Empowering MPs means strengthening Canadian democracy

What Canada needs is a re-engagement and recalibration of the role of the MP, rooted not so much in a drastic change in formal powers as much as it is a respect for the powers that they already have. Surveys of former parliamentarians commonly express the fact that, in contrast to the well-organized, staffed, and funded Office of the Prime Minister, MPs enter office with little training or understanding of their role—outside of toeing the party line—and how they can affect change.
Conservative MP Michael Cooper, pictured on the Hill in a scrum. 'What Canada needs is a re-engagement and recalibration of the role of the MP, rooted not so much in a drastic change in formal powers as much as it is a respect for the powers that they already have,' writes Sam Routley.

Canada’s federal political institutions are widely considered to be inadequate for the country’s democratic needs. For the most part, the main problem is the 

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