Canadian Committees

As a concept, Parliament is intuitive to define yet complex to substantiate. Although in theory it lies at the intersection of civil society and the political establishment, in practice committees are the more accessible microcosms of Parliament that empower affected stakeholders to come out of the woodwork. Viewed from this paradigm, the Canadian House of Commons committee system is far from broken, and its continued evolution in empowering backbench MPs in legislation since Confederation has not been routine nor particularly in vain. Neither are technical inadequacies within the House’s Standing Orders (SO) a cause for concern, whether now or in the past. Instead, committee expectations – vis-à-vis their broader causal narratives – need to be tempered: Legislatively, they have too much power, if nostalgia gives way to reassert the original vision of Parliament as the McGrath reform last explicitly argued. The bottom line is simply that it is untenable to investigate fundamental questions on responsible

government and Parliamentary democracy at large without deeming committees as partly independent quasi-institutions worth studying in depth, especially after recent international developments in literature quantifying committee influence and identifying external stakeholders. Regardless, their major roles affect the remaining stakeholders – virtually unstudied in Canada – beyond the confines of Parliament in the media, the public, the bureaucracy, the judiciary and special interest groups. At heart, this inquiry is on the fundamental nature of the interaction between the independent legislator and their constituents.
After the necessary background on the epistemology and academic value for the study of committees through causal narratives is first developed, this report advances the argument that discretion in expectations is required. Committees are neither ineffective nor uninfluential, because to argue either line misses the fundamental nature of responsible government precluding legislative decision-making outside Cabinet. Accordingly, this report next introduces the theoretically unclear and empirically ambivalent foundation for committees, and traces its evolution in causal narratives over Canadian democracy to reject the myth that there is a singular objective framework to conceptualize committee work innately. A normative stakeholder-centric perspective is consequently taken and committee frameworks are comparatively analyzed in North American and Westminster perspectives to define relevant interested parties. Afterwards, the scope of this paper is derived from academic and grey literature affecting these actors: chiefly executive and political actors in caucus and Cabinet, and in less attention the public servants, judiciary, special interest groups, the media, and the public. The conclusion proposes an empirical framework to assess committee performance. Annex I substantiates the methodology used; Annex II provides a timeline. “[T]he underlying problems in the committee [system] are not procedural,” C.E.S. Franks reiterated seven years after his inaugural study. “They are deep down in the way that our system works.”
The Underlying Problem
Central to this essay is the troubling, yet seemingly simple question: If academics and students of Parliament do not care much for committees as a legislative tool in Canada, why study Canadian committees at all?

While an important question, its premise is flawed, since Canadian committees are the key to more than merely Canadian legislative problems – they provide an exciting and testable foil for the simplified causal narratives affecting legislatures, domestic and abroad, that ultimately help define a national legislature as a distinct polis. By shortly exploring the bedrock for the empirical rationale to study Canadian committees, both the gaps in literature and the universally Canadian implications for studying committees are delineated. At the end, this argument set the stage to investigate the unclear theoretical background and recent ambiguous history for the role of an independent legislator vis-à-vis the causal narratives guiding the committee

system.
Finding the Missing Link
To restate the obvious, the rationale for empirical research is found uniquely in its nuance. Yet, unlike in other Westminster democracies or in the United States, legislative committees in Canada remain chronically understudied by academics – and, not surprisingly, are largely trivialized by their stakeholders. Thirty years have passed since C.E.S. Franks last published his authoritative 1987 work The Parliament of Canada, barely two years after the McGrath parliamentary reforms reinvigorated the earlier Lefebvre reforms to empower committees and backbench MPs. Since then, little has changed in the world of academia – besides a handful of papers, the Canadian literature on generalized committees remains virtually static, isolated from the quantitative focuses elsewhere and the impact of committees’ influence outside the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). Elsewhere, the literature moved on. Empirical frameworks developed to judge committee influence and effectiveness in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand were not exported to the uniquely Canadian federal experience. In the US, committees became analyzed less in terms of their non-legislative impacts, but rather more on the relationship between legislators and their constituents, and especially the methods used by the former to cultivate personal votes. Regardless, neither school of thought made it over to Ottawa. The committee structure was deemed irreverent; the academic locus remained on the individual effect of committee reports, and not so much on the legislators behind the curtain. Filling the void, Canadian MPs and insiders wrote bestsellers and op-eds decrying the presumed legislative democratic deficit, and while much can be said on its oversimplification – theoretically and historically, this exact argument is later made – the uneasy state of the Canadian role for Parliament is more pronounced.