Put simply, we do not live in the system we think we do. We have the form of a democracy but not the substance; the rituals but not the reality. Because we preserve the forms and rituals, people find it hard to accept how far the substance has been eaten away. But at some point the facts become unanswerable. Far from a democratic example to the world, our parliamentary system is in a state of advanced disrepair – so advanced it is debatable whether it should still be called a democracy.
The plain truth is that none of the institutions of our democracy work as intended, or as we imagine they do, or as they used to, or as they do elsewhere. Some are best described as having ceased to work at all. The rot has set in at every level, from the corrupt and chaotic process by which the parties choose their candidates and leaders, to the sordid fraternity hazings that are modern election campaigns, to the random distortions in representation imposed by our electoral system, to the many dysfunctions of our increasingly irrelevant House of Commons, to the almost total concentration of power in the office of the prime minister. While any one of these on its own might not trouble us unduly, their accumulated weight should.
The effect has been to invert all of the institutional relationships characteristic of a properly functioning parliamentary democracy. The government does not answer to the Commons so much as the Commons answers to the government; party leaders are not accountable to the members of Parliament in their caucus, but rather caucus is accountable to the leader; the prime minister is no longer a member of Cabinet so much as Cabinet has become an extension of the prime minister. And so on