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| Home | Introduction | Our Fiscal Mess | Our Declining Defences | Accountability Gap | Discussions |
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| :.Who's Accountable? | :.Possible Solutions | :.What You Can Do |
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Possible Solutions How can we return accountability to our governing institutions? The most obvious way is to return Parliament – the legislative assembly for our representatives – to its original role of holding the government responsible for its decisions and actions. This can be accomplished through a combination of electoral reform and parliamentary reform. Electoral Reform
Parliamentary Reform
- An elected Senate would allow it to better fulfill its purpose of representing regional interests and providing sober second thought to proposed legislation coming from the House of Commons; - More resources, and a real role for parliamentary committees, to enable them to help craft legislation, and not just rubber stamp legislation that is presented to them by government.
….Another fundamental problem is that MPs do not have the resources to hold the government to account. The government has 100,000 public servants or more. They have Crown corporations. They have access to all kinds of consultants, whereas Parliament has only 80 non-partisan policy researchers. You can’t really do battle with 80 non-partisan policy researchers serving both the Senate and the House of Commons, trying to hold 100,000 public servants and Cabinet to account. There’s a complete mismatch. The challenge, I would argue, is to fix that. Determining Value for Public Monies Spent Another way of bolstering Parliament’s role in holding government to account is by reinstating its ability to genuinely and effectively oversee government spending. MP John Williams, Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, was a driving force behind a “Business of Supply” report that recommended that Parliament not only examine government spending Estimates for the coming year, but that it evaluate the effectiveness of this spending. As Williams noted in A Call to Account: Our report also wanted to set up an evaluation program so that these programs are evaluated on a cycle – so Canadians can see if they are getting value for money based on four simple questions. First, we wanted to know what the program was designed to do because in many cases there isn’t even a public policy attached to government programs. Currently we just spend the money and keep it circulating. Surely Canadians would hope that we should get some benefit for the money we’re spending. Second, how well is the program doing? This isn’t rocket science here, but the government just does not want to know the answer to how most of our programs are doing. They just spend the money. Third, are we delivering the programs efficiently? Fourth, can we achieve the same or better results for our government dollar by delivering the program in a different way in a fast-changing technological world?…The government currently does not ask these four questions. Answering these four questions for each and every government program would certainly keep MPs productively employed for years to come, and would clearly be a means of holding government to account on behalf of all Canadians. How Would You Change the System? You have been exposed to some ideas here as to how government could be made again accountable. Are these good ideas? Are they workable? Do you have ideas on how to improve accountability? Or do you think we get a chance to hold governments accountable every four or five years when there is an election? Do we need to change anything? Let your views be known in the discussion forums. We are now going to get “personal” in the final module of this course. Further Study Books Video
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As
was noted previously, our first-past-the-post electoral system often creates
significant distortions between votes casts and seats won. For example,
the Liberals won a huge majority of seats (57%) in the House of Commons
in the 2000 election with only 41% of the popular vote. This has the effect,
in essence, of disenfranchising large segments of the population. Introducing
some form of proportional representation would eliminate these anomalies
and more closely reflect the popular will, as expressed in the popular
vote. Such a system would also make it easier for political parties to
add policy experts (e.g. in law, defence, foreign policy, business, economics,
social policy, etc.) to their roster list of candidates.
The
following reforms would make it easier for Parliament to fulfill its role
of government oversight: