HE DARED EXPOSE OUR SHAM COMMONS

MP Violates Taboo And Grabs Mace After Liberal 'Poison Pill' Kills 4 Years
Of Work

Sitting in the House of Commons watching four years of work go down the
drain, feeling more than usually despondent about the irrelevancy of the
ordinary MP, Keith Martin finally snapped.

Moments before, his private member's bill calling for simple possession of
marijuana to be decriminalized had been killed when Liberal MPs, on the
Prime Minister's strict orders, stood and voted for a "poison pill"
amendment denying it second reading -- an unprecedented bit of
parliamentary sleight of hand designed to sidestep the convention that
private member's bills are not "whipped." His Alliance caucus mates rose to
walk out in protest. The member for Esquimault-Juan de Fuca had another idea.

"I said to myself, this is your last, best chance to draw attention to this
issue, so you'd better have the courage to pick that thing up."

"That thing" was the Mace, the large, gold-encrusted staff that rests upon
the clerks' table immediately in front of the Speaker's chair when the
House is in session: symbol of the Speaker's authority and sacred totem of
parliamentary democracy. Mr. Martin walked down to the centre aisle, picked
up the five-foot-long Mace, and turned toward the Speaker. "We don't live
in a democracy any more," he declared in a loud voice. He glared over at
the Liberal front bench, then put the Mace back where he'd found it.

"I was fed up," he says -- fed up at the rights of MPs being slowly
whittled away to nothing, fed up with MPs being treated as "nothing but
voting machines," fed up with seeing his every effort to change the system
go nowhere, most of all fed up that nobody seemed to care. And now this: A
sneak procedural trick had not only killed his bill, but eviscerated the
parliamentary tradition on which whatever slim hopes a private member's
bill has of passage depend.

"The public need to know what's happening in this House, and they don't,"
Mr. Martin comments. "When they do find out, they're shocked." He had to do
something to grab the public's attention. Grabbing the Mace seemed the most
logical way.

Understand that this is in violation of every parliamentary rule and
convention. The last time an MP so much as touched the Mace, more than a
decade ago, he was called before the Bar of the House and reprimanded: the
parliamentary equivalent of six of the best. Mr. Martin's actions are now
under investigation by the Speaker; the government is pushing for him to be
suspended until the end of the current session, a month or more from now.

At least they take some conventions seriously. Mace-grabbing they take very
seriously indeed. On the other hand, that little convention about MPs being
elected to Parliament to represent the people -- deliberating and voting on
legislation according as either their conscience or their constituents
dictate -- well, that's a nice little fiction, isn't it? Members of the
Parliament of Canada, as everyone knows, have one role and one role only:
to stand up and sit down when they're told.

And private member's bills? Legislation put forth, not by the government,
but by ordinary, individual MPs? Don't make me laugh. In the current
Parliament, some 229 such bills have been introduced in the Commons. Most
of these die then and there: A small fraction win a lottery -- literally --
which entitles their sponsors to go before a committee to plead why their
bill should be brought to a vote. A small fraction of these -- just five
out of the original 229 -- succeed in persuading the committee, a majority
of whom are government MPs, to make them "votable." And that's just the
start of the many legislative hoops through which they then pass. Exactly
two of those five bills have even made it as far as Mr. Martin's bill did,
and none have made it to committee: the clause-by-clause examination that
bills receive after passing second reading.

So Mr. Martin was entitled to feel a little bit heady. He had spent the
better part of two years researching and drafting his bill. It had taken
another two years for it to get to this stage. And its chances looked good.
It enjoyed support on all sides of the House -- 55% to 60% of the Members
were in favour, he estimated. And there was that convention that votes on
private member's bills were free votes. Why, the Prime Minister himself was
on record to the same effect. Could it be that his bill might actually
pass? More than that, could an ordinary MP, not even a member of the
governing party, actually make a difference?

No, actually. The bill itself might not be whippable, but amendments could:
so ruled the Speaker earlier in the session, after an awkward 15-minute
deliberation. From that moment, Mr. Martin's bill was toast.

Of course, not every private bill meets the same fate. Three have passed in
the current Parliament, all originating in the Senate. There was the bill
to name Canada's horse. And the one establishing a parliamentary poet
laureate. And a third honouring Sir Wilfrid Laurier. "If my bill had dealt
with making April 2 disabled dog day, it would have passed," Mr. Martin
says. But because it dealt with something substantive, because it called
upon MPs to think and act on a matter of public interest on their own, as
free individuals freely elected, it was deemed too threatening. "It just
makes a mockery of democracy," he says in frustration.

Parliamentary reform is of course one of the youthful Mr. Martin's
passions. Until last night, he might have permitted himself to hope that,
in some small sliver of a way, it might become a reality. He was wrong.