B. Reform to Central Institutions: The Excessive Power of the Executive Branch

• Author: Patrick J. Monahan - Byron Shaw
• Pages: 527-528

Page 527

The area with the greatest need for constitutional change is not part of Quebec’s agenda. In our view, the greatest shortcoming of the existing Canadian constitution continues to be the excessive power that the executive branch wields over the legislature. As has been made clear in this book, there are few institutional checks and balances on a majority government in Canada at either the federal or the provincial level. The opposition parties and ordinary MPs (even those from the government party) typically lack any meaningful role or input into the policy process, which is dominated by the prime minister, senior officials in the bureaucracy, and a limited number of Cabinet ministers. We recognize that it is important that majority governments have the tools necessary to implement their agenda. However, the problem with the current Canadian parliamentary system is that it seems to have swung too far in the direction of protecting the prerogatives of the executive, while often reducing ordinary Members of Parliament to the role of mere bystanders.

There are no clear or easy remedies for the imbalance between the roles of the executive and the legislature. One proposal that achieved a degree of popularity in certain parts of the country in the 1990s is the so-called Triple-E Senate.⁷Depending on how it was configured, a Triple-E Senate might impose some limits on the power of the executive, since it could increase the ability of the Senate to block proposals

Page 528

from the House of Commons. But this outcome is by no means assured, since the primary purpose of the Triple-E Senate is to equalize provincial representation in the Upper House rather than to achieve a balance between the powers of the government and Parliament. The difficulties created by this single-minded pursuit of equal provincial representation in the Senate were made manifest in the Charlottetown Accord. In order to offset the fact that the eight smaller provinces would dominate representation in the Senate, representation from Ontario and Quebec in the House of Commons was increased and a complicated and untested "joint sitting" procedure was proposed to resolve deadlocks between the House of Commons and the Senate. The practical impact of these changes was simply unknown.⁸Canadians were asked to endorse a radically redesigned Parliament without any real idea of how it would function. It was hardly surprising that the strongest support for the accord was in...