Thirty years since C.E.S. Franks published his authoritative 1987 work The Parliament of Canada, and despite the elevated media profile for would-be parliamentarian reformers and refuseniks after the Lefebvre and McGrath parliamentary reforms, the current Canadian House of Commons committee system remains comparatively understudied to similar Westminster-style democracies. Decades worth of government responses to committee recommendations are largely untouched, even by the Library of Parliament; empirical frameworks developed to judge committee influence and effectiveness in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand have not been exported to the uniquely Canadian federal experience. These gaps in literature impact the study of cabinet-parliamentary
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Since “[we] often think we have defined a problem when we have described its causes,” it is not surprising the understudied causal story tying together Parliamentary reform with maligned committees presupposes the underlying issue: a legislative democratic deficit. On the contrary, the foundational basis of responsible government lies at odds with “irresponsible” committees. Despite this widely-held belief of a democratic deficit in Canada, and the ensuing discussion on the limits of executive federalism, the role of weak legislative federalism in its essential propagation has largely been overlooked. Empowered committees with intrinsic decision-making powers, however, undermine the main source of powers for individual ministerial responsibility and executive …show more content…
Writing at the same time as Confederation, Walter Bagehot argued the superiority of the British Westminster system is because “[t]he natural tendency of the members of every legislature is to make themselves conspicuous.” Democratic legitimacy, Bagehot inferred, pre-empts either vocal or legislative dissent – and not ipso facto into vehicles for activist decision-making in governmental affairs. Accordingly, given Cabinet acts as the predominant “buckle” fusing the executive and the legislative branches together, the “mixed motives” for the lower House will in Bagehot’s conceptualization constantly “urge them to oppose the executive” in the legislature, if only due to the virtue that “[t]hey are embodying the purposes of others if they aid; they are advancing their own opinions if they defeat”. Voting Cabinet down, in theory, is the primary modus operandi for specialist MPs in Westminster-style democracies to voice their constituents’ concerns in session, notwithstanding the politicized Question Period (QP), member statements, opposition days where the opposition controls the House agenda, parliamentary debates, informal lobbying in caucus or in all-party parliamentary groups, and the exceptional Private Members’ Business (PMB) to sift through the adversarial party system to gain enough cross-party support – and finally, of
Since “[we] often think we have defined a problem when we have described its causes,” it is not surprising the understudied causal story tying together Parliamentary reform with maligned committees presupposes the underlying issue: a legislative democratic deficit. On the contrary, the foundational basis of responsible government lies at odds with “irresponsible” committees. Despite this widely-held belief of a democratic deficit in Canada, and the ensuing discussion on the limits of executive federalism, the role of weak legislative federalism in its essential propagation has largely been overlooked. Empowered committees with intrinsic decision-making powers, however, undermine the main source of powers for individual ministerial responsibility and executive …show more content…
Writing at the same time as Confederation, Walter Bagehot argued the superiority of the British Westminster system is because “[t]he natural tendency of the members of every legislature is to make themselves conspicuous.” Democratic legitimacy, Bagehot inferred, pre-empts either vocal or legislative dissent – and not ipso facto into vehicles for activist decision-making in governmental affairs. Accordingly, given Cabinet acts as the predominant “buckle” fusing the executive and the legislative branches together, the “mixed motives” for the lower House will in Bagehot’s conceptualization constantly “urge them to oppose the executive” in the legislature, if only due to the virtue that “[t]hey are embodying the purposes of others if they aid; they are advancing their own opinions if they defeat”. Voting Cabinet down, in theory, is the primary modus operandi for specialist MPs in Westminster-style democracies to voice their constituents’ concerns in session, notwithstanding the politicized Question Period (QP), member statements, opposition days where the opposition controls the House agenda, parliamentary debates, informal lobbying in caucus or in all-party parliamentary groups, and the exceptional Private Members’ Business (PMB) to sift through the adversarial party system to gain enough cross-party support – and finally, of