For their assistance when I was putting together last week’s piece on the House—and for the indispensable sites they respectively maintain—I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Michael Mulley of openparliament.ca and Cory Horner of howdtheyvote.ca. I also must thank Ned Franks, both for his writing on Parliament and omnibus legislation and his perspective.
Those seeking perspective and data, should start with Parliament’s own tallies of private members’ bills passed, legislation adopted and sitting days.
Beyond those, there are several other texts that proved helpful.
-Ralph Sultan’s essay on the power of the private member
-Michael Chong’s essay on reforming the House
-A transcript of a roundtable discussion of MPs on private members’ legislation (published by Canadian Parliamentary Review)
-Laura Stone’s review of recent private members’ bills
-A paper prepared in 1999 by the Canadian Election Study about the state of Parliament
-The Library of Parliament’s review of cameras in the House
-John Pepall’s Against Reform
-Mark Kingwell’s essay on civility
For my own part, I’ve written about the House at length on a couple of occasions: on the question of civility last March and on the question of cameras in the House last September. Some of the ideas in last week’s piece were probably first explored in those pieces.
