In April, Parliamentary Committees Spent 24% of Their Time Hiding from the People
Since winning its majority, the Harper régime has forced most Parliamentary committees behind a veil of secrecy. They meet in camera and, despite being our elected representatives, sitting in our building, they refuse to share their discussions with us. A special report by iPolitics last month reported that during the first two months of 2012 committees spent one-third of their time meeting in secret, away from the prying eyes of the citizenry. The most secretive committees, that site reported, were Environment, Industry, International Trade (which had no public meetings at all), and Public Accounts (which met in public for all of 3 minutes).
The Opposition has been growing increasingly unhappy about this situation. In mid-March, the Liberals announced that they intended to hold a scrum straight outside any committee which had met in secret but which, they felt, had discussed matters of public import. So far the Liberals have not made good on their threat, that I am aware of. Doing so would risk a contempt ruling and possible jail time.
This month, though, it does appear that the government may have blinked — I emphasize, maybe. My count shows that in April, committee secrecy fell to 24 percent of meeting time. That’s still more than the 21% which committees under Chretien apparently averaged (again, according to iPolitics). Is that a trend, or was it just a comparatively “good” month for Canadian democracy?
Last month, the most secret committees were Industry and Natural Resources, which held no public meetings; Veterans Affairs, which was secret 74% of the time; and Agriculture, which was secret 68% of the time.
In contrast, five committees deserve praise for holding absolutely no in camera meetings this month: Aboriginal Affairs, Fisheries and Oceans, Heritage, National Defence, and Transport.
If this is a subject which interests you, please leave a comment and I will make this a regular feature. iPolitics was based on a limited comparison of the last 6 months of 2011, the first 2 months of 2012, and the last six months under Chrétien. My analysis can be broader, but it will take a significant time investment, so I will not do it unless some people express interest in seeing it.
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Sam Gunsch
This sort of monitoring work needs to be done for all aspects of our governance and politics, given how rapidly and dramatically Harper’s Conservatives are thwarting or ignoring democratic principles of accountability and transparency.
The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance has a handbook to guide citizens to do their own assessments.
http://www.idea.int/publications/sod/democracy_assessment.cfm
This organization has had prominent Canadian involvement: Hugh Segal is on their board of advisors for example.
Most of this organizations work is directed at emerging democracies.
I think they need to create a task force to help citizens of democracies in decline or suffering attacks of neo-Con borg-like machines.
Sixth Estate
You see the flaw in a Hugh Segal organization advising us on how to combat the Harper regime, right?
Darren
I would love to see work done on this. Harper’s Cons are supposed to be our democratically elected officials and need their feet held to the fire. I’ll happily spread the word of your findings as well!
Sixth Estate
Thanks, Darren. I have another post ready to go in the next few days. The longer-term study will take longer… unlike real journalists, I don’t get paid for this sort of thing.
Sam Gunsch
re Segal and irony and IDEA’s democracy DIY audit model
Absolutely. I think the irony is quite fun. That was my point.
Thing is, Segal didn’t have anything to do with creating that audit model at IDEA. But applied to Canada’s Con’s it would shred the Con brand as it is being manifested under Harper.
IDEA’s core model/framework for citizens conducting audits of their democracies was worked up over some years going back to the 1980′s. Segal I’m guessing joined up / add-on in the last decade.
To get some sense of the history of the audit model, here is the academic that initiated the concept and created the program at IDEA:
David Beetham: Associate Director of the UK Democratic Audit, which is based in the University of Liverpool.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Beetham
http://www.democraticaudit.com/about-us
… Beetham describes the democratic audit as ‘the simple but ambitious project of assessing the state of democracy in a single country’. It has been applied to assess the extent, and limits, of democracy in the United Kingdom.[3]
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Weir and Beetham audited the democracy systems of the UK.
Published their analyses in this book.
Beetham, David and Weir Stuart(1999) Political Power and Democratic Control in Britain
The audit framework/process/approach they employed actually could be done on a permanent ongoing basis by citizens organized into focused groups publishing to the Internet.
Again, the IDEA audit W and B did was based on the core principles and criteria in the handbook at the link in my first post.
The audit model seems basic on the face of it, but as they employed it, quite a deadly tool.
Blogs like yours are already doing some of the key work of citizen audits as they envision them.
But your kind of democracy evaluation/monitoring/auditing work is scattered around the blogosphere.
And your blog is one of the least partisan but at times arguably it would even depart at times from the audit framework/model IDEA has set out.
Most commonly, the key problem with political blogs is usually their obviously partisan perspectives. And thus the blogosphere is mostly populated with blogs from the other tribes who never believe anything the other tribes say. So preaching to the choir, all round. Intensifying the fragmentation of polity.
The audit framework at IDEA is based on evaluating democracies from the perspective of the citizen. It ain’t left or right, it’s citizen-based.
I think it offers an important method to find common ground among the citizenry willing to concern themselves with the democratic quality of politics and governance, and who are able to still engage across political parties, i.e. despite their particular partisan allegiance.
Just something I’m mulling and cogitating for now.
Sixth Estate
Interesting thoughts, Sam. I would love to be part of a project like that. If I depart from the model, aside from simply being because I’m unaware of it, it’s because I have many different motivations for writing.
One of them is not partisanship, though. The Patronage List, the Pork Barrel, the lobbyist list, the Media Bias study, and the new Open Government project (sheesh, that list is getting long) would follow exactly the same methods regardless of which government is in power. And they are not loaded against the government. They can demonstrate government responsibility and transparency just as easily as they can demonstrate secrecy and irresponsibility.
If I am anti-Conservative, it is because the Conservatives are a party which has repeatedly broken the law of the land, subverted central democratic institutions, and show a reckless disregard for the short-term survival of the human species. If and when they’re reduced to the opposition benches, I will work just as hard to attack any other government which fails on the same counts.
John Mills
I would love to see more in-depth work done on this. I appreciate your motivation and TRANSPARENCY in doing your work. Along with Darren, I would tweet, G+, FB and likely blog right along with you on the findings that your unearth and the potentially perilous path that we may be wandering down.
Sam Gunsch
@ SE… re non-partisan, nitpicking, anti-Conservative…
Your blog posts are so close to the ideal of non-partisan critique re democratic nature of governance/politics, that I to this day, can only speculate with little certainty where on political spectrums of any sort you might position yourself.
The ‘depart’ bit I had intuitions about is very minor.
Seriously… my oldest friends would remind me: sometimes my own internal nit-pickiness leads me to say and write nitpicks not worth mentioning because in fact they are not material issues. Despite my ability to be quite thick at times, even I can see the obvious non-partisan nature of the standards against which you frame your critiques.
And absolutely, with a Con party that is such an extreme repeat offender, then the content of blog posts such as SE, like anyone attempting to protect the democratic nature of politics and governance, cannot help but be mostly critical analyses/reports/evaluations. Which inevitably is going to set you up as ‘anti-Con’ in the minds of Con partisans. My own political program is small c conservative in many respects but my comments make me sound totally anti-conservative. They’ve done unprecedented, abominable stuff to democracy in Canada. Even the Coyne’s point this out.
re: Citizen assessments of the democratic qualities/processes of politics and governance:
Getting out of the various complications and traps such as appearances of partisan political commentary, to my mind, is perhaps the core strength of IDEA’s Democratic assessment model.
And this key advantage I think I see in the model, is why I’ve been mulling and cogitating over options for systematic methods of using it, that are in fact feasible for the citizenry themselves, i.e. DIY.
The citizens who I imagine might engage in this sort of effort are of like mind with SE, in that they somehow see themselves as having obligations to protect the democratic health of politics/governance as their first obligation as citizens. Said obligations taking priority over their loyalty to a political party and its program/ideologies/agenda.
I’ve been considering some frameworks of implementation that might work in combination to enable/empower groups of citizens to undertake ongoing assessments, but these how-to frameworks have not coalesced sufficiently such that I have written them down to share.
Here’s some of the key explanatory content about IDEA’s model with respect to the absolute necessity that means be found for citizens to engage in DIY approach.
Apologies for copy-pasta. from page 19 of the
Democracy Assessment: Explaining the Method
aqd_practical_guide_part1 IDEA.pdf
http://www.idea.int/publications/aqd/upload/aqd_practical_guide_part1.pdf
excerpt:
In Annex A, ‘Other ways of assessing democracy’, we compare the IDEA framework with other methodologies for assessing democracy current in the world today and explain the essential differences in principle and practice between them.
The International IDEA framework is, in brief, the only one to insist that only those who know a country’s culture, traditions and aspirations are properly qualified to assess its democracy.
The purpose of International IDEA’s SoD assessment programme is to put the future of democracies around the world in the hands of their own citizens.
[8] The main features of the International IDEA approach may be summarized as follows.
• Only citizens and others who live in the country being assessed should carry out a democracy assessment, since only they can know from experience how their country’s history and culture shape its approach to democratic principles.
• A democracy assessment by citizens and residents of a country may be mobilized by government or external agencies only under strict safeguards of the independence of the assessment.
• The prime purpose of democracy assessment is to contribute to public debate and consciousness raising, and the exercise ought to allow for the expression of popular understanding as well as any elite consensus.
• The assessment should assist in identifying priorities for reform and monitoring their progress.
• The criteria for assessment should be derived from clearly defined democratic principles and should embrace the widest range of democracy issues, while allowing assessors to choose priorities for examination according to local needs.
Sam Gunsch
Krugman today…related to finding non-partisan modes to engage as citizens in seeking the common good…
… intensifying ‘tribalism’ (partisan) in economic policy debate.
excerpt: People aren’t very receptive to evidence if it doesn’t come from a member of their cultural community. This has been blindingly obvious these past few years.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/05/economic-tribalism/
May 5, 2012, 10:39 am
Economic Tribalism
Hmm. This seems to be meta Saturday, with reactions to how people think – or, all too often, don’t think — about economics taking center stage.
Justin Fox has an interesting post documenting something I more or less knew, but am glad to see confirmed: People aren’t very receptive to evidence if it doesn’t come from a member of their cultural community. This has been blindingly obvious these past few years.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/05/economic-tribalism/
Chris Mooney’s work on this tribalism issue is instructive.
He provides links to a lot of specialists I’ve found valuable.
http://www.desmogblog.com/bio/chris-mooney