Interest groups and Parliamentary committees: leveling the playing field.

• Author: Marlin, Marguerite

Parliamentary committees in Canada are undeniably important resources for interest groups--particularly in terms of gaining information, articulating one's message on public record, and establishing oneself as a legitimate stakeholder in the eyes of politicians, government and the public. However, one of the intended functions of standing committees--to serve as a venue for non-governmental influence on policy--has largely proved to be a canard in Canada's House of Commons. The first part of this article prioritizes the challenges facing non-governmental actors who wish to exert policy influence through parliamentary committees. It asserts that standing committees' function of carrying out studies has more surmountable challenges than the function of legislative reviews. The second part of the article emphasizes that two developments are imperative in order to realize the potential committee studies hold: first, the open-ended nature of studies and the inadequacy of follow-up mechanisms should be addressed (with the scope of questions designed to feed into a pipeline of future legislative activity wherever feasible), and second, long-overdue accountability mechanisms should be introduced to ensure that the government responds to committee reports upon request.

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As the most recent edition of the House of Commons Procedure and Practice stipulates, the general mandate of the Parliament of Canada's standing committees is to review the policy and performance of their corresponding government departments. (1) To fulfill this mandate, committees may call upon non-governmental witnesses to gather information for studies and consult on the merits of proposed or existing policies. With the exception of the Standing Committee on Finance in Canada (which also has pre-budgetary hearings), the official activities of parliamentary committees that involve hearing from non-governmental representatives take two main forms: reviewing draft legislation and producing studies which lead to the creation of committee reports. Both activities provide opportunities for nongovernmental policy input. However, among interest groups in Canada, a distinct strategic preference for informal meetings with Cabinet ministers or other influential politicians over committee meeting presentations has long been observed; the effectiveness of the former strategy has far outshone the latter. (2) As a result, interest groups without sufficient resources to pour into the burgeoning economy of consultant lobbyists and other costly networking strategies are put at a disadvantage in the realm of policy influence. (3)

The path to improving the potential for impact of non-governmental policy input through parliamentary committees hinges on the committee function being considered. Of two such functions of the Standing Committees of the House in the Parliament of Canada --legislative reviews and committee studies--the tight grip of party discipline in Canada and the timeline of legislative reviews in committees renders the function of committee studies a more fruitful site of reform than legislative reviews. However, in order to improve the transformative potential of committee studies, two issues must be addressed: the open-ended nature of many such studies (which limits the transferability of such studies to the development of legislation) and the inadequacy of follow-up mechanisms to prompt a formal government response to study reports from committees.

In this article, interviews with three nongovernmental witnesses from the environmental sector who appeared before parliamentary committees in recent years--Christine Wenman of Ecology North, Bill Eggertson of the Canadian Association for Renewable Energies and Martin von Mirbach of WWF Canada --are used to illustrate some of the frustrations that emerged among non-governmental representatives following their participation in hearings for committee studies. (4) Two conclusions percolate from this analysis: first, mechanisms combining the timeliness of reports with the specificity of legislative reviews should be developed for committees to avoid overly-broad studies, and second, the continued failure to mandate compulsory government responses to committee reports is a needless hindrance to the effectiveness of parliamentary committees in achieving their mandate.

The path that parliamentary committees have taken by way of reforms throughout Canada's history is a subject that has been adeptly chronicled by Jack Stilborn, (5) with succinct accounts also provided by Christopher Garner in previous editions of this publication. (6) The storied history that has shaped the current processes and protocols for parliamentary...