The reform of Parliament

The reform of Parliament PAULINE JEWETT Getting changes made in the procedures of a legislative assembly is almost as difficult as getting an intractable fellow to change his mind. There is a deep-seated, almost mystical reverence for the established way of doing things and it takes a brash parliamentarian to question the status qua and a great deal of patience and determination on the part of reformers to get any significant reforms pushed through. In Canada, although parliamentary reformers had occasionally been heard from, no significant changes in procedure were made from 1867 to 1955. A closure rule was, it is true, introduced in 1913 but this was a clumsy expedient to answer an immediate situation and was seldom resorted to in later years. It is also true that some partial reforms were effected in 1927 - chiefly a forty-minute limit on speeches, with certain exceptions - but these reforms went no real distance towards improving the effectiveness of the House, regulating debates or apportioning time. The procedures of the House remained in most substantial respects those of 1867. Even the reforms of 1955 came only after years of frustration. As long before as May, 1940 the then Prime Minister, the Right Honourable W. L. Mackenzie King, had moved for the appointment of a select committee of the House to consider the problem with Mr. Speaker. This motion was withdrawn by unanimous consent because of the war emergency, and in fact the issue of procedural reform was in suspension until the closing stages of the war. Then, in 1944, a procedural committee made certain proposals which were studied in Committee of the Whole, but which never reached the floor of the House for decision. A similar committee appointed in 1946 also made proposals, but these were not considered either in Committee of the Whole or by the House itself. A like fate awaited a report by the then Speaker, the Honourable Gaspard Journal of Canadian Studies Fauteux, in 1947. Finally, in each regular session from 1950 on, a special committee was set up by the House to study its procedures, but not until 1955 did any positive recommendations emerge. It comes as a bit of a shock, therefore, to discover that just eight years later, in 1963, a new Special Committee on Procedure and Organization was set up, that this Committee made several recommendations for amendments to Standing Orders which were in many cases approved by the House, in 1964 and early 1965, and that the government itself made a number of further proposals for change in May, 1965 which were approved by the House in June. The pace of parliamentary reform had certainly quickened! There were many reasons for this. The fact that the 1963 election had brought into the House of Commons yet another minority government (the third since 1957) undoubtedly gave the new government a strong incentive to "do something" about potential obstruction. Furthermore, the new Prime Minister, the Right Honourable L.B. Pearson, was prepared to give to reform the kind of leadership that only a Prime Minister can give but that had been sadly lacking in his predecessors. Then, too, the Special Committee on Procedure and Organization, unlike some of its predecessors, included in its membership several relatively new, reformminded M.P.s, drawn from all parties, who were less tradition-oriented than many of their fellows . Most important of all perhaps, the long drawn-out Flag debate of 1964 convinced even the tradition-bound M.P.s, or some of them at any rate, that change must come. Indeed, it was the Flag debate - which lasted 33 days - plus the inability of the Committee on Procedure to get unanimous agreement on rules for allocating time for debates, (plus the tendency of the Committee to be too radical in other respects), that pushed the government into making its own proposals for change in May, 1965, and that gave these proposals such a strong bias towards the problem of allocating time. In fact, practically all of the government's substantive proposals related, directly or indirectly, to this problem. 11 The most important, and contentious, of the government's time proposals was the guillotine. This new rule...