02 January 2008

No political parties a good way: NL Liberal leader

It's hard to figure out how the leader of a political party could be quoted as saying that the province would be better off without political parties.

But Liberal leader Yvonne Jones did just that in the Wednesday edition of the Telegram.  Sadly, it isn't online but we'll see if the hundred rhesus monkeys kept chained to the IBM Selectric IIs in the Bond basement can churn up a clipping shortly.

I always say that we're such a small province, when you've got three political parties, there's always a lot of energy and time and expertise spent in, I guess, staking out everybody's turf in the political arena...

I used to say to myself, "maybe we're expending it in the wrong direction? [sic]"...Maybe if a lot of that was just put into strengthening policy for people, we might end up with a lot better result at the end of the day.

Let's start by pointing out to Ms. Jones that our political system is already supposed to be about "strengthening policy for people."  That's what politicians are supposed to be doing.

If there is insufficient attention paid to policy in the political realm currently - and there isn't - the fault lies not with the system but with the politicians currently in the system.

After all, as we have noted here numerous times over the past three years, one cannot slide a sheet of paper between the political parties in this province on any major policy issue. 

Sheet of paper?  That's too thick.

Physics does not conceive of a sheet so thin as to describe the complete absence of policy difference between the Liberals and the Progressive Conservatives on major issues or, more startlingly between Danny and Lorraine on even more things.

After the general election, Ms. Jones stated publicly that she and her rump caucus could not do their jobs without cash from the legislature for "researchers."  This presumed that the researchers actually had any impact on the party policy, or even on the individual member's ideas.  Obviously, they did not. 

Take for example the energy bill, rammed through the House last spring with virtually no debate in the legislature.  Ms. Jones spoke in glowing terms of the bill and never once mentioned the policy issues involved in, except to indicate her support for the government position.  She took her notes, incidentally, not from whatever dozen staff the caucus employed, but almost entirely from the briefing provided by government officials at the request of opposition house leader Kelvin Parsons.

Did she question at all the notion of state-owned oil companies in Canada?  Did she question the government on its business plan, that is, did she ask if there was one she could examine to see if it made any sense?  Did she say boo about the borrowing attached to the bill of $600 million?  Did she ask why the bill was coming to the House only a year after the hydro corporation legislation was changed to allow it to be an energy company? Did she do her job?

You can easily guess the answer to every question.

And that is merely one example.

You see, our political system, divided into parties and generally adversarial in style is designed to place ideas in conflict.  It is designed to create or to foster a conflict or a contrast in positions.  In the process, flaws may be exposed in either point of view and, if possible, fixed. New ideas may come to the fore.  Bad ideas may be discarded.  Out of the clash of ideas, truth - or something approximating it - may emerge.

Our system is based on the premise that there is a fundamental value in examining policies openly and publicly before implementing them.  What we have seen over the past four years, and what Ms. Jones obviously supports, has been a fundamental erosion of that value.  When we noted here the decrease in sitting days of the legislature and the pathetic excuse for debate in the House over the past four years it was to point out that - fundamentally - politicians in this province have become increasingly elitist and decreasingly democratic in their actions. 

When they meet in secret and agreed to ram a bill through the House - as Ms. Jones did last spring with the Green bill on behalf of her caucus - she and her colleagues robbed every single resident of the province of his or her fundamental democratic right to know what is being decided on his or her behalf.  That was just one bill.  There were literally dozens of others, all of which will have lasting impacts on the province and its people.  Yet not one single voice was raised in opposition.  Not one contrary idea was given voice.

At least, in the legislature there was silence, but that is because for the past decade, the province has been without a properly functioning political system built on parties. We already have the system Ms. Jones wishes for and it has been a dismal failure.

What Ms. Jones is now endorsing, though, is an even greater effort to dismantle democracy in the province than what she and her colleagues in the legislature - irrespective of party - have been working at since at least 2003. At least in the current state, the party system may be revived for the greater good.  What Ms. Jones now proposes is to kill it off entirely.

Political parties are not merely teams built around ideas.  They also serve as a means of funding campaigns for individual candidates in districts who might otherwise be unable to raise the money needed to fight an election. They provide a body of knowledge and groups of workers who understand how the political process - the electoral process - actually works. In that way, political parties can serve as a way of encouraging increased participation in the political process. Eliminate parties and this province will take yet another step backward to the days when it was nothing more than the playground of the local merchants and their vassals.

There's no small irony that Ms. Jones makes this suggestion in the 60th anniversary of the single greatest exercise in democracy ever undertaken in this place. After two referenda based on universal adult suffrage, the people of Newfoundland and Labrador restored to themselves responsible government.  They clearly rejected rule by appointed elites in the first referendum and in the second chose the form of responsible government they wished for themselves and future generations.

But make no mistake:  in 1948 the people of Newfoundland and Labrador opted for a form of government for which they individually held ultimate responsibility.  Arguably, by opting for Confederation, they chose a form of government that would ensure the old elites could not control the country as thoroughly and as dismally as they had before 1934.

Ms. Jones proposes an idea that may well suit her colleagues.  After all, the government party is led by a fellow who has some problems with free speech. But the idea ms. Jones floats is as fundamentally bad as the idea of removing free speech from the legislature or replacing our democracy itself  - as suggested by one newspaper publisher recently - with rule by some form of triumvirate.

In the long ago days of 1948, as Newfoundlanders and Labradorians headed to the polls, might any of them have thought that 60 years on, the economy of the place would be as rich as it is and yet the politics would be so demonstrably bankrupt?

If only electricity could come from the generations of our ancestors turning in their graves...