Like fox, I guess: Michael Chong's Reform Bill sails through

(previous post here)

Jennifer Ditchburn has the deets on the passage yesterday of backbencher Michael Chong's Reform Bill, the one that encourages parliamentary party caucuses to assert their authority to review, and if necessary dismiss and replace, party leaders.

Chong has been savaged for tweaking, possibly diluting, the details of his proposal, but evidently that process won it enough support to make its passage so unstoppable that the threatened leaders had to pretend to like it, and virtually the whole house voted for it.

I've long thought that this is an appetite that grows with the eating: feed backbenchers (journalists too!) merely the notion that it is not illegal or impossible or unconstitutional for MPs to, you know, participate in parliamentary life, and gradually they will develop a taste for being kingmakers rather than nobodies. Imagine a government accountable to the people we elect -- it would be like catching up to where we were in 1848 all over again.