“Could things be different, could there be a better way?”
CBC radio’s Anna Maria Tremonti is not the first Toronto-area media type to hoist consensus government onto her lap for some snuggles.
“There is another model of government in Canada, just look north,” she trumpeted earlier this year as Canada headed into its fourth federal election campaign in seven years, adding, “it seems fair” to do so considering the rancour and guile that was stinking up the House of Commons floor.
I guess Tremonti missed that day in the legislative assembly when Michael Miltenberger, whose relentless drive toward the premiership presses onward, menaced a member opposite of him with a slashing gesture to the throat.
But to those unfamiliar with the manner of government that afflicts us here in the Northwest Territories, I can understand the initial appeal. It’s like discovering a lost continent in your own backyard, small and inhabitable though it may be.
One day you’re sitting glumly in a Queen Street juice bar, sipping away on your acai berry smoothie and wishing there was something more interesting about Canadian politics than Stephen Harper and Dalton McGuinty, blah, blah, blah.
Then along comes consensus government, with its MLAs in cute seal and moosehide jackets and origin myths about hunters sitting in igloos and tents “working together,” contemplating caribou and the millions more dollars needed to complete the Deh Cho Bridge.
It’s very romantic, very Last of the Mohicans. Never mind that other than us, Nunavut, and some godforsaken islands in the English Channel, there is no other nation or province of peoples who would dare accept it as means of government.
To be fair, Tremonti’s feature on consensus government is not a total puff piece. She brings out Carolynn Bennett, one of the few remaining Liberal MPs, who describes her horror at witnessing MLAs in the Nunavut legislature carve up the corpse of its federally-funded budget, more concerned about hockey rinks for their home communities than claiming a common vision for their future. I’m sure Tom Beaulieu, one of three incumbent MLAs to be acclaimed this election, can relate. He wants a seat on cabinet because “that’s where money is being divided.”
“Without a party structure, each member of the legislature was just sticking up for their riding and there was no team approach or ability to do a master plan,” confided Bennett. “It was just awful.”
Nunavut MLA Hunter Tootoo tries to defend consensus government. at least with the consensus approach, members seated on the opposite side of the floor can stand up and applaud the government when it does something right, Tremonti is told.
Hay River South MLA Jane Groenewegen adds that visitors to the NWT legislative assembly have walked away remarking “how conciliatory it is” before acknowledging that it’s when MLAs get together behind closed doors to decide who gets to be premier and on cabinet that the “de facto party politics come in.”
Ah, isn’t that a kicker? What’s the point in pretending you have consensus government when everyone knows all you’re really doing is practising “party politics” in secret?
What wasn’t addressed in Tremonti’s piece and rarely anywhere else, are the historic realities of consensus government. it has always been a proto-government; a precursor to more responsible, inclusive government wherever it has occurred before. This is the reality: the first premier of the Northwest Territories is an old, dead white guy named Sir Frederick Haultain. That hardly seems in keeping with the idealistic notions of consensus government we keep hearing about today.
Haultain came over from great Britain and eventually got into Conservative politics when those opposing him began coalescing under the Liberal banner. He was premier of the Northwest Territories, or “North-West Territories” as it was called back then, from 1897 to 1905 before it was carved up to form Saskatchewan and Alberta. His consensus government was the last government on the books when NWT Commissioner John Parker ceded the premiership to George Braden in 1980 and it has stubbornly stuck with us ever since.
When former premier Joe Handley says “the present system is about as good as it gets,” and premier hopeful Bob McLeod says people “have to start earlier rather than wait for the writ to be dropped” if they want see changes to the way we’re governed, they’re not telling us consensus government works, they’re telling us to go get bent.
Consensus government only works when it works for them, and toward that consensus they agree.
Why don’t you take that back to Ottawa, Anna Maria.
- Mike W. Bryant is assignment editor for Yellowknifer. Contact him at 766-8236 or by e-mail at minder@nnsl.com