Jim Coutts died last week and today’s politicians may mourn him. But many of them are determined, apparently, that the old political system he served so well should pass into history as well.
I knew Coutts as a cherubic adviser to Pierre Trudeau in the late 1970s, and his gatekeeper, controlling access to the prime minister and trying to keep him out of trouble, which wasn’t always easy.
It might be said he supervised the running of the country, even through the nine months of 1979-80 that it took the Progressive Conservatives under Joe Clark to throw themselves out of office. It was Coutts who persuaded Trudeau to come back from the wilderness — to save the country from ruin and, eventually, to bring its Constitution home with a Charter of Rights that has confounded succeeding governments in so many ways.
It might be said as well that it was during the Trudeau-Coutts years that the prime minister’s office began to assume powers that some today find objectionable.
Opposition politicians in those early days raised a fuss just because Trudeau began speaking from a podium like a U.S. president. Opposition MPs complained that Liberal majorities prevented Commons committees from working as they thought they should.
Trudeau reminded them that they were “nobodies” the moment they stepped off the Hill.
Are the complaints today any different now that “the Harper government” is in office? Is the current prime minister any more secretive, inaccessible or bloody-minded than Trudeau was or any prime minister who has come between them?
I don’t think so, though lacking political fixers of Coutts’s abilities, they might not have been as good at it.
Coutts was suckled on Liberalism at the age of 14 and weaned on power in the PMO when Lester Pearson was prime minister.
He recognized no distinction between serving a party leader and the prime minister of his country: Wasn’t the Liberal party, after all, the natural governing party?
Well, that has been called into question by voters several times since, and there are some youngsters on Parliament Hill today who are anxious to curb the power of both party leaders and prime ministers.
They’re motivated by the quaint assumption that this will restore elements of democracy that have been lost and right scales that seem unbalanced.
Here’s how Michael Chong, the Conservative MP, explains Canada’s need for his proposed Reform Act: It would take away control of party nominations from party leadership and restore it to ridings; it would strengthen party caucuses as decision-making bodies; and it would reinforce the “convention” that party leadership in the Commons must have the confidence of MPs.
Brave lad. But apparently he’s not alone. A lot of Canadians have a jaded view of how Parliament works, how governments, once elected, seize agendas and won’t let go. And they’ve got the ear of a lot of MPs on both sides of the House.
Now, reforming ancient institutions and changing the way things have been done for centuries are not necessarily bad. They’re certainly more to be desired than what’s going on today in, for example, Egypt.
But where is Chong’s grand purpose to allow MPs greater freedom “to represent their constituents” leading? Where, indeed, is it coming from? Not from Walter Bagehot, who said representation doesn’t mean obedience to the opinions of electors.
MPs might have the ear of prime ministers in caucuses, they might be good at listening to their constituents’ grievances and doing what they can to satisfy them. But their main purpose is to stand up in the House and vote when told to do so.
If Robert Stanfield as Progressive Conservative leader hadn’t refused to sign the nomination papers of the anti-bilingual Leonard Jones, chosen by Moncton Tories in 1974, his leadership problems would have been much worse than they were.
Letting MPs dethrone party leaders as they can in Australia and Britain would be a step away from grassroots and party “bases” upon which our party system depends. Fads like proportional voting and recall would ruin the discipline that is necessary in government, and would weaken the effectiveness of Opposition.
Chong never knew Jim Coutts. Pity.
