Not all reform proposals are as worthy as those of Michael Chong MP.
John Pepall’s book, Against Reform, is a sparkling, nay stinging, defence of Parliamentary institutions as they have evolved historically against the schemes of projectors that makes short, nay minuscule, work of virtually every proposal for parliamentary reform, showing how they will throw the organic system out of whack. It is not itself a historical work and it stands solidly on its own as a contemporary polemic. But it stands solidly because, like its subject, it rests on deep foundations. The essence of Pepall’s argument is that every currently trendy proposal for reform of our political institutions, from voting systems like Proportional Representation or the Single Transferrable Vote to suggestions for diminished party discipline, is based on a misunderstanding of how Parliamentary self-government works, why it works that way, and how well it attains its ends. Voting, Pepall insists, is about letting citizens choose governments able to govern, and no reform that undermines that goal is desirable, whether it meddles directly with voting so elections pursue other ends than letting voters choose governments, or meddles indirectly by changing institutions so that governing becomes more difficult. He unfolds his arguments with such wisdom, wit and brevity that on page after page you encounter passages that, once written, seem so obvious you not only won’t ever forget it, you can’t believe you didn’t come up with it first. Yet generations of pundits and popularizers have covered the topic without making this point in this way, such as: “All votes in Parliament are already free votes, but they are votes with consequences — consequences MPs are often loathe to face.” Pepall’s central point is that Parliamentary institutions are about responsible government, that is, government responsible to citizens for producing a coherent program that is on balance desirable. Thus on proposals to loosen party discipline he writes: “Legislating, administering, taxing, and spending governments must try to act coherently. The free-for-all, everyone-does-his-bit model promoted so that MPs can feel better about themselves could never do it at all. It would be a case of too many cooks and no chef.” Too many cooks and no chef. I wish I had written that. At least I can quote it. And think about it. As for the notion that too many things are considered confidence measures, he writes “Why, ask the advocates of free votes, must the government fall if it is defeated? Because the government is a not a series of isolated measures.” This compelling grasp of why we vote enables him to make short work of any number of proposals for changing how we hold elections, often distilling an entire argument into one unforgettable sentence, as in this demolition of a key argument from enthusiasts for proportional representation: “The dogma that parties should have seats in proportion to the votes they get is not argued for but assumed. The insistent claim of advocates of proportional representation that it is fairer simply begs the question; what is fairer about it? Each party gets its fair share of seats? But is politics for parties? Is it not about government? Can government be broken up and handed out like cake? Elections are not about sharing. They are about the people deciding.” Can government be broken up and handed out like cake? The metaphor is irresistible because the analysis is so trenchant. He spots the surface absurdities in arguments with enviable ease. The argument of reformers that under the current voting system “parties somehow get in the way of voters choosing the individual they would like best to represent them” is simply not credible after he notes that, “If the party label, however, were all that mattered, a lot that goes on in politics would be inexplicable. Why do parties seek star candidates if candidates do not matter? Why do incumbents relentlessly curry favour with voters if all that will matter on election day is their party affiliation?” But he does not stop there. Rather, as elsewhere in the book, Pepall goes right to the roots in pulling up PR. For instance, he concedes that it would produce parliaments in which parties were represented according to their share of the vote. But, he rightly notes, “The question why it should do that remains unanswered.” He goes on to ask whether anyone wants to adopt policies in proportion to their share of the vote, then answers his own question decisively:
If 50 per cent of the people oppose capital punishment and 40 per cent support it and 10 per cent are undecided, why should we not give five out of ten murderers a life sentence, hang four, and keep one on death row until the undecided make up their minds? To govern is to choose…. Government is not a jumble of discrete choices, of which some people could make some, and others, with different ideas and interests, could make others. The choices must fit together. This is most obvious in a budget.
It is now. Moreover, he comes back time and again to his central contention that voting is about choosing governments responsible to voters and “under proportional representation,” he states with devastating bluntness, “the voters do not choose the government.” As he goes on to document, it took very nearly half a century before a single government in West Germany was voted out. And this is typical of PR systems: “In the fifty years after 1945 in 103 elections in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland, the major governing party was thrown from office only six times.” And in 47 governments in Italy in this period “the Christian Democrats dominated them all.” Furthermore, under Germany’s PR system the Free Democrats have actually had a grossly disproportionate share of cabinet seats whereas in Britain as in Canada parties get to govern roughly in proportion to their share of the vote. He’s not done yet. He also explains that because it guarantees seats to party insiders skilled at climbing the greasy pole, under PR, “The internal workings of parties, which, however broad their membership, always involve obscurely only a small minority of voters, become dangerously important.” Further, he points out that reformers present themselves as concerned to make MPs more independent, “But the logic of proportional representation reduces MPs to mere party tokens.” Finally, he says, people criticize our current electoral system “because it does not yield proportional representation of parties, as if the purpose of Parliament was to serve the parties. But it is the other way around. Parties were formed to allow Parliament to work and to support a government.” As he also devastatingly observes, “If their [electoral reformers’] arguments are sound and proportional representation or the STV is ‘the thing,’ as reformers believe, the results of every election in Canada’s history have been monstrously wrong and only the enthusiasts for reform have noticed.” He brings the same combination of insight and acidity to proposal after proposal, from citizens’ assemblies to senate reform to referendums, recall and initiative, which he calls “the reductio ad absurdumof reform. … In practice it is impossible for there to be in Canada a groundswell of support for a measure sufficient for a successful initiative that would be ignored by government.” Thus, “Like recall, initiative, where allowed, is not likely to be much used or to get very far. But if it did get off the ground, it would be a bad thing. It involves taking a single issue in isolation out of the hands of government without regard to how the promoted measure may sort with the rest of what government is doing. If it turns out badly, who will be held responsible?” Responsible government is the touchstone of his critique and rightly so. Thus he gets off a series of great one-liners, for instance about making MPs more influential, but always in service of serious analysis. He does not merely say “The fault, dear reader, is in our MPs, not in our institutions, that they are underlings.” He explains that, “Backbench MPs are not without influence. But that influence is mostly exercised privately, in party caucuses. There they have to be team players and can get no public recognition. It is not enough for some. More scope for private member’s bills is only an indulgence of MPs’ vanity. It will do little harm. It will do no good.” And the reason it will do no good is that in a Parliamentary system the ministry is responsible not just for passing individually meritorious or at least popular bills but, far more importantly, for ensuring that the entire mass of laws and regulations, and the associated spending and taxes, amount to a coherent goal. This understanding of what responsible government means informs critique after critique in the book. Thus of one trendy proposal, for parliamentary committees to play a significant role in confirming executive branch appointments,If parliamentary confirmation became effective … the responsibility of the government would be eroded. If an official confirmed by Parliament turned out badly, the government could fairly say, “Don’t blame us. We had a better candidate but could not be sure of confirmation.” And to whom would appointees be answerable; to the government whose second or third choices they were or to Parliament who confirmed them?
These are not questions lightly to be brushed aside. It is on the basis of this deep grasp of why our system works and how that he is able to frame such trenchant warnings as: “Democracy cannot always give the people what they want. It can only make government answerable to the people for what it does. So long as people wrongly think government can give them what they want, they will pursue futile and harmful efforts at reform.” Pepall does know his history and inserts it deftly from time to time, noting for instance that while Britain’s House of Lords was formally nearly equal to the Commons until 1911, “In practice there was always a way to get around the Lords, if it did not restrain itself,” because the monarch could create new peers at will. This not only secured passage of the Parliament Act but, before it, the crucial 1832 Reform Bill. “In 1711 Queen Anne created twelve new Tory peers to overcome a Whig majority in the Lords that had been obstructing her Tory government’s moves to make peace with France.” How many critics, or defenders, of the present Canadian senate knew that? I didn’t. [In 1990 Brian Mulroney appointed eight supernumerary senators in order to pass the GST. The CBC called this “unprecedented” which, of course, it was not.— eds.] And he is not merely a successful collector of pertinent historical anecdotes. In a key passage he writes:Much of the push for parliamentary reform seeks, wittingly nor not, to confound the distinction between Parliament and government. In its origin, Parliament had nothing to do with government. … Over the centuries, as governments came to be drawn from and dependent on the support of Parliament, the relation between government and Parliament became intimate. But their roles remained distinct. Eighteenth-century theorists and the authors of the United States Constitution in severing the executive and legislative branches misconstrued this distinction, but it is fundamental. Governments are drawn from Parliament and must have its support, but Parliament does not govern, cannot.
These are deep constitutional waters. But Pepall gives us a vantage point from which they are also clear. Historically minded readers will find such passages both gratifying and frustrating: gratifying for their grasp of history and its importance; frustrating because we would enjoy and profit from a much more detailed exposition of this idea about the developing relationship between government and Parliament. Pepall is not to be faulted for failing to present that exposition here; it is simply not his purpose in Against Reform, which could not have remained a scintillating monograph if he had allowed himself thus to be diverted. But it would also not be the solid work it is if he were not possessed of an erudition all the more impressive for being worn so lightly. Pepall vigorously defends our current voting system, although he strongly dislikes the term “first-past-the-post” and offers an ugly alternative: “single member plurality voting (SMPV).” His point is that, while “it is not the device of a theory, but simply seemed the natural and obvious way from the start,” it “tends to produce two competing parties as parties form in accordance with their purpose of forming a government or an alternative government.” One flaw in Pepall’s book is his contempt for the American system. He’s quite right to remind proponents of recall that it doesn’t work well in the United States, noting that the case of California Governor Gray Davis in 2003 was the first of thirty-three such attempts to succeed in the Golden State and only the second to succeed anywhere, the first being in North Dakota in 1921. And he might have added that California’s budgetary debacle under Arnold Schwarzenegger didn’t exactly vindicate the hopes of the recall forces. But he is flip and unfair to state baldly that “The system of government provided for by the United States Constitution, for good or ill, largely for ill, is entirely different from Canada’s,” or that “American elections do no [sic] work well, and the extraordinary advantage of incumbency is stark evidence of that.” In the first place, Americans do get considerably more dramatic choices than Canadians at election time. And in the second, the American system of government was expressly designed to preserve crucial virtues of the old British constitution that seemed to be in grave peril in the eigteenth century and that succumbed to a different, more populist, threat in the twentieth, both there and here in Canada. Here his history lets him down and it is a shame. But he can be forgiven this failing in a book that, on its actual subject, provides so much instruction and entertainment in one absolutely compelling package including a staunch defence of our institutions, their history, and the rapidly vanishing understanding of that history. Thus he notes that Canada went through decades of serious upheavals and major political issues without people blaming the institutions:But a century and more of content with our political institutions is forgotten in the general oblivion of Canada’s past. Behind Canada’s experience with our existing political institutions lie centuries of political evolution in Britain. Very little of this was the result of conscious political theory. By a process of trial and error, institutions were developed that provided effective government answerable to the people. Two generations ago that history and the achievements of the governments it led to were well known in Canada. They too have passed into oblivion. It was once understood that our political institutions were a primary part of who we are and an object of pride. In the remaking of Canada, at once aggressive and surreptitious, in the last forty years this understanding has been suppressed. How and why our existing institutions came to be and why thoughtful people in the past defended them is hardly taught in schools and universities.
In this sense, Against Reform is a historical work without dwelling on history. By its compelling demonstration that parliamentary institutions are not merely good, they are good because they consist of a coherent and interlocking set of institutions and practices that have generated workable answers to the conundrums thrown up by events over centuries, it points us toward an examination of the history of Parliament to understand what it is meant to do and how and why. And those of us who regard informed study of history as invaluable preparation for the dilemmas of the present will cheer heartily at his crushing formulation that “those who call for reform see no farther into the future than they do into the past.” Against Reform is a contemporary polemic, a work of deep historical understanding, a primer on political theory, a collection of one-liners, short, sweet yet acidic, and a must read. [Against Reform. John Pepall. University of Toronto Press, 2010.Originally published in The Dorchester Review, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2011).
