On systemic responses

A couple of Kady O'Malley's tweets from this morning offer a useful shorthand to describe how to define parliamentary privilege and confidence conventions. But it's worth noting exactly how the Harper Cons have tested the limits of both terms by Kady's definition, and questioning what it means for Canadian parliamentary democracy in years to come:

i personally find it easiest to think of most confidence-related conventions in terms of what options the House has if the PM goes bonkers.
.. and privilege matters in terms of how we would protect parliament against a demented, raging crown bent on its destruction.

So what can we say about how Parliament will function under both of those circumstances based on the time the Harper Cons have spent in office? Sadly, we've had plenty of chances to test both - with most of the movement going in the direction of bolstering the cause of out-of-control executives, and even the limited pushback resulting only from the Cons' efforts to further expand the boundaries of unilateral executive action.

After all, if a future PM does indeed go bonkers, Harper has managed to set the precedent that even the most obviously-insane executive can cling to power indefinitely by refusing to allow the House of Commons to carry out a scheduled vote of non-confidence against it. (Which surely can't be the preferred outcome of anybody looking at the situation from any standpoint other than a current government which has maneuvered itself to the brink of disaster.) And unfortunately, that precedent has been set due to Harper's testing the limits of exactly what a prime minister can do to avoid the will of a majority of elected representatives.

Likewise, parliamentary privilege related to MPs' access to government documents and witnesses has taken a beating over the past few years. And that can be traced directly to the Cons' efforts to ensure the "destruction" of any opposition capacity to find out what its government is up to and hold it to account - even in cases where the apparent cost of allowing Parliamentary access to documents and witnesses wouldn't seem to justify the level of brinksmanship.

In effect, in trying to push the limits of executive power as long as they hold it, the Cons have converted the well-known maxim that "hard cases make bad law" into an invitation rather than a warning - systematically weakening the ability of our democratic system by forcing no-win choices. And while one can argue that there's some value in figuring out exactly where the limits of our democratic system lie, I'd think it's long past time to conclude that we're best off dealing with a few less direct questions about what to do in the face of an out-of-control Prime Minister than we can possibly expect as long as Harper remains in power.