The canary in the Parliamentary mine is dead, as dead as the Monty Python parrot. It’s a former canary, an ex-canary.

The canary of which I speak is democracy, the right of people through the ballot box, to expect that Members of Parliament will look after their affairs.

The expulsion of John Cummins, Conservative MP from Delta-Richmond East, from the Fisheries Committee makes it clear with breath taking clarity, that Mr. Cummins was not elected to represent his constituency but to do what he’s told.

Cummins is a maverick in that he truly believes in representative democracy. His riding, a coastal one, depends in large measure on the health of the British Columbia salmon fishery and since 1993 has elected Mr. Cummins, a former commercial fisherman, to protect their interests, a mandate he takes very seriously. In this case, the multi-flawed Fisheries Act is before the Commons Fisheries Committee.

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans has been a disaster on the West Coast since the Mulroney days when it was politicized in order to accommodate Alcan’s Kemano Completion Plan, which would have been an environmental catastrophe. The government of the day buried a full study of the Alcan plan  done by the solid, soon to be ex DFO scientists, which strongly condemned the project on environmental grounds. This report stayed suppressed until a copy was leaked to me in 1994 during the heated public debate that saw the project tubed by the Harcourt government. This same department, instead of acting as the policeman in the environment, has become a shill for the Fish Farm industry which is wiping out wild BC salmon. No one has followed these and other west coast fisheries debacles more thoroughly than Mr. Cummins.

But the issue is not Mr. Cummins opinions but whether, as an MP he can not only express them but try to have them implemented.

Let us go back a bit. Prime Minister Harper and Mr. Cummins come from the Reform party where one of its raisons d’etre was to bring in Parliamentary reform, very much including allowing MPs themselves to make the appointments to various Commons Committees, to appoint the Chairs and to debate matters without the government whip telling them what to discuss or how to vote.

During the run-up to the 2006 election we heard the term “democracy deficit” for the first time and, by golly, Mr. Harper would see the independence of Commons Committees as paramount to Commons reforms.

Here are the comments on Cummins dismissal from the Conservative whip, Jay Hill. “We have to have all of our committee members solidly onside with the government’s agenda … you can imagine how it would look … if, at committee, we were to lose the entire bill because of one vote, and it was Mr. Cummins vote.”  Thus the Commons canary is killed.

We are taught in school that we have “responsible government” which means that the Prime Minister and Cabinet are hostage to the approval of the House of Commons. The facts are quite the opposite – in fact the Prime Minister controls the House of Commons in many ways, not the least of which is his power to refuse to sign a naughty MP’s nomination papers. A classic example was John Nunziata who, like all Liberal candidates in 1993, promised to repeal the Goods and Services Act. When, after the Liberal victory the Minister of Finance brought in a budget that didn’t get rid of the GST, Nunziata voted against it. He had, after all,promised his constituents that it being Liberal Party policy, he would do so. Nunziata was tossed out of the Liberal caucus and Prime Minister Chretien refused to sign his nomination papers in 1997.

Nunziata and Cummins demonstrate that Canadian MPs have about as much power as did a member of the old Soviet Presidium. Pierre Trudeau once said that 50 yards off the Hill, MPs were nobodies. I have always wondered why the geographical limitation – MPs are nobodies, period.

Parliament is run by the Prime Minister’s office by the Prime Minister on the advice on unelected advisors. Not since the fall of Sir John A. Macdonald over the Pacific Scandal, in 1873, has a majority government fallen and in Macdonald’s day there was nothing like the party discipline we see today.

The good electors of Delta-Richmond East have just been informed that democracy, Harper style, hasn’t changed, which is to say there is none. As with the bad old Libs,  MPs are not allowed to represent their constituents nor permitted to fulfill election promises but are ciphers to do and say precisely as they are told.

John Cummins is a good man, an honourable man, a man who listens to his constituents and who tries to represent them – a fatal combination for a member of the Canadian House of Commons.