Sunday 10 February 2013
Following the leader – It is an old game and it is not much fun anymore.
From both a Provincial and a Civic perspective, elected members are becoming more and more irrelevant as the Mayor and Premier use the tools of their office to reward sycophants and punish those who would dare to offer non-conforming ideas. Manitoba United will actively reduce the amount of command and control in both leader’s offices.
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This unconstitutional issue of much magnified command and control is something that was never anticipated by our founding fathers. Unfortunately it is also something which has gradually ratcheted up over the last fifty years. The grabbing of power by leaders is a serious problem because it diminishes the usable power of duly elected officials by transferring policy control to un-elected spinners and communicators within the leader’s office. It delivers a further complication when that control frustrates the process of honest and open debate within the Council chambres or the Legislature. Plain and Simple that growth of centralized power presents an affront to basic democracy.
ReplyDeleteSo it might be bad but what can anyone do to fix it? Electoral reform will never come soon enough to slow this problem down so we looked at what practical actions could be taken in the interim. Suggestions from our own policy framers come in several different areas that might be worth considering.
1) Reduce the budget for the leaders office.
2) Make policy and planning personnel responsible to the caucus or the members as a whole.
3) Remove some of the power to appoint from the leader and make that elected from the Legislature or Council as a whole
4) Review the approval mandate for senior civil servants to reflect an obligation to table items of controversy, high value or precedent setting
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5) Improve the research capacity of the Legislative Library and make it more open to individual members
6) In the Case of the city, consider changing the EPC to a planning and policy research group accessible to all members
7) Add one additional staff member to every Councilor’s office. (these folks currently cover much more population with much less resources than Provincial members)
8) Change the speaker’s authority to compel the legitimate answering of questions
This topic may also has meaning to those looking at Federal politics so if we can address the problem here, perhaps some of the solutions will be taken up elsewhere.
It was brought to my attention that I missed an important one which was kind of scheduled for another topic but is equally worthwhile here.
ReplyDelete"Stop muzzling the elected members"
The Leaders office should not be trying to be so politically correct about everything. Let the members peak their minds. Have a little faith! The public will sort out fast enough who is full of baloney and who isn't. A really good example occurred this week (the week of this writing) when Councilor Paula Havixbeck was stripped of her EPC role for spitting out the truth that the current tax increase was completely unnecessary.
Looking back on the earlier comments, and especially considering that Manitoba United deliberately chooses not to have a leader at this time it may seem that we are trying to be negative toward leaders. Not so! We just see a different role and an important one. We want the leader to be a coach, a trainer, a facilitator a motivator but not a dictator or a private policy creator.
ReplyDelete