In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Parties and Free Votes in the Canadian House of Commons: The Case of Capital Punishment DIANNE POTHIER The most distinctive feature of the Canadian House of Commons, at least since the turn of the century, has been the disciplined nature of the parliamentary parties.I The evolution of responsible government has been such that parliamentary accountability implies party government. The government insists on party cohesion to ensure the passage of its legislative program; the opposition parties do so to present a credible image as an alternate government. In the process, party cohesion has been deemed an important goal in and of itself. While discipline is formally enforced through the party whips, the importance of party unity in the House is so widely accepted that it is usually achieved with minimal effort. In this context , a decision to remove the party whips and allow a 'free vote' can only be taken under exceptional circumstances. Although a free vote does not necessarily imply the complete absence of party pressures, it does mean that the goal of party unity has been forgone. A free vote is also incompatible with certain other patterns of behaviour exhibited during the normal circumstances of a whip vote. This unique style of legislative behaviour which is produced by the removal of the whips constitutes the focus of the present analysis. The dual questions of the definition of a free vote and the problems involved in adapting to such a situation will be investigated through a discussion of the four recent capital punishment debates: those of 1966, 1967, 1973, and 1976. The choice of the capital punishment debates as case studies in Canadian legislative behaviour 80 under a free vote was not really a matter of discretion . In the past few decades there have been practically no other debates which culminated in a free vote. Nevertheless, the capital punishment debates do represent a wide range of types of free votes, especially since they include examples of motions introduced by both backbenchers and Cabinet Ministers. Accordingly, although few in number, the capital punishment debates still provide a useful setting for the study of legislative behaviour under a free vote. The Various Meanings of 'Free Vote' The usual rationale for a free vote is that an issue that touches on fundamental moral principles ought to be decided according to the consciences of individual MPs, not according to the dictates of the party whips. Questions of morality, it is argued, are above partisan politics. However, the actual definition of a 'conscience issue' appears somewhat arbitrary. As one observer of the British experience has noted, "In practice, a matter becomes an issue of conscience whenever it is convenient for the parties to treat it as such."2 Similarly, in the Canadian context, it is impossible to make a meaningful distinction between conscience issues as free votes and non-conscience issues as whip votes. In the past few decades there have been only two issues handled as free votes in the Canadian House of Commons. Apart from the capital punishment debates, the only occasion on which the whips were withdrawn was for one of the flag debate motions. While the issue of capital punishment, since it literally involves matters of life and death, can easily be considered a conscience issue, it would be very difficult to construct an argument that the design of the Canadian flag constituted a moral question. It certainly was a divisive issue, but it hardly involved questions of morality. Moreover, several other issues which might easily be labelled conscience issues, such as abortion, homosexuality, and divorce, were handled as whip votes.3 Accordingly, 'conscience issue' is by no means synonymous with 'free vote.' A review of the Canadian capital punishment debates confirms that it was not the nature of the issue itself which ensured that the Commons votes would be free. (The chronology Revue d'etudes canadiennes Vol. 14, No. 2 (Ete 1979 Summer) of these debates is briefly summarized in Table 1.) In 1966 it was decided not only that the vote would be free, but also that the motion would be moved by private members, rather than by a Minister of the Crown. Four backbenchers, representing three parties...

pdf

Share