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0 JOURNAL OF CANADIAN STUDIES -:(~>-. ' Editor Associate Editors Editorial Assistants Editorial Board . RALPH HEINTZMAN DAYID CAMERON JOHN WADLAND ARLENE DAVIS MARGARET PEARCE WALLACE CLEMENT MARGARET LAURENCE HARVEY McCUE JACQUES MONET, S.J. W.L. MORTON W.F.W. NEVILLE JAMES E. PAGE MICHAEL PETERMAN GORDON ROPER DONALD V. SMILEY DENIS SMITH PHILIP STRATFORD T.H.B. SYMONS W.E. TAYLOR CLARA THOMAS MELVILLE H. WATKINS ALAN WILSON The Educational Contract REVUE D'ETUDES CANADIENNES Directeur Directeurs adjoints Assistantes Comite de redaction In the summer of 1979, several events have conspired to place parliament, and parliamentary reform, once again on the national agenda. A new federal government has assumed office after an election campaign in which its leader made the reform of parliament one of his top priorities. If that were not enough, the government took office barely three months after publication of the report of the Royal Commission on Financial Management and Accountability, the final chapters of which proposed substantial changes to the structure and function of the House of Commons . The Lambert Commission's recommendations came themselves in the wake of other reform proposals from the Task Force on Canadian Unity. And, finally, interest in parliamentary reform has now spread beyond the public forum to private organizations such as the Business Council on National Issues, whose recent report on parliament endorsed a number of reforms similar to those suggested by the Lambert Commission . Thus it could hardly be a more appropriate time to reflect on the rhetoric and reality of ''responsible'' government. Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 14, No. 2 (Ete 1979 Summer) One thing these events illustrate is that we have come a long way from the state of mind in which, only a generation ago, a Chester Martin could still assume without much hesitation that the "foundations of Canadian nationhood" consisted in our character as a parliamentary people and in the self-evident superiority of Canadian parliamentary institutions over American con- gressional ones. We are now far more ready to see the weaknesses of parliament, and more conscious of the wide, and widening, gap between the rhetoric of parliamentary accountability and the reality of executive dominance and bureaucratic government. Yet unless I am mistaken, we also seem to have travelled some distance from the mood of the late 1960s or early 1970s, when Englishspeaking observers such as Anthony Westen were given to bleating about the "irrelevance" or the "farce" of parliament, and when both commentators and politicians in Quebec seemed suddenly unanimous about the need to replace their venerable parliamentary institutions with presidential and congressional ones at the earliest opportunity. At the end of the 1970s, we are able to make a more balanced appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses of both systems of government. Certainly there is little danger of losing sight of the weaknesses of parliamentary government in its current Canadian guise. The contrast between the traditional claims and the contemporary reality is simply too great. Whereas the rhetoric assumes that the House of Commons has the power to make and unmake governments, to hold the government accountable for its actions from day to day, and to serve as a forum in which the great national issues are debated and decided, reality reveals a condition of affairs in which the House plays a minor and often inglorious role. Real power and real action are to be found elsewhere : in the cabinet and the public service. Hampered by their lack of expertise, by party discipline, by the necessary distraction of constituency duties, and by the structure and conventions of the House itself, individual MPs can do little to scrutinize, criticize or influence either legislation or administrative performance. In fact, their position is so weak that some experts have even argued that MPs should pay less attention in future to their vanishing legislative role and should concentrate instead on developing their role as go-between and facilitator, linking their constituents to government and vice-versa. Career incentives do not encourage government backbenchers to be assertive in parliament. Since the ultimate ambition of the ablest MPs 2 is to be elevated to the cabinet, and since for that purpose it is necessary to ingratiate oneself with those who control...

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