights--at the national level in the form of the Official Languages Act (1969) and at the provincial level, as in Quebec's language laws--introduced new grounds for political organization and action, even when that activity was directed toward court challenges.

The media is a fourth area of change. The forty years that this lecture discusses were also the years of the electronic 'revolution'. Norman Ward wrote an article once about the founding of the Canadian Press (with government patronage) and CP's maintenance of the Commons Press Gallery. Print medium has transformed itself over the last four decades, in no small part in response to the spread of television coverage of politics. The press is less centered on the House and more devoted to investigative reporting. The compression of time and space, which the electronic media foster, and their success at instantaneous coverage have contributed to making the print medium more partisan in a non-party political sense--that is, more critical of government of whatever partisan complexion. Twenty-four hour news channels, which are just a decade old, subject politicians and the viewing public to both a concentration and breadth of coverage once unimaginable. Much more could be said--about the contrasting roles of public and private broadcasters, the adaptability of radio and the rigidity of television when it comes to reporting local news especially in a national context, as for example, in the coverage of general election returns. If there is a broadening out of politics as a result of the modern concern for rights, then television is the ideal medium to 'nationalize' or 'internationalize' that coverage.

Fifth is the concept of representation which is all the rage today although the themes advanced are essentially passive: white, male, middle-class legislators do not reflect the demographic diversity of the electorate; and the partisan composition of the legislature does not mirror the distribution of partisan sentiment among the voters. For these reasons, a recent study published by the Law Commission of Canada asserts that voters have "essentially wasted their votes." This is one source of the lament about the public's lack of trust in politicians, the reputed decline in the political system's legitimacy, and the heightened calls for accountability on the part of government. For Norman Ward and a previous generation of scholars, Parliament's effectiveness lay not in passive appearance but active result. Parliament did not make policy--that was the job of government; Parliament's task was to debate policy, to set out its strengths and weaknesses for the electorate ultimately to judge at the polls. Responsible government, that is, the cabinet-in-Parliament was the actor. To take recent examples: people want government to act on SARS, Iraq, BSE, softwood lumber and a multitude of other questions. The traditional view (that of forty years ago) was that the electoral system could not carry the weight of what people want. At best it could assure fairness of the process. (It is worth asking whether a government drawn from a legislature based on proportional representation would have acted faster or more effectively in the emergencies of the last couple of years). In any case, according to the traditional view, only government and the people's representatives were in a position to meet that challenge.

That understanding of parliamentary government gives meaning to the belief in what used to be called "the morality of the ballot box." Today this belief is under attack either in the media or, from organizations whose raison d'etre is to challenge the existing operation...