Parliament Decides

[Edward Campbell]

I scanned the threads going back to Jan 09 and couldn’t find one that fits this topic so I’m starting a new one with, I hope, a broad enough scope.

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s Globe and Mail is an excellent article by noted Canadian historian and sometimes Army.ca contributor Jack Granatstein:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/going-to-war-parliament-will-decide/article1281065/

Going to war? ‘Parliament will decide'
Mackenzie King's dictum was often forgotten after 1939, but Canada is now back on the right track

J.L. Granatstein

Thursday, Sep. 10, 2009

Parliament will decide.” Mackenzie King offered this dictum repeatedly almost from the time he became prime minister of Canada in the early 1920s through to the outbreak of war in September, 1939. For King, that simple phrase was his way of evading commitments to Britain in advance of any crisis.

And if a crisis – as at Chanak in Turkey in September, 1922, when Britain almost found itself at war with the Turks and tried to commit the dominions to battle without consultation – was unpalatable, “Parliament will decide” was the way to evade action completely. At the time of Chanak, the House of Commons was in recess, and by the time the members returned to Ottawa, the crisis had blown over. Parliament, happily for King, did not need to decide anything.

Nonetheless, King's position was the right one. After August, 1914, when Britain's declaration of war bound its Canadian Dominion to action with no say of its own, automaticity was no longer satisfactory. The country had torn itself apart over conscription for overseas service in 1917 and 1918, and Canadian unity had been shredded by vicious political warfare between French and English Canadians.

The Statute of Westminster of 1931, negotiated by King's government but enacted in Britain when the Conservative government of R.B. Bennett was in office, had been a declaration of independence, giving Canada the powers in foreign policy to accompany its full control over domestic policy.

But if the nation was independent in fact, it did nothing to exert itself on the international stage. In power again from 1935, King said little as the world drifted toward war. If they listened at all, the Nazis, the Fascists and the militarists in Tokyo heard only “Parliament will decide” from Ottawa.

To the prime minister, the delicate nature of Canadian public opinion meant that it was better to say as little as possible about foreign and defence policy. The newspapers in Quebec were against all wars, cool to Britain, isolationist in their approach. The English-speaking media tended to believe that Britain was always right in foreign policy, no matter if London was for appeasement or war or anything in between.

Moreover, many of the few specialists in foreign policy doubted if the Statute of Westminster gave Ottawa the right to stay out of a British war or even to make a separate declaration of war. The king of Britain was the king of Canada, and the Crown was indivisible, wasn't it? Mackenzie King would not be drawn. “Parliament will decide.”

Thus, when Adolf Hitler sent the Wehrmacht into Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, and two days later, Britain and France declared war on Berlin, no one truly knew what Canada might do. The British high commissioner in Ottawa believed that Canada would go to war, but he was unsure. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called King to ask if Canada was still at peace, unsure whether the U.S. Neutrality Act had to come into effect. No, FDR was assured, Canada was not yet at war. “Parliament will decide.”

And Parliament did. Summoned back to Ottawa, the members of the House of Commons and the Senate heard the governor-general, Lord Tweedsmuir, tell them that the government proposed to go to war at Britain's side. Yes, the country's tiny regular military and naval forces and weak reserves had been called to the colours; yes, action had begun to round up potential subversives under authority of the War Measures Act of 1914; but no, Canada was not yet at war and would not be at war until the Speech from the Throne was accepted by Parliament. Then, and only then, could George VI, king of Canada, declare war on behalf of the Dominion of Canada.

Parliament had to decide and on Sept. 9, Parliament did, almost with unanimity. The next day, the king declared war. Canada had gone to war one week after Britain, the Crown had proved to be divisible and the independence given by the Statute of Westminster had been demonstrated to be genuine.

Some had feared that riots in Montreal and Quebec City might accompany any declaration of war, but Mackenzie King's delicate dance – and his promise that there would be no overseas conscription in this war – had kept all quiet. British-leaning constitutional scholars were as unhappy as French-speaking neutralists, but no one threw rocks.

The Canadian people had been consulted. Parliament had decided. That was enough to ensure a form of unity.

Seventy years later, King's formula has often been forgotten. Canada frequently sent large contingents of troops abroad without a declaration of war and sometimes without even a “take note” debate in the House. But Prime Minister Stephen Harper held votes in Parliament in 2006 and 2008 on the Afghanistan mission, and he told ABC News last month that “we require that military deployments ... be supported by the Parliament of Canada.”

His is the right way to proceed. As Mackenzie King also understood, no substantial Canadian force should ever be deployed abroad without a vote of Parliament. Representing the people of Canada, Parliament must decide before our soldiers go abroad to fight or even to keep the peace.

J.L. Granatstein is a historian and senior research fellow of the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute.

Little has changed in 70 years: Québec (not just the French language media) is still ”against all wars, cool to Britain [and all the ‘Anglos’], [and] ”isolationist in their approach"; while Canada, proper, is no longer convinced that Britain or America is always “right” the country, less Québec, is, broadly, internationalist and interventionist and sees itself as a charter member of a robust West – even as it is suspicious of America’s leadership.

But it isn’t the domestic political landscape that matters, it is the constitutional principle – one that goes back not just 70 but, rather, over 700 years: parliament decides.

The basic principle is that the sovereign – in practice, the cabinet – is constrained by the “supply” voted by parliament. Your money and mine, collected in taxes and duties and the like, is “voted,” year by year, for very specific purposes. “Policy” is, in effect, made by budget allocations. By and large it is an efficient and effective system. Parliament says (to cabinet) “here’s a specific pot of money for national defence, with specific sub-allocations for a specific number of people, and another pot for foreign aid and yet another for a pipleline across the Rocky Mountains.” Those budget votes provide quite specific direction and limits; de facto they tell cabinet what to do – not, necessarily, how to do it. Fort several hundred years restricting the size and budget of the sovereign’s armed forces was enough to restrict the sovereign’s ability to conduct military operations overseas.

Sometimes, in modern times, the system is not quite sufficient – troops have been deployed to “operations” overseas, in large numbers, as Dr. Granatstein notes, without so much as a word from parliament. The defence budget is large enough and flexible enough to permit cabinet to conduct military operations around the world without recourse to parliament.

Prime Minister Harper’s votes on the Afghanistan mission and his commitment (promise) that he will do so again may be enough to reinforce parliament’s right and duty to approve major, overseas military operations.

 

[Edward Campbell]

There’s a reason I always disagree with the Globe and Mail’s Rick Salutin. I only read his column when it appears not to deal with economics – he’s a socialist which means, ipso facto, that he is economically illiterate and, therefore, ought to ignored all the time – and even then I find that he always gets almost everything back asswards. He does in this column, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s Globe and Mail:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/in-praise-of-another-election/article1282719/

In praise of ‘another' election
We need more political engagement, not less

Rick Salutin

Friday, Sep. 11, 2009

Suck it up, Canada: What are we – shoppers or citizens? A portion of each, I suppose. But it's fatal to confuse the roles, as seems to be happening with all the whinging and whining over “another” election that “nobody” wants.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper was the first to moan in, right after Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff announced his intention to pull the plug on the Conservatives' minority government. Iggy had a list of plausible enough reasons that would more likely lead you to ask him Why did you wait so long? than What for? The PM's response was that he hasn't met “a single Canadian” who wants an election, which may only reveal the limited range of his contacts.

Yet many in the news media echoed it. I think at random of Suhana Meharchand on CBC Radio's phone-in last Sunday, chortling over the silliness of another election. I may have gone humourless, but I don't really get it.

In a vital democracy, like ancient Athens or the Iroquois confederacy, people were involved in politics continually. Under our system, politics more or less equals elections, so you could call frequent elections our form of participatory democracy. It keeps citizens engaged and parties on their toes. Under a stable majority, everyone goes to sleep for four years. Do you think we'd have had even the minimal action we've seen from Mr. Harper on the economy or on withdrawal from Afghanistan if he'd had a majority?

But everything turns upside down if you treat politics as a shopping trip – I don't waaant an election – rather than the ongoing duty of each citizen. It's like newscasters saying, “Thanks for watching,” as if we tune in to do them a favour, rather than from our need as citizens to be informed. Citizenship isn't a consumer choice that you may or may not make. People can opt out of it, but then they lose the right to complain, and it's a mingy choice to make if you think of kids and others affected by actions taken in the name of us all.

Besides, if these whiners really don't want an election and prefer Parliament “to work,” why did so many of them object to a coalition last winter? It was the very definition of making Parliament work in a minority situation. I don't think minority governments are inherently unstable; I'd call them inherently alert. The current one has indeed been unstable since it's so distant from the majority of members in the House and voters in the country. But, say, a Liberal minority could well find enough common ground with the Bloc and NDP to enact many things that most citizens would value.

It's the snickering and eye-rolling among media opiners that I find most offensive, as if their stance is so sophisticated. In fact, they function as dupes for a rotten status quo, helping to keep power in the hands of those who can afford to pay for it by getting others, like the party bosses, to fulfill their wishes. There is wreckage to be dealt with out there, lives are still being destroyed, although the recession is supposed to be all but over. My little strip of College Street in Toronto now has a solid row of abandoned small businesses such as we've not seen in previous crises. It's become a street of broken dreams. Add the fact that voting numbers are declining, which the pseudo-wit of the moaners tends to glamorize. The downward trend reduces the constituencies to which politicians must attend, and ratchets up the electoral clout of the resolute pressure groups, such as evangelicals and gun owners.

If there is a problem with another election, it's that voting is all we're ever offered to satisfy our political impulses, and it is a repetitive and intrinsically shallow exercise. But this implies that we should vote for those ready to expand the arena of democratic participation so that we need not shoehorn the entire human political drive into the narrowness of elections.

He gets so tantalizingly close to actually understanding one of our many social problem: lack of political engagement. But, being Salutin, he gets it all wrong.

There is a way for Canadians to be engaged in an age of specialization (à la Adam Smith) – specialization that applies to politics, too: join a political party, participate at the “grass roots” level.

That’s how politics “worked” in Athens and the Iroquois Confederacy – both of which, by the way, were much, much closer to mob rule than to anything we might consider to be a functioning democracy.

By way of personal example: I am a members of two parties –

1. The Conservative Party of Canada;

2. The Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario.

They are two quite distinct parties.

Now, I never agree with all the positions of the parties I support – only a robot would do that. I suspect that even Harper and Hudak have some reservations about some of the “planks” in their party platforms.

We, party members, argue – sometimes vociferously – about policy. For example, just last night I had a shouting match, literally, with a young lady from the Ontario PC Leader’s team because she and her dimwit boss and the idiots running the show oppose a harmonized sales tax. They are, as I said – very loudly – “opposing good public policy just because they are not smart enough to figure out how to criticize!”

If Canadians – the ones not wearing a military uniform “full time” - want to influence policy and if they want to do so through some mechanism other than semi-annual general elections then the answer is simple: get involved! join a party! argue and debate! and, thereby, make policy for politicians to implement.

Parliament does, indeed, decide, but it decides what the partisans tell it to decide.