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Until the 1930s, it was the convention and indeed the law in Canada that an MP, on appointment to Cabinet, had first to resign his seat and run in a by-election. The reason: his role had changed, from being a watchdog on the government to being a member of it. As such he was obliged to ask his electors’ permission.

Contrast that to the present day. The idea of members of the governing party acting as any sort of effective check on the prime minister or Cabinet is so far removed from current practice that I doubt many Canadians could even imagine it. Nowadays, as Brent Rathgeber writes in this eloquent lament for what we have lost, they are more cheerleaders than watchdogs. They do not see their role as to hold government to account; indeed, they see themselves as part of it. They “show up at government funding announcements in their ridings,” he writes, “often with oversized novelty cheques (sometimes bearing the party logo) bragging and taking credit for the pork that has just been delivered.”

What we have lost, in short, is “responsible government,” the great achievement of pre-Confederation Canada. Government is no longer responsible to Parliament in any meaningful way. Opposition MPs lack the tools, and government MPs lack the incentive, preferring to angle for one of the many scores of offices in the prime minister’s power to bestow. “Canada,” Rathgeber writes, “has had responsible government since 1848, and a constitution since 1867. The latter remains substantially unaltered; the former has been almost completely destroyed.”

The critique is neither exaggerated nor new. Indeed, similar complaints have been heard for decades; what is new, however, is that the present government came to power promising to restore what previous governments had undermined. But Rathgeber is no ordinary critic. The decline of Parliament, the neutering of MPs, isn’t an abstract complaint to him: as a Conservative MP, he lived it. He saw how the system has broken down close up, from the inside. And, exceptionally, he chose to do something about it, first by resigning from caucus in protest, and now with this book.

As he describes, nothing in our present system works as it is supposed to. The dominance of the executive over Parliament, and of party leaders over caucus, pervades everything, from how we nominate candidates to how we elect party leaders, from how elections are conducted to how Parliament works, or fails to. Other checks and balances — the media, the bureaucracy, the courts — are no substitute for a democratically elected Parliament, accountable to the people and as such in a unique position to demand accountability from government.

Notably, Rathgeber makes clear the real-world consequences of this, such as the decades-long failure of Parliament to control public spending, or, in the extreme, scandals like the Wright-Duffy affair, in which a sitting legislator was paid tens of thousands of dollars to keep quiet about a matter embarrassing to the government: the logical consequence of a system where all power resides in the Prime Minister’s Office.

“Irresponsible government,” he writes, “has not served Canadians well.” But before they can be persuaded to demand change, “the electorate will need to be convinced that reform is in their best interest in a tangible way, not merely at a conceptual level.”

Rathgeber offers several recommendations for reform. Of these, the most intriguing is his suggestion that members of Cabinet be appointed from outside Parliament — a hybrid of the American and Canadian systems, in which the government would be accountable to the Commons but not of it. If MPs had no possibility of becoming ministers, he reasons, they would be less inclined to servility, more inclined to perform the watchdog role as of old. I am reflexively hostile — smaller cabinets would achieve much the same purpose, surely — but the idea can’t be dismissed outright.

And certainly any would-be reformers would do well to start with the analysis offered in these pages: as clear-eyed as it is forthright, a passionate call to arms, for a democracy in need of defenders.

Andrew Coyne is a columnist with Postmedia; his columns appear in the National Post, the Ottawa Citizen, and other papers in the chain. His writing has also appeared in Maclean’s, Saturday Night, the Globe and Mail, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Time. Coyne appears frequently as a commentator on television political affairs programs, including the “At Issue” panel on CBC’s The National.