When it was first proposed, Michael Chong's Reform Act was full of promise.  Pundits sang his praise, and people thought that this would finally do something to rebalance the power of MPs in parliament, that they would finally have a way to start checking the power of their leaders.  Well, most people did anyway, but a few of us were sceptical for the main fact that MPs already have all of that power already through expressions of confidence, but simply choose not to exercise it for whatever the reason.

But then the tinkering began, and Chong made concession after concession to get the bill passed.  What began as a dubious bill succumbed to the weight of parties to make careful nips and tucks so as not to affect things too much after all, the NDP still wanted to be able to run nomination contests with affirmative action, and so on.  And while the pundit class lamented that the bill was effectively neutered, it was at least a symbol of a desire for reform.  And what is that political syllogism something must be done and this is something, therefore we must do this?  The Reform Act was the epitome of it.

What emerged from committee was not a harmless and neutered bill it's one that is actively destructive to our political system, and will do further damage to it.  As MPs decide how they're going to vote on it, we can hope that they will come to their senses and vote down this very bad bill, but I'm not optimistic because they don't want to be seen to be voting against reform.  That will leave it up to the Senate to do their due diligence and if not defeat it outright, then to at least do what they can to ensure that it dies on the Order Paper when the election is called.

To begin with, the only good part of the bill removing a party leader's veto on nominations has been watered down to uselessness.  Because parties protested that they didn't want any one system imposed on them, the language of the bill now says that the sign-off is done by a "designated officer," who can be pretty much anyone, including the leader's chief of staff.  Unless parties have that conversation with their membership about who the designated officer is going to be and put in safeguards to keep it out of the leader's hands, the provision is useless.  (There is also nothing stopping them from doing that process now and making the leader's veto pro forma, but none have made that effort).

It gets worse.  Parliamentary parties in our system are creature of convention the same kind of constitutional convention as our system of Responsible Government, and this bill seeks to start codifying that into law while it further blends the parliamentary party and the extra-parliamentary party.  This is the division between caucus and the grassroots membership.  Canada already has a problem with the blurred lines between the two after we started the practice of having the membership vote for the party leadership, which is precisely the root cause of the problems that Chong's bill is supposed to address.  Legislating that practice suddenly solidifies those problems.

Indeed, if Canada returned to our original system whereby caucus chooses the leaders of the party, the whole bill wouldn't be necessary.  MPs, having chosen the leader, would be empowered to dispose of those leaders as they saw fit.  Clear lines of accountability would be there, where they do not exist currently.  The current bill makes a return to this more accountable and empowered system a near impossibility because no future government would want to be seen to be undoing these "reform" measures and I do use the term "reform" loosely, because it is more akin to the sabotage of our system.

With these changes in place, it would enshrine into law that caucus only includes MPs and not Senators, undoing nearly 150 years of convention that will have vast, unintended consequences for parties.  After all, senators are the institutional memories of parliament and caucuses in particular, and excluding them by law will simply fuel the attempts to further de-legitimise the institution in the popular opinion.  This is dangerous for our parliamentary democracy.

Another major problem is that the bill mandates into law that party leaders must be elected by the party  entrenching our currently broken and unaccountable system with little hope of being able to restore it to caucus selection.  After all, leaders elected by a nebulous membership can't be held to account by them.  It also means that if there was a leadership removal, or death or incapacitation of a sitting leader, that there must be an interim leader selected before a full membership election, depriving parties of any flexibility.

Most alarming is that while the bill purports to empower MPs to remove a leader, what it perversely winds up doing is raising the threshold to start a process for that removal.  If you look at some of the recent provincial leadership removals Alberta in particular, but Newfoundland, Manitoba and the NDP leadership in BC these processes were started by a small number of MLAs who made their discontent known.  Raising that threshold to 20 percent means that any time those discontented MLAs come forward, media will start counting for that 20 percent of MPs to trigger the leadership challenge vote.  This will inevitably wind up discouraging more MPs from dissenting publicly without sufficient numbers greater numbers than we've seen previously.

Canadian parliamentary democracy is replete with examples of attempts at "reform" that are intended to make us "more democratic," but which inevitably backfired and made things worse leadership selection by party membership being a prime example.  Chong's bill is one more example of good intentions that will inevitably go terribly wrong and make things worse for another generation.  MPs need to realise this and put a stake in the bill now, before it's too late.

The $2.7 million bill that the House of Commons is delivering to the NDP for their satellite offices is a bitter pill for sure, but it can't come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the way in which the NDP have operated since they became Official Opposition in 2011.  They insisted that they were going to do things differently, and well, that's certainly been the case but perhaps not for the reasons why you might think.

Upon their change of status following the election, the NDP gained a sense of entitlement and quickly ran roughshod over some long-held conventions within the way things operate in the Commons.  It started with things like office spaces long-time Liberal MPs who were once cabinet ministers were unceremoniously evicted from their Centre Block offices whereas convention would have allowed them to stay owing to their seniority and status making the NDP look petty in the process, but who cares because they were Official Opposition and they were going to be different.  Those new MPs who were being put on some of the organizational committees spoke longingly of trying to "modernize" things, doing away with some of the traditions and symbolism, and fortunately it looks like they didn't get their way, but the desire to start blowing things up was certainly there.

Changes behind the scenes were also happening, and the way things started to shift was perceptible if you knew what to look for.  One of the most obvious signs was the increase in the use of time allocation.  While it may look to the casual observer that this was just the sign of a controlling government that wanted to shut down debate at every opportunity, scratching beneath the surface and talking to those who were privy to what was going on recall that House Leaders used to come to agreements as to how long they would allow bills to be debated at whatever stage in order to say what needs to be said and then allow the debate to collapse naturally.  The NDP, however, would have none of it and so the government decided to start using time allocation as a matter of course.

This lack of backroom consensus in other areas of Commons operations leads us to where things currently stand with the Board of Internal Economy, and the problems of the satellite offices.  If you listen to excuses that Peter Julian and other NDP MPs make, they have been attempting some fairly hefty misdirection as to the justification for these satellite offices.  First and foremost is their excuse that the Conservatives run their own satellite offices, which is not the case.  Yes, there are regional ministerial offices, and yes, you can question about the current government's decision to open more of them over the past few years, but that's not a "Conservative satellite office."  It also mistakes the Office of the Leader of the Opposition as a ministry of the Crown, which it also assuredly is not.  Sure, it gets a few extra dollars thrown its way to be able to do a few more things in terms of staff and coordination, but it's not a ministry.  Why?  Because it's the job of all MPs to hold the government to account, and Official Opposition only means that they're the biggest group that's all.  Attempts to try and portray it as a ministry are frankly dishonest and distort the way the system works.

When Thomas Mulcair appeared before the Procedure and House Affairs committee to explain the satellite offices, he produced a photo that made it look like a Conservative riding association and a Conservative constituency office were co-located, when in fact they were several doors down in the same strip mall.  It was false, but they claimed it as "proof" that the Conservatives were doing it too.  That they decided to co-locate these satellite offices with party offices goes to the issue of perception, but it also beggars credibility to insist that no partisan work was being done by staff in the same office, particularly when it was murky as to what kind of "parliamentary" work was supposed to have been done.  Coordinating communications?  Setting up press events in the region?  All of this goes to the way in which the NDP have centralized their communications beyond what the Conservatives have done.

Now that the Board of Internal Economy has decided on the matter of the offices and come to a figure that should be repaid, the NDP have tried to again spin this as a "fine" which is wrong and that this is all a partisan "kangaroo court" where the Conservatives are ganging up on them and the Liberals are apparently too stupid to see what is happening and just along with it.  The problem of course is that it was the Commons Clerk who found that these offices and the salaries paid were against the rules, and tallied up by how much.  Trying to cast her as a Conservative partisan demeans her and the institutions of parliament.

So what's next?  The NDP are trying to take this issue to the Federal Court, but it's debatable whether the courts will touch the issue because it very likely infringes on parliamentary privilege.  The NDP wants to blow up the Board in favour of an outside body to lord over MPs and their expenses, but the logic of it boggles the mind.  After all, MPs are the ones who make up the Grand Inquest of the Nation.  They have privileges to ensure their supremacy, and empowering some group of outside bureaucrats does damage to that privilege not that the NDP seem too bothered by the damage that their intransigence and sense of entitlement has wreaked on the current parliament.  If ministers' regional offices are doing partisan work, then certainly that should be called out, but that doesn't justify the NDP breaking the rules, or trying to misconstrue how parliament works because they didn't get their way.