Editor:
Re: Voters are poorly served by strict party discipline, letter to the editor, April 26
Teetering, as we have been since confederation, on the very brink of democracy, the centralization of power in the Prime Minister's Office has effectively hollowed parliament's role, with the dictates of caucus solidarity suffocating the regional voices of individual MPs by rigid party discipline, demanding sheep-like obedience.
No lasting progress will have been made to correct the country's "democracy deficit" and chart a new course toward the restoration of public trust without a truly democratic separation of powers into a functional system of political checks and balances, as constituted by three clearly independent branches of government:
* a legislative branch to make laws;
* an executive branch to enforce and carry out the laws; and
* a judicial branch to interpret the laws.
When shaping their own constitutional concept of government in 1776, the guiding principle for America's revolutionary founding fathers was that there should never be another "king" (i.e. a branch of government wielding the power of a king).
By contrast, having failed to provide an effective system of political checks and balances, Canada's cloned copy of the British parliamentary system left us constitutionally and democratically constipated !
E.W. Bopp
