ONE THING PAUL MARTIN oonce promised to tackle as prime minister was the “democratic deficit” found on Parliament Hill.

Well, some of the things he promised were achieved, but we find ourselves today with a far greater “democratic deficit” than the one Mr. Martin saw as worrisome, and it’s found, albeit in different forms, at all levels of government.

In his campaign for the leadership of the Liberal Party, Mr. Martin targeted the alienation of Canadian citizens from the federal government and the erosion of power of individual MPs. He wanted to broaden public participation in government and restore public confidence in government and federal politicians.

Key to most of his suggestions was restoring the individual MP as a link between his or her constituents and government in a meaningful way. His six-point plan called for letting MPs use their own judgment more often by loosening party discipline; giving MPs more influence on legislation by strengthening the committee review process; making it easier for MPs to initiate legislation; strengthening Commons committees, and allowing parliamentary review of senior government appointments.

Instead of all that happening, and despite the fact we have a minority government at Ottawa, recent developments have led to MPs’ powers being further emasculated.

Take, for example, this year’s production by the Harper government of a budget implementation bill of nearly 1,000 pages that included hundreds of measures that had little, if anything, to do with the 2010-11 budget. An example was the strange proposal to privatize Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.

And more recently, there is the bizarre decision to gut the 2011 Census by eliminating the long forms that formed the basis for much of Statistic Canada’s continuing analyses. The resulting statistics are seen as vital for maintaining Canada’s health and social programs and help businesses foster economic growth.

But without any advance consultation, and no involvement of a Commons committee, the Stephen Harper government has decreed, by cabinet fiat, that filling out the socalled “long form” census, sent to one in five households, will be abandoned in favour of voluntary responses which experts agree will lack the reliability of a compulsory census.

Some see the move as an echo of the campaigning by the far right against the U.S. census as being a symbol of government intrusiveness.

More seriously, the medical community sees the decision as costing health planners a vital source of data and ultimately undermining health care nationwide. In a sharply worded editorial, the Canadian Medical Association Journal accuses the government of putting ideology ahead of “evidence-based decision making” and taking an “uninformed approach to public policy.”

“Without this information, Canada is stripped of an important resource to guide social interventions and investments to improve the health and wellbeing of Canadians,” wrote Dr. Paul Hebert, editor-in-chief of the Journal, and co-author Dr. Marsha Cohen.

Instead of proposing the change in draft legislation that would go before a Commons committee for debate and public hearings, the census change was simply disclosed by publishing the fiat in the Canada Gazette, on a summer weekend.

Clearly, a voluntary survey is not a census. As a Toronto Star columnist noted, its data “would be skewed, some groups having responded and others not, like the super-rich at one end and the very poor on the other.”

And the results from the voluntary survey could not be overlaid on existing data, dating back decades. Even if a future government were to restore the survey, a breaking of the chain of information could not be repaired, and the storehouse of existing analyses would potentially be rendered useless.

Interestingly, the move has been assailed by virtually every stakeholder, including the Canadian Federation of Municipalities, and we’ve seen virtually no one supporting it.

So much for Harper-style democracy. But similar trends can be seen at the other levels of government.

At Queen’s Park this year, we saw a Budget bill that was almost as big as the one at Ottawa, one of its countless provisions being governance changes for the Law Society of Upper Canada.

And then there’s the case of the new “eco fees” imposed July 1 by the McGuinty government without any public hearings on how they should be calculated for collection by the armslength agency Stewardship Ontario. (Common sense would suggest they should be collected from manufacturers and form part of the retail price, not mysteriously tacked on to a retail price that’s subject to the 13% Harmonized Sales Tax.)

At the municipal level, the democratic deficit shows up as an ever-increasing trend by councils to do most of their real work out of the public eye, by holding in camera sessions on potentially controversial issues, on the spurious ground that the subject might one day involve some legal action.