Parliamentary scrutiny and redress of grievances.

• Author: Thomas, Paul G.

Parliament is a political forum in which a small group of partisan politicians called the Prime Minister and Cabinet is given the authority and resources to define and implement public policy. They do this subject to the requirement that they regularly account for their actions before the public's elected representatives. This article looks at the traditional concept of accountability as well as some recent innovations such as the work of various officers of Parliament.

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Parliament's role is mainly to examine and to react to the government s policies and actions. This point was well made by John Stuart Mill who wrote "Instead of the function of governing, for which it is radically unfit, the proper office of a representative assembly is to watch and control the government." (1) Watching and controlling has clearly become a huge, if not impossible, job for Parliaments given the scope and complexity of government activities today compared to 1861 when Mill wrote.

Modern legislative scholars would say that Parliaments perform a number of official and unofficial functions within the national and provincial political systems. In more old-fashioned terms, approving legislation and spending, providing scrutiny of policies and administration and providing specific redress of grievances are the historical tasks usually attributed to Parliaments.

Watching and Controlling Modern Governments

I want to focus on the last two tasks--scrutiny of administration and redress of grievances. These are clear expressions of the watching and controlling function of Parliaments written about by Mill. I will focus first on the relationships between Parliaments and bureaucracies.

Watching and controlling activities by Parliaments reflect the uneasy relationship presumed to exist between democracy and bureaucracy. There is the fear that, if left unchecked, bureaucracies can become arrogant, uncontrollable, self-interested, unresponsive and ineffective. Yet societies are forced to rely upon large public organizations with specialized knowledge and skills to achieve productive actions. These facts of life account for our ambivalence (for some people it rises to the level of hostility) towards public bureaucracies.

I am not going to debate whether the negative stereotype of public bureaucracies is accurate or whether the fear of all-powerful bureaucracies is justified. My view is that both images represent gross exaggerations. Also, not all public organizations are the same in terms of being amenable to top-down political direction and control or in terms of their responsiveness to society and individuals. Designing mechanisms of control and scrutiny need to recognize these differences.

Given the vast scope and shifting contours of modern governments, watching and controlling have become difficult, indeed impossible tasks for Parliaments to perform comprehensively on their own.

Recognizing this, Parliaments were forced to depend greatly upon controls within government and on the professionalism of the public service to ensure integrity and fairness in the exercise of public power. They also increasingly sought the assistance of independent agencies serving them to stretch their limited capacity to oversee the decisions and actions of ministers and public servants and to provide complaint mechanisms for individual citizens.

Put simply, independent parliamentary agencies are meant to serve two broad functions: first, to deal with individual complaints about a lack of fairness involved with various types of actions and inactions, and second, to promote improved performance and appropriate standards in the delivery of public programs and services. The two functions are complementary and parliamentary agencies are not doing their whole job if they stop at resolving individual complaints and fail to analyze patterns of decision-making which need improvement.

Clearly, unaided Parliaments could not provide the necessary continuous surveillance of the vast range of administrative decision-making and actions affecting individual citizens. Parliamentarians have always used "casework" on behalf of constituents to oversee the bureaucracy. When problems were blatant or left unresolved, matters could be raised in Question Period or in committees when Estimates were being examined. These efforts were useful as a "spot check" on the exercise of bureaucratic power. By providing a "visible" person to whom citizens could take complaints, constituency service activity puts a "human face" on "big" government. However, the casework approach relied upon the willingness and capacity of individual parliamentarians to secure information, explanations and changes to the decisions of permanent officials. Eventually, Parliaments concluded that the right of citizens to fair treatment should not be as variable as the political redress mechanism left open.

Parliamentary agencies have also stretched the limited organizational capacity of legislatures to provide scrutiny of the operations of departments and agencies. Agencies have provided Parliaments with valuable countervailing information necessary to hold public organizations accountable, especially given the development within governments of a sophisticated communications apparatus intended to put the most positive "spin" possible on their performance.

I start from the premise that the rise of independent parliamentary agencies has been positive. In important and significant ways they have strengthened democracy and accountability. Parliaments in this country could not fulfill their responsibilities in any meaningful way without the assistance of the auxiliary agencies established mainly over the past three decades. So that is the good news.

The Surveillance Challenge

Just because parliamentary agencies serve noble causes on behalf of Parliament does not mean that they are perfect institutions, or that their relationships with other institutions and with citizens are ideal. I want to raise two challenges.

The first and broader challenge involves the intersection...