"Today we tabled in Parliament the new Federal Accountability Act, a bill which contains a number of measures aimed at cleaning up the federal government," said Prime Minister Stephen Harper. "Once implemented, this Act will: Put an end to the influence of big money in federal political parties; [etc]"
http://pm.gc.ca/eng/media.asp?category=1&id=1097
I just can't see how this is going to be good for our society for a number of reasons:
-Who donates most to federal political parties? Rich people who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and/or advancing a certain agenda. These people won't go away just because of the act, they'll just go underground where they cannot be traced.
-Interested people join social organizations like the labour unions and church groups because they believe that collectively they have better bargaining power with the government (through donations to political parties). If these orgs don't reflect the values of their constituents, then their funds dry up and they fall apart due to the laws of the free market. Preventing these social organizations from representing their members' values will also cause them to fall apart as they will have lost their raison-d'etre. Who then will bargain with the government to tackle specific issues and implement changes that people really want?
-What does it really mean to "be held accountable to the people of Canada" anyway? What methods do we have as citizens? Really, our only (and most important and fundamental) power is our vote. But the recent election and its aftermath has shown us how the government really cares about our votes - just ask the thousands of constituents of Burnaby BC - and how they twist protest votes against the liberals into votes "for" their five key priorities - and how the minister of the biggest spending federal department is appointed to the senate, bypassing "public" scrutiny in the House of Commons and flying in the face of having democratically elected cabinet ministers leading the country, and who says he intends to run not as soon as possible in a by-election, but only at the next general election...
-Further empowering Officers of Parliament (information commissioner, privacy commissioner, auditor general) and protecting whistleblowers, while restricting access to information and starving the media's need for question opportunities, means you will only be able to fight the system from within, and wouldn't that be an inconvenient conflict of interest... Remember Radwanski?
In the end, it seems that the only tools we would have left at our disposal to change the course of a majority government between elections are:
-Demonstrations to grab the media's attention, at the risk of tarnishing our "pristine" image abroad;
-Demonstrations to grab the international media's attention, but we've seen how ineffective that is against China;
-As the situation gets more desperate: riots, rebellions, violence, kidnappings, etc., and the government has ample experience quashing such events (October crisis, Riel Rebellion, etc).
Sure I'm taking this to the extreme, but to me, these are all warning signs on the road to a totalitarian state where the government and the people are isolated from one another, the only bridge being the elections every 4years or so (note: at the sole discretion of the Prime Minister) and the propaganda that the current conservative government seems to be so good at already...
http://pm.gc.ca/eng/media.asp
I just can't see how this is going to be good for our society for a number of reasons:
-Who donates most to federal political parties? Rich people who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and/or advancing a certain agenda. These people won't go away just because of the act, they'll just go underground where they cannot be traced.
-Interested people join social organizations like the labour unions and church groups because they believe that collectively they have better bargaining power with the government (through donations to political parties). If these orgs don't reflect the values of their constituents, then their funds dry up and they fall apart due to the laws of the free market. Preventing these social organizations from representing their members' values will also cause them to fall apart as they will have lost their raison-d'etre. Who then will bargain with the government to tackle specific issues and implement changes that people really want?
-What does it really mean to "be held accountable to the people of Canada" anyway? What methods do we have as citizens? Really, our only (and most important and fundamental) power is our vote. But the recent election and its aftermath has shown us how the government really cares about our votes - just ask the thousands of constituents of Burnaby BC - and how they twist protest votes against the liberals into votes "for" their five key priorities - and how the minister of the biggest spending federal department is appointed to the senate, bypassing "public" scrutiny in the House of Commons and flying in the face of having democratically elected cabinet ministers leading the country, and who says he intends to run not as soon as possible in a by-election, but only at the next general election...
-Further empowering Officers of Parliament (information commissioner, privacy commissioner, auditor general) and protecting whistleblowers, while restricting access to information and starving the media's need for question opportunities, means you will only be able to fight the system from within, and wouldn't that be an inconvenient conflict of interest... Remember Radwanski?
In the end, it seems that the only tools we would have left at our disposal to change the course of a majority government between elections are:
-Demonstrations to grab the media's attention, at the risk of tarnishing our "pristine" image abroad;
-Demonstrations to grab the international media's attention, but we've seen how ineffective that is against China;
-As the situation gets more desperate: riots, rebellions, violence, kidnappings, etc., and the government has ample experience quashing such events (October crisis, Riel Rebellion, etc).
Sure I'm taking this to the extreme, but to me, these are all warning signs on the road to a totalitarian state where the government and the people are isolated from one another, the only bridge being the elections every 4years or so (note: at the sole discretion of the Prime Minister) and the propaganda that the current conservative government seems to be so good at already...
