Bill's Bulletin Board
By Bill Rea

I did some quick counting the other night, and figured that in more than 22 years as a community newspaper journalist, there have been some 30 parliamentarians that I have actively covered and kept track of at one time or another. That includes MPs, MPPs and senators.

These people have represented three political parties, both genders and a wide variety of backgrounds and political credentials. I have respected or learned to respect most of them. Some I have liked, some I have tolerated and one I believe wrote the book on political pointlessness, but that's for another column.

But of them all, when it came to being relevant to constituents and trying with sincerity to represent their interests, Garth Turner showed the way. He's a guy who I originally dismissed as a political opportunist. I figured his political career would be very short, like a month or so. He declared he was seeking the Progressive Conservative nomination for the 1988 federal election in the riding where I was working exactly 28 days before the nomination meeting.

"He hasn't got a hope in hell," I exclaimed to the fellow who first broke the news to me, a local school

trustee who secured the Liberal nomination in the riding a couple of weeks later.

I can tell you that was neither the first or last political prognostication I was wrong about. And he who I had dismissed as a political opportunist quickly got my respect, through the most effective means possible - he earned it.

I will grant that there's a bit of personal bias affecting my judgement here. The fact is Turner was a fun guy to cover. In the days when he was an MP who's riding covered Caledon (where I worked), he submitted weekly columns. I was a lucky editor to have a nationally syndicated columnist writing for me, and not charging me a dime. And there was educational benefit too. I have a university degree in politics, but I have made no secret of the fact that I learned more about the workings of government in Canada from typesetting Turner's columns every week (in the days before email) than I did from three years of lectures.

He also held regular and frequent town hall meetings, and still does in his current riding (I actually attended one earlier this year and another over the weekend). These sessions were both informative and entertaining, with several people showing up to vent their temper, and Turner frequently getting angry right back. Fun meetings at which to be a scribe.

And I saw Turner do a number of exceptional decent things, and that includes personal experience. When my father died 14 years ago Thursday last, he sent a very nice sympathy note to my mother. I expected her to be cynical about the gesture, since my mom was smart enough to understand the nuances of the relationship between a politician and a local editor with an election less than a year away. But she was genuinely touched by his note, and I know she remembered it until the day she died.

So, having stated my bias, I was naturally curious by last Wednesday's announcement that Turner had been tossed from the Tory caucus in Ottawa.

The frustrating thing is it's awfully hard, if not impossible, to get a line on just what act of naughtiness Turner committed to deserve being unfrocked by his party. I've read several theories, and heard Turner's own thoughts.

But it's also a bit of fun to speculate of what Turner should and will do next, at least politically.

The meeting I attended Sunday had been arranged some time ago; before Turner's ouster, although it shouldn't come as a surprise that it was the main topic of discussion. He even took an informal vote at the end, and there was a slight edge among those who thought he should sit in the House of Commons as an independent, with his accepting the overtures of the Green party running a close second.

Since I was there as a spectator and not a constituent, I stood down from any voting.

But I think this situation highlights the need for parliamentary reform. Now I know we have been hearing calls like this for years. It was one of the poster issues for the old Reform party. As well, we hear a lot of promises for some sort of reform at election time, but the reality is we only get a couple of token gestures. For example, both the federal and provincial governments think it's a great idea to fix election dates. The reality is such moves are visible, productive looking and utterly pointless.

What we really need is something that recognizes MPs as elected representatives, something that several political leaders have called for. But most of them aren't prepared to do a thing to deliver.

So here's a suggestion.

Party discipline is recognized as crucial in a parliamentary system, but is it really necessary?

The reason it's seen to be is because if the governing party looses a crucial vote, it's seen as a matter involving confidence of the House (of Commons), and a government needs that confidence to govern. But is it written that votes on legislation, even important legislation like a budget, has to be a matter of confidence?

The last federal budget called for a cut to GST. Now let us hypothetically suppose that a number of Conservative MPs had liked most of what they saw in the budget, but couldn't support the GST cut, for

whatever reason? Under the current rules, enough defecting MPs would bring down the government, because budgets are matters of confidence.

So let us hypothetically impose a new practice, which states that no vote on legislation can be a matter of confidence. If the confidence of the House is at issue, then any MP can put forth a motion of non-confidence, and that can be subjected to a vote on its own. The hypothetical MPs who voted against the GST cut can still stand and support the government, allowing the prime minister and cabinet to go back and tweak things a bit; maybe make the budget a little more acceptable to this group of elected representatives.

True, members of a political party should generally be on the same proverbial page when talking about things like budgets. But let's be real here too. Does anyone seriously believe every member of the Tory caucus agreed with every word in the budget that Finance Minister Jim Flaherty brought down earlier this year? If you do, see your doctor.

Granted my idea has a couple of holes contained within it, and it also helps explain in some detail why I'm not a parliamentarian or a strategy advisor in the Prime Minister's Office.

But it's also true that I've put this idea in print a couple of times, and no one has said a word to me about what's wrong with it. By the same token, no one has told me it's right either.

Frankly, I think Canadians would benefit a lot more from something like this, than the cosmetic fixing of election dates.