The trouble in Ottawa

Speaker Peter Milliken offers a few parting words.

Canada’s longest-serving Speaker of the House of Commons says federal politics have become more partisan and less democratic than they were when he first arrived in Ottawa as a rookie MP. This erosion is due mainly to the increase in the power of party leaders, Peter Milliken told Postmedia News in an exclusive interview at his rural home in the Kingston area.

"The leader says you vote this way or else you’re out, and bango, you have to do it, or else. I don’t think that’s the way our democracy was intended to function," said Milliken, who was first elected to the Ontario riding of Kingston and the Islands in 1988.