Is Harper changing Canada’s political landscape?

Michael Harris, Opinion, iPolitics:

Stephen Harper is certainly giving it the old college try. The most remarkable feature of the first half year of Conservative majority rule is how quickly we have been herded toward a one-party system. Strangely, a lot of people seem to like it.

The same treatment has been meted out to Opposition MPs sitting on House of Commons committees. At best they have been treated like unruly children; at worst, as nobodies. Opposition motions at committee are taken in camera (which means the public never hears them), witness lists are controlled by the government, and virtually no amendments to government legislation from the other side are ever adopted. As one Liberal MP told me, “They have reduced the whole thing to a charade to the degree that you start asking yourself what’s the point of going through the motions.”

That became comically clear on the government’s omnibus crime bill, where none of the brilliant Irwin Cotler’s amendments were adopted, though he made a powerful case for them. But then the government simply took over the Liberal MP’s ideas and presented them as amendments to their own bill. In a stroke of poetic justice, the “government’s” amendments were struck down by the Speaker on procedural grounds.

The bottom line is that, for better or worse, the Harper government has reduced the workings of the parliamentary system to an exercise in minimal compliance – a token role for the opposition in the legislative process, and a painfully obvious disdain for debating issues in the House of Commons. The Conservatives have used closure on MPs the way they have wielded back-to-work legislation against striking workers – to instantly impose their political will on those they consider not as colleagues or constituents, but as people not with the program.

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