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Teaching the Mongrel Dog New Tricks: Sources and Directions ofReform in the Ontario Legislature GRAHAM WHITE A unique confluence of circumstances conspired to make the 30th Ontario Parliament a particularly auspicious time for legislative reform. The two final volumes of the Camp Commission on the Legislature had just appeared, recommending thoroughgoing procedural reforms and improvements in services for the members. Several years of change - grudging and hesitant, but change nonetheless - had fostered a spirit and an expectation of change. Finally, the province 's first minority government in a generation not only gave the opposition a powerful tool for forcing reform on an oftentimes recalcitrant government, but it also focused attention (both the public's and the members') on the Legislature to a degree unequalled in decades. This paper is a chronicle of legislative change during this period . A principal concern informing the analysis is that only by understanding how legislative change and reform (the two are hardly synonomous ) come about can we hope to mount an effective campaign to improve our legislative bodies. The Camp Commission As documented ably in Fred Schindeler's Responsible Government in Ontario, the Ontario Legislature's procedures and facilities scarcely changed from the nineteenth century until the mid 1960s.1 In contrast to this fixity in the legislative realm, the scope and size of government had expanded many times over. Coupled with prolonged periods of one-party rule, this resulted in a dominance of the executive over the legislature even more overwhelming than in other parliaJournal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 14, No. 2 (Ete 1979 Summer) mentary systems (for the decline of the legislature is hardly confined to Ontario). Long overdue reforms set in motion by John Robarts did not fundamentally alter the legislature 's subservience to the executive. Indeed, with a highpowered technocratic reorganization of the executive underway in the form of a Committee on Government Productivity (COOP), the Legislature (explicitly excluded from COGP's terms of reference2) was threatened with further eclipse. Significantly, an important source of the mounting pressure to redress this imbalance was the Conservative backbenches, rife with frustration at the impotent lot of a government private member in an executive dominated chamber. In February 1972, the Speech from the Throne announced that an enquiry would be held ''to review the functions and processes of the Legislature, and means by which these might be improved to give elected members better opportunities to serve their constituents and to enhance the role of the private member in the Legislature."3 This enquiry seems to have been originally envisioned as a legislative committee, or at least a committee composed largely of MPPs, operating on a $350,000 budget and reporting by the end of 1972.4 By the time it surfaced in concrete form, however, it had been transformed into an independent commission. The decision to bypass the Legislature in this way at first disturbed some members,s but as the Commission got on with ,its work, hostility quickly dissipated. The choice of an independent commission probably reflected a sincere desire for an effective enquiry free of partisan wrangles. The decision, admirable in intent as it may have been, betrayed a fundamentally paternalistic, executive-oriented view of the Legislature: in any important matters, it was not to be trusted with its own affairs. To ensure full cooperation, the Commission's terms of reference were scrupulously checked in advance with the opposition parties which were asked to nominate one Commissioner apiece.6 Dalton Camp, Tory eminence grise, became the chairman; his fellow-commissioners were columnist and broadcaster Douglas Fisher, a former CCF-NDP MP, and Farquhar Oliver, leader of the Ontario Liberal Party on three separate oc117 casions, and MPP for Grey South from 1926 to 1967. These selections were hailed on all sides. The Commissioners and their researchers set to work on several fronts, although it was clear from the outset that their principal task lay not so much in divining the Legislature's problems, for these were never obscure, as in proposing workable, acceptable solutions.7 The Commission eagerly sought the opinions and advice of the members via questionnaires and interviews,s although it encountered great difficulty in getting more than a handful of...

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