In the wake of the Mike Duffy verdict, and all 31 charges against him being dismissed, we have seen the pundit class call for all manner of "fixes" to the way in which the Senate spends public money, and none more egregious than the calls that the Prime Minister somehow step in and start policing the place by holding onto their purse strings, or failing that, that MPs be allowed to supervise it.  Or the calls to replace the Board of Internal Economy in the Commons and the Internal Economy Committee of the Senate as each are "too partisan" in nature.

In other words, we are being told that parliamentarians cannot police themselves.  Well, that and that these pundits don't understand how our system of government works, either of which is a pretty serious problem, which we should probably start with.  For starters, the chambers are independent of one another.  The Commons cannot tell the Senate what to do, just as the Senate can't tell the Commons what to do, and that includes how they set their budgets.  In fact, the Senate was designed with institutional independence precisely so that they could not be intimidated by the Commons or the prime minister of the day.  It's a crucial check on the power of the prime minister, which is why suggestions that the Prime Minister is somehow obligated to put a check on the Senate by controlling their budget is preposterous.

The very last thing we need is to empower a Prime Minister to intimidate the Senate by controlling its budget, no matter how much of a whiff of scandal there is around the Duffy issue.  It's the same reason why it's a big problem when politicians try to meddle with the pay and pensions of judges or the Governor General because there is a conceivable future circumstance where the government would try to use that power to intimidate the other institutions who are there to provide a check on it.  Institutional independence is an important principle that needs to be upheld and respected, and for the pundits of this country to not grasp that concept is a problem, no matter how much distaste there is around Duffy and his compatriots.

The notion that if not the PM but rather that MPs should somehow oversee Senate expenses is just as much of a problem.  The operation of the chambers should be kept separate for that very same reason of institutional independence, and the last thing that we need is for a bunch of MPs trying to score points by monkeying around with the Senate's budget particularly at a time when they want to look tough.  The Senate has a job to do, and believe it or not, MPs don't understand what that job is most of the time.  If MPs had their druthers, they would prefer that the Senate rubber-stamp their bills with no fuss, if they should exist at all.  But that's not why the Senate exists, and MPs do resent it when the Senate doesn't fall into line and sign off on bills, particularly when there has been monkey business around those bills in the Commons (witness the single sports betting bill in the last parliament).  And if MPs want a veto on the Senate's budget, they should beware because the Senate will exercise their own veto on the Commons budget, leading to a war of mutual annihilation between the chambers.  No good can come of that.

And then there's the notion that parliamentarians should no longer look after their own expenses through their Internal Economy mechanisms.  And this one sticks in my craw a little more than ignoring the fact of institutional independence, because this one is about the nature of our democracy itself.  And it's just that this is a democracy and not a technocracy, and therefore it is incumbent upon us to trust that our parliamentarians have the ability to police themselves.  It's not that we need to give them blind trust no, we need to absolutely be vigilant that they are spending the dollars wisely, but that comes through openness and transparency, and not by creating a new bureaucracy for those parliamentarians to report to.  This is the same reason why the Auditor General's proposal that the Senate create an audit committee that they don't control is a problem because it removes their agency when it comes to parliamentary supremacy.  If we remove the agency of our parliamentarians, then we might as well just hand power back to the Queen, because the end result is all the same.

Despite what went on with Duffy and the other Senators found to have made questionable expense claims, there have been changes, even if the majority of the pundits in this country don't think so.  There are new clarifications around things like what constitutes a primary residence, there are new processes for justifying travel claims or contracts, and in the wake of former Supreme Court Justice Ian Binnie's report, even more clarification around how Senators are able to submit claims when they spend additional time after a business trip to stay with family.  All of these changes have happened, and the avenues for future misspending are closing.  But this doesn't mean that Senators should be submitting themselves to a higher authority.

In order to maintain their independence, Senators' obligation is to the Chamber itself, which can discipline its members as it sees fit hence the suspensions without pay of those senators who brought the place into disrepute.  The Senate itself is accountable to the public, and yes, they do respond to public opinion.  It's why they've spent the last number of years trying to rehabilitate their image, and to reach out to demonstrate the work that they do.  Institutional independence exists for a reason, and blowing up the system for the misdeeds of a couple of bad apples is not a solution anyone should look to.

Photo Credit: Senator Doug Black

In the weeks leading up to Parliament's Easter break, we were witness to a surlier than usual House of Commons, with weeks of filibusters at the Procedure and House Affairs committee, and innumerable privilege debates and dilatory motions in the chamber while a mounting number of bills go without seeing any debate.  While it's not uncommon for tensions to rise in the last few weeks of any sitting particularly as MPs get squirrelly as sittings stretch out to four and five weeks without breaks in May and June, those same tensions have already been felt before we've reached that point on the calendar.

Thus far, Government House Leader Bardish Chagger has refused to give ground when it comes to offering guarantees that her ideas for how to "modernize" the House of Commons' operations won't be unilaterally imposed.  She's couched this in the language of refusing to give a veto to the Conservatives on changing the very tools that they abused while in government, whether it's things like omnibus bills or prorogation, to which the Conservatives have outwardly stated that they agree any changes to the Standing Orders should be done by way of consensus with all parties rather than be imposed.  I'm not sure that Chagger would find this reassuring, however, as agreeing to consensus just allows the opposition parties to stall and block the proposals (which, to be fair, they should be doing for most of them because they're terrible).

It's the fact that Chagger has been so ham-fisted about this whole debate, and has in fact doubled down on her position, that doesn't fill me with a lot of hope that we'll see any resolution to this situation when the spring sitting gets underway next week.  The fact that the Liberals have been agitating to have these "discussions" around the Standing Orders completed by June 2^nd  an overly ambitious timeline given the magnitude of what is being proposed (not to mention the fact that the vast majority of said proposals miss the mark in terms of what they're supposed to be addressing), will only make the next few weeks even more fraught.  And in terms of that ever-increasing stack of bills that aren't seeing any debate?  Well, you can bet that Chagger is going to start wielding the hammer of time allocation to try and start moving it along.

If anything will make the surly feelings worse, it's the "guillotine" of debate.  Expect weeks of snap votes in protest, yet more dilatory motions, bitter debates and accusations of rank hypocrisy that the government promised they wouldn't use these same tactics that the Conservatives did when they were in government.  All of it, of course, is self-inflicted for Chagger, who didn't need to be so insistent on these changes, and could have pulled Liberal MP Scott Simms aside at any point to have him withdraw his motion at the committee to have this debate completed by June.

The possibility does exist that Chagger has been this ham-fisted deliberately, looking to provoke a crisis on the Order Paper in order for her to justify ramming through changes to the Standing Orders around programming motions or the likes, claiming the need to get those bills moving after weeks of delays.  It would be a gamble, hoping that the public will side with her and find the opposition tactics to be childish and obstinate rather than with the opposition and their apocalyptic talk about this being the death of democracy in Canada (only the eleventieth time that this claim has been made), but one that could succeed, especially as the opposition has not been walking their own talk on things like Friday sittings.  Chagger also has precedent on her side, given that the opposition overplayed their hand after the Elbowing and lost all sympathy from the public.  If this is indeed Chagger's ultimate goal, then it would be a sign that this Liberal government is not only far more cynical than their "sunny ways" branding would have us believe, but that they are also bent on centralizing power to a greater extent than previous governments through far more underhanded tactics than we've seen in the past.

Meanwhile, the only two viable proposals in Chagger's discussion paper prorogation and omnibus bills are almost certainly going to be misread by people who don't understand the difference between legitimate and abusive uses of each mechanism, and it's going to inevitably lead to leading to yet more tears and recriminations whenever the debate around these measures gets underway.  You can bet that we'll see opposition demands to both outlaw omnibus bills in any recognizable form (a mistake given that they have perfectly legitimate uses, especially given that most budget implementation bills are by their very nature omnibus given the fact that they will touch on several Acts as a matter of course), and to try to turn control of prorogation over to the House of Commons in defiance of our constitutional conventions (which rests that power with cabinet as a Crown prerogative), and that the bulk of our nation's columnists, ignorant of the actual workings of a Westminster parliament, will side with them when Chagger tries to push through the  more palatable options of empowering the Speaker to break up abusive omnibus bills and to codify rules around restoring prorogation ceremonies.  If this is one area where Chagger would be willing to show flexibility in order to blunt some of the criticisms and look like she's listened, then we'd be left with the worst possible outcomes rather than get at least one or two decent outcomes in a package of bad ones.

This insistence by the government that they bully though these changes is mystifying, but so is their continued cultivation of such bad feelings among the opposition.  Unless Chagger is sincere in saying that she'll come to a decision on the next steps of this voyage of the damned when she "takes the temperature" of the Commons upon their return and backs away when she finds the hot tempers unchanged, we could be in for one of the most deservedly acrimonious spring sittings in years.

Photo Credit: Huffington Post

Among the many items in the government's new budget implementation bill are provisions that would create an independent Parliamentary Budget Officer, freed from the constraints of the Library of Parliament, and the constant threats of having his budget cut in retaliation for speaking truth to power by the government of the day.  But included in that legislation is also a narrowing of the new Office's mandate, which has caused no end of wailing and gnashing of teeth in the nation's column inches, without anyone really underscoring the fact that empowering the PBO too much might actually be a bad thing.

And this is the part where most people get their backs up.  Why wouldn't we want a non-partisan body to crunch those numbers and provide an independent analysis of government projections or costings of bills or proposals?  We need more people to hold the government to account, after all.  Why isn't this the answer?

The reason why an empowered PBO is not the answer is because it further weakens the role of MPs, and most especially the official opposition.  For decades now, our parliament has slowly been divesting itself of its responsibilities, which is supposed to be holding the government to account.  Instead, that accountability is falling to an increasing number of independent Officers of Parliament, from the Auditor General, to the Commissioner of Official Languages, to the Information Commissioner, the Privacy Commissioner, and more recently the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, and Lobbying Commissioner.  A newly independent PBO swells those ranks even further.

While it cannot be argued that in many of these cases, there are areas of expertise that most MPs don't possess that these Officers are able to provide a reasoned watchdog role therein, it also shouldn't be argued that their proliferation has hollowed out the capacity of the Opposition in Parliament.  Instead of putting their resources and research dollars toward doing the critical policy work that are supposed to define their role, the opposition now simply waits for the reports of these officers to use as both the cudgel for their criticisms of the government, but also the shield by which they hide their attacks behind.

"Don't take our word for it," they insist.  "The independent, non-partisan PBO says this is true, therefore it must be and the government is terrible!"  They don't provide their own analysis, and really, don't do their own homework.  Why bother, when they have all of the independent officers that they can fob it off onto, who can make their arguments for them?

And this is where a overly empowered PBO starts to become a problem.  As it stands, the PBO has an overly broad mandate for such a small office, and I do have genuine concerns about the proposal to have that office start costing party platforms during an election campaign, which will further politicize an office that is already used for doing partisan homework.  It would also involve the PBO in the bickering about just how transparent those platforms are, which also starts to encroach on the job of the media.  Remember how the NDP released their first "costing" documents in the 2015 election that had these broad categories of items like "Helping Canadians" and "Supporting families" and other such meaningless headers with no actual breakdown of what those actually entailed?  Those of us in the media roasted them for it, which is our job.  I'm not sure that it should be the PBO's job to get involved there.

The other major problem with this proliferation of independent officers is that they essentially have no accountability, barring gross misconduct that can have them removed for cause.  MPs are held to account by their electorate, but independent officers have no such mechanism, and I do worry about officers who showboat, because I do see signs of that happening, not only with the first PBO, Kevin Page, and some of the fights that he picked, but I've also seen elements of that with other officers, including the Auditor General.

So who is supposed to hold the watchdogs to account?  The media?  Would that it were the case, but most of the time, the media are far too deferential to the independent, non-partisan expertise of these officers that they are blind to the problems in some of their work.  Most emblematic of this was with the AG's report on the Senate, which was riddled with problems and arbitrary determinations for which expenses were legitimate that did not stand up to a legal analysis conducted after the fact when the Senate's internal economy committee had to decide whether to pursue prosecutions for those senators which did not repay amounts identified in the AG's report.  Did the media say anything about it, or were they critical of the quality of the report with these flaws out in the open?  Of course not.  The AG is not to be questioned, while senators raising the objections were treated as being self-interested and looking out only for their own entitlements.

The other problem with this lack of accountability for these officers is that it is also weakening our system of Responsible Government.  We don't live in a technocracy, and it should not be up to the bureaucracy to do the job of holding government to account by virtue of their non-partisanship, and yet that is in essence what we are demanding when we would see that work offloaded onto these officers.  And while it's true that financial documents have become far more complex in recent decades and parliament's own Estimates cycle has become disjointed from the budget and the public accounts, the answer should not be offload the work of scrutiny to other officers.  Instead, MPs should be the ones to demand clarity in reporting and in documentation, so that they can do their own jobs, rather than simply passing those jobs off onto others.  Creating new officers only serves to further the decline of parliament — it is not a remedy for what ails it.