Today in The Hill Times, long-time Ottawa-watcher Donald Savoie decries our political parties as having lost their connection to Canadians, and our Parliament, which has turned over its accountability function to various agents of Parliament, including the auditor general and the privacy commissioner.
According to the Hill Times (which has a paywall, so I'll crib and attribute bits here), in Savoie's new book he writes that these agents of Parliament now "appear to function as free agents accountable to no one but themselves." Any attempt to make them accountable to Parliament would "compromise their raison d'être."
He's not happy with Parliament's response to all this: "[Parliament's] turned... its role over to officers of Parliament. It's saying, 'Okay, you drive. Government has become too complex for Parliamentarians to grasp so we can't quite figure it out,'" he said. "I have great difficulty with some of the work of these officers of Parliament. They can never be true legitimate political actors because they don't have the democratic link to Canadians."
For this he blames our souless political parties and the increased professionalization of politics (including the increasing influence of lobbyists). "They don't bring a knowledge of other sectors to bear. They bring a knowledge of politics and they play politics. And it's not a process of ideas, it's a process of tactics," Savoie said.
He believes this undermines the role of the MP, limiting the contributions they can make. "It's all the game of scoring political points. They don't bring to the process the knowledge of how the private sector works, the contribution of academe, volunteer associations. They only bring a knowledge of professional partisan politics," he said. "In my view, there's too much of that, not enough of ideas, not enough of involving the average Canadians to understand how governments work or why it's important that they would understand it."
He recognizes this is because our organizations and institutions have become so large, unwieldly and complex. This has led to an over-personification of leadership politics, where parties are identified not with an ideology or a set of policies, but instead by a leader. And so we look to individuals, not institutions to make change (poor Barack Obama).
To fix things, then, we have to focus on our institutions (and I would add that you can't do that without also looking closely at the actors within them). "There are realizations that our institutions are in a state of disrepair. When you realize that, then people will go about fixing it. That's where you start. I don't think you start with powerful personalities or personalism. I think you start with rebuilding the importance of institutions," Savoie said.
Thoughts?