House of Commons Committee Chairs: perspectives of two Members of Parliament.

• Author: Dubois, Alexis

In this article, the author looks at the issue of the impartiality of chairs of the House of Commons standing committees during the 41st Parliament. He explains the importance of the Standing Orders of the House of Commons, constitutional conventions on responsible government and the disciplinary mechanisms influencing the behaviour of committee members. He suggests reforms to improve the operation of Canada's House of Commons by examining the situation in the United Kingdom and the way in which the Standing Orders of the House of Commons have evolved over time.

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In his classic book The Parliament of Canada, which describes the many aspects of the business of the House of Commons, C.E.S. Franks noted a paradoxical aspect of the roles and responsibilities of standing committee chairs that is still apparent today:

Chairmen in effect wore three hats: one, they were to ensure that the committee proceedings were orderly and fair, the same sort of impartial role as the Speaker plays for the House; two, they had some responsibility for the effectiveness of the committees and the quality of this work, and helped to organize and lead investigations; and three, they had a function of protecting the government's interests when these were under attack by opposition members of the committee. To the parliamentary observer, a committee chair's first and third roles appear to be in clear contradiction. How is it possible for a member of the government party to be impartial while protecting the interests of the executive branch, or the interests of the opposition parties in the opposite case? This paper will describe the tension that arises in the course of committee chairs' work, thus revealing the limits of their impartiality. The normative position on this point is that it is desirable for the proper operation of parliamentary institutions that the first two roles, as outlined above, be properly performed, even if that means abandoning the third.

The analysis is built on a literature review which includes a roundtable discussion conducted by the Canadian Parliamentary Review with different Speakers of legislatures around Canada in the summer of 2004. Other examples were taken from a research conducted by Lynn Matte, parliamentary intern in 2010-2011, with government committee chairs Hon. Michael Chong and James Rajotte. To supplement the research, Michael Chong, Chair of the Standing Committee on Official Languages, and Pierre-Luc Dusseault, the then Chair of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics and member of the Official Opposition, were interviewed on May 8 and 16, 2012, respectively.

Standing Orders, party cohesion and interests

Committee work is characterized by a set of rules, conventions and privileges (both express and implicit), that members must know how to use in order to perform and fulfill their legislative roles.

The Standing Orders of the House of Commons provides the rules that a MP must obey and are the primary source of information on legislative matters. Chapter 13 contains numerous provisions on parliamentary committees, such as the political affiliation of the chair (Standing Order 106 (2)), membership of committees (Standing Order 104 (2)) and powers and mandates (Standing Order 108). Committee members may introduce motions for the purpose of organizing the conduct of proceedings, establishing the committee's agenda (studies, bills, appointments, travel and so on) and allotting speaking time. For practical or procedural reasons, they may also strike a subcommittee on agenda and procedure responsible for those matters. The Standing Orders also apply to all activities of the House of Commons and remain in force from parliament to parliament until the House decides otherwise. Historically, amendments to the Standing Orders have mainly been made by consensus among the parties represented in Parliament. All cases for which no provision is made in the Standing Orders must be decided by the Speaker of the House.

A number of less formal, unwritten conventions and practices particular to Westminster-style systems do exist, although it is difficult to provide an exhaustive list, and they influence members in the course of their legislative work. Unlike American-style presidential systems, it is a constitutional convention of responsible government that every government that is defeated in the House on a question of confidence (motions of no confidence, motions that the government declares to be questions of confidence, some motions for the granting of supply, the budget and the Address in Reply to the Speech from the Throne) must resign. Consequently, mechanisms to guarantee party cohesion have been developed to ensure greater predictability in legislative business by guaranteeing a higher degree of coordination of members' individual actions. In formal terms, a parallel may be drawn between the parliamentary secretary in a committee, who acts as a link to the Minister's office and as a spokesperson to explain the government's position, and the government whip in the House in that the former ensures that the party's position is known to committee colleagues. Consequently, since the government party holds a majority in all committees in the 41st Parliament, if it maintains cohesion, it can exercise a major influence by virtue of its numeric superiority. According to Michael Chong, Chair of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Official Languages and member of the governing party, the analogy between the parliamentary secretary and the whip is not quite accurate. "It's even worse," he suggests. "Parliamentary secretaries are essentially run by the ministers' offices and every parliamentary secretary is assigned a staffer out of the minister's office, a parliamentary secretary assistant." As a result, work done in committee is controlled by the executive branch based on specific political objectives, in addition to being subject to the usual rules of the House of Commons. Pierre-Luc Dusseault, the then Chair of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics and member of the Official Opposition, contends a comparison can be drawn not only with the position of whip, but also with that of House leader:

The parliamentary secretary is often the person who tells the member who will ask the witnesses questions and in what order, who issues the instructions most of the time, and the initiative rarely comes from any other member (during meetings of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics). Parliamentary secretaries...