Is doing nothing for a month the best?

SOCIAL STUDIES - Published Monday December 8th, 2008

always try to be writing about something different; something out of the ordinary. There are so many people who write about, or even who express their opinion about politics, for example. So I have tried to be a voice about society in general, and less specifically about the governance.

Of course, I am an opinion writer and I would not be one if I did not have very strong opinions.

So I am going to wade into the current political controversy -- carefully.

I have always understood that the possibility of a non-confidence vote was in effect the corrective to dictatorship. I think of it as a majority veto. In the American system there are more checks and balances then you can shake a stick at. It doesn't always work, but at the same time, there are multiple ways that a bill can be vetoed.

We simply do not have as many checks and balances, we have a more distributed power system -- or perhaps a less distributed one, but what we do have is the possibility that the party which holds the power looses the confidence of the House.

I think that is very important. No one seems to be reminding anyone of this, but Joe Clark lost the confidence because his party proposed an 18 cent per gallon tax on gasoline.

I hold that up simply to state that governments in our country have been toppled for less than fiscal mismanagement on the brink of economic collapse. I am disappointed that somehow the Harper government has sidestepped the issue of whether or not they have the confidence of the House.

This is an important distinction, and one that Harper himself is ignoring, what matters here is the confidence of the House, not the confidence of the voters.

I say that he is ignoring this because he has consistently stated that the opposition party, or the coalition, does not have the support of the voters, his party does.

We do not, however, vote a person into power individually; we vote a party into power until such a time as the people who represent us deem that they have failed.

For the first time, a Canadian government has managed to simply escape the fate of this decision by doing something that is worthy of Robert Mugabe -- deciding that things are not going their way and then changing the rules.

The reason given is that the people have spoken.

But this is simply not true. Our definition of representational government is not that we elect people to power and then feed them the answers. Our MPs do not have to have opinion polls in their riding before a decision is made. Instead, we elect the person who we think would make the best decisions on their own, and we send them off to do it.

They represent us only in the sense that we empower them to act on our behalf. It is more of a proxy vote then a direct democracy of the people.

Because of this there are hundreds, nay millions, of things about Parliament and the nitty-gritty of running a country that most of us have absolutely no idea about. Nor do I have the time or desire to know about most of these details; that is someone else's job; in my case, Brian Murphy's job.

So if Brian Murphy believes Harper is doing it wrong and deserves to be removed -- then I will have to trust Brian's judgment. After all, he knows far greater than I what should have been done.

In a sense this all boils down to trust. We forget that what we are called to do is elect people who we trust have the skills to do the best job; once we elect them we should set them free to act. We also elect people who are trustworthy to do the right thing. I know popular opinion leads us to believe otherwise, but at the time that is what we are thinking.

I am not really trying to sound a rallying cry to kick out the Conservatives. Nor am I trying to suggest we leave them alone. What I, and I am not alone in this, am wondering, is why something more decisive did not happen one way or another.

Is a vote of non-confidence a hollow threat? Is there no sense in which governments are accountable for their actions in between elections?

So what happens next? I have literally no idea except that we wait for over a month while everyone supposedly just goes home and celebrates Christmas.

Meanwhile, the economy continues to slide into despair; friends and family of each one of us continue to lose their jobs; stock markets crash; all because Stephen Harper advised the Governor General that the best thing to do in a crisis is nothing.