Letter to the Editor

On May 10 the Select Standing Committee on Parliamentary Reform, Ethical Conduct, Standing Orders and Private Bills called for public submissions as a part of a review of Members Conflict of Interest Act.

This is a submission.
TO: The Select Standing Committee On Parliamentary Reform, Ethical Conduct, Standing Orders and Private Bills:
Sirs and Madams:

This submission will center only on two areas of your committees’ responsibilities; Parliamentary Reform and Ethical Conduct.
I would like to make a few back grounding points first so that this submission can perhaps be better understood.
Since there has been no parliamentary reform since 1866 (pedantic procedural changes are not reform), you should either remove that phrase from your committee name or actually reform. In your own 30-second Oath of Office you swore allegiance to the Queen or King Of England and nothing else, so that should tell you something about the pace on that score. However, I will take you at your name and discuss the reform area in the hopes you may eventually see yourselves that way.
In the ethics area I assume that this includes promising something publicly but not actually doing it when the time comes to fulfill the promise, or saying you believe something to be true or right when you privately don’t actually believe it to be true or right. I will assume these are an ethics violation.
And now I go at risk of losing you because I will address some sensitive realities directly. This is in the interest of accomplishing something here.
Circumstantially, in both parties, you are part of a vertical authority system where all authority is concentrated at the top in the Premier and a few cabinet people, and by extension their unelected echelons of aids and advisers, and your role is to support them without question. This is a quasi-military chain-of-command model of control and operates under the name of ‘party discipline’. The rules are unwritten but well understood and obeyed, and I am aware that at least two of your sitting committee members have been punished for breaking this code; one for not doing what he was ordered in a matter of turning down bona fide compensation, and the other for exercising freedom of expression. Party central rhetoric designers, dissemblers, dissimulators set out what you are to say if you are questioned about party policies, intentions or laws, but usually it is recognized as self serving doublespeak. You are required to vote on laws as ordered by party authority. Laws are now routinely announced beforehand and then later rubber stamped by you in the legislature, often in a matter of minutes. Constructive debate has been replaced by mawkish partisan carping. There is in fact no democratic process, circumspect vetting and balancing of laws or free voices whatsoever.
This has rendered the legislature to be a useless thing, and its pretense causes it to be held in contempt by the public. The authoritarians become ever more of a ruler mentality, evermore interventionist into peoples’ lives, and evermore less truthful. We are witnessing disassociative and sometimes tyrannical behavior due to the toxicity of unchecked power. Democracy regresses proportionately as this concentration of power strengthens. The populace has more and more a feeling of subjugation.
So in the area of ethics, you are ethically deficient when you say you will represent the interests of the people in the election process and then not do so when you are elected. It is also unethical to say you believe in, say a tax for an example, when in fact you do not. None of you has ever stood up in the legislature against a tax. Some taxes recently that some of you KNEW your voters thought were unnecessary and unfair and they could not afford, but you voted against them despite this. You have all done this and it is patently unethical.
There is a price. As such, the public does not believe most of what you say and holds you in low esteem and trust. That is the cost of saying untrue things and saying you believe in something when you don’t, but try explain it away by claiming you know better what is good for your constituents than they themselves do. This seeds the conviction amongst the people that the government is hopelessly divergent from their fundamental ethos, and there is no other means of communication but termination on election day. You are very often thrown out with them. Not always a positive option, but it is the only tool left in our box.
It is always ironic to witness perplexed government leaders that have irretrievably ‘lost’ the minds of the population and they have no idea of how to go back and bridge that chasm. A vital legislature with free voices of representation was their link with the population, but they have burned that bridge. It also provided a healthy balance that may well have preserved them in the end.
So now we get to reform. As a committee you can create room for freedom, candor and truth in your system. Simply create a condition where you can mean what you say and say what you mean within party structure as a right and without reprisal. A simple concept, but you would elevate immediately in public perception. We know the truth when we hear it just as much as we know a lie, and you can trust the populace to be fair even if they don’t agree with you. We just want to hear straight talk. The parties will fluster but adjust. You will feel so much better about yourselves.
‘Say what you mean and mean what you say’; an extraordinarily simple concept. But what makes it easy to do is to just declare you are going to follow and practice the law and spirit of the constitution of this country. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms section 2(b) gives you the inalienable right to “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression” and section 32(b) provides that “this Charter applies to all the legislatures and governments of each province in respect of all matters within the authority of the legislature of each province”. Both of the sitting committee members mentioned earlier had the right under the law of the Charter to do what they did without punishment and reprisal. The parties were wrong for taking those rights away. The doctrine of party discipline may well be questioned before the courts some day, so it is perhaps in your interest to take leadership on this now.
No man or woman should ever be asked to hand over their very being, their essential individuality, for any cause. To ask you to live the artifice that party discipline imposes on you goes beyond all reason, and it is an indecent thing to do.
So serve the truth and reform. Create the room to be truthful without reprisal, and then your committee will have done something worthwhile.
If on the other hand your request for submissions are just showcasing a status quo with no real intention of changing anything, then I will have wasted my time writing this submission and you will have wasted your time reading it.
Step out and show wisdom, show courage, show strength. Make a difference and take measures that will reform and elevate your profession.
You will feel so free.
Roy Roope,
Summerland

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