The next Speaker of the House

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, May 13, 2011 at 8:55 AM - 2 Comments

Conservative MPs Andrew Scheer (who served as deputy speaker during the last Parliament) and Barry Devolin (who served as an assistant speaker) will apparently seek to replace Peter Milliken as Speaker of the House of Commons. NDP MP Joe Comartin, who sought the Speaker’s chair in 2008, apparently won’t do so this time around.

Mr. Comartin had publicly recommended Michael Chong for the post, but Mr. Chong’s not interested. Via email, he explains as follows. Continue…

'Respecting and Renewing our Democracy'

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, April 3, 2011 at 11:45 AM - 87 Comments

For those of us who are interested in such things, here are the democratic reforms promised by the Liberals.

Liberals will adopt a new approach to information, issuing government-wide direction that the default position for all departments and agencies will be to release information to the public, both proactively and responsively … all Access to Information requests and responses will be posted online … a searchable, online database for grants, contributions and contracts … restore the mandatory long form census … procedural limitations on the prime minister’s power to prorogue … all Canadians will be able to participate in People’s Question Period, where the Prime Minister and Ministers will respond directly to unscripted, user-generated questions online … a new Standing Committee on National Security … regular face-to-face meetings of all party leaders … direct Elections Canada to develop an online voting option.

The Liberals also commit to pursuing Question Period reforms similar to those proposed by Michael Chong. And elsewhere, under deficit reduction, the Liberals suggest a smaller cabinet.

The House: Further reading

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, February 22, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 6 Comments

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. Continue…

The House of Commons is a sham

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, February 18, 2011 at 5:12 AM - 145 Comments

Adrian Wyld/CP

In the early evening hours of an otherwise unremarkable Thursday in December, as a crowd gathered on Parliament Hill for the official opening of the annual Christmas light show, Jim Maloway was lecturing a nearly empty House of Commons on the history of suicide as a technique of military assault. “We had Dutch soldiers fighting for control of Taiwan in 1661, who used gunpowder to blow themselves and their opponents up rather than being taken prisoner,” he explained.

Maloway, a New Democrat backbencher, is either the last man truly dedicated to Parliament or the greatest symbol of its current neglect. In 2010, he spoke more than three times as many words in the House—309,647 in total—as any other member of Parliament, nine times more than the Prime Minister. In the month of December alone, Maloway contributed to debates on vehicle imports from Mexico, autism, white-collar crime, free trade with the European Union, RCMP reform, the parole system, Canada Post, human rights, a proposed national Holocaust monument, railway safety, the prosecution and registration of sex offenders, immigration reform, the military justice system, the census, oil tanker traffic off the coast of British Columbia and prison farms. All the same, you’ve probably never heard of him.

On that Thursday night in December, the House was debating a Senate bill that sought to add suicide bombing to the Criminal Code. A small cluster of four Conservative MPs, chatting with each other in the southwest corner of the room, waited impatiently for Maloway to finish. Irwin Cotler, the Liberal MP, sat listening on the opposition side. The teenage pages assigned to deliver notes and fetch glasses of water for MPs had already begun to clean up. In addition to the 300 or so empty seats around Maloway, the galleries above were empty as well, save for a few police officers.

After he had finished, a series of perfunctory oral votes confirmed that the bill had the unanimous support of the House. And thus did Canada apparently become the first country in the world to explicitly outlaw suicide bombing as a crime unto itself. Save for a short item on the National Post‘s website a week later, not a single major newspaper would carry word of this apparent landmark in international law.

Continue…

The Backbench Top Ten

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, December 12, 2010 at 2:57 PM - 1 Comment

After a week away, our weekly, and wholly arbitrary, ranking of the ten most worthy, or at least entertaining, MPs returns. A celebration of all that is great and ridiculous about the House of Commons. Last week’s rankings appear in parentheses. Continue…

A man apart

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 1:01 PM - 13 Comments

Stobo Sniderman spends a day with Michael Chong.

To this day, Chong has expressed no regret about his resignation. “Canada cannot survive as a jumble of nations. The role of the state is to focus on the qualities that hold us together,” he told me. He does not deny the existence of a Québécois nation, but he thinks the role of the Canadian Parliament is to create a multicultural future, not recognize historical facts. The question is not so much who we were, or even who we are. “The real question is what do we want to be.” Canada grows ever more multicultural and moves ever further from its three founding peoples…

“The nation motion reinforced otherness, increased divides,” he said. “I don’t see it bringing people together. These things have consequences decades down the line.”

The Backbench Top Ten

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, November 29, 2010 at 12:07 AM - 2 Comments

Our weekly, and wholly arbitrary, ranking of the ten most worthy, or at least entertaining, MPs, excluding the Prime Minister, cabinet members and party leaders. A celebration of all that is great and ridiculous about the House of Commons. Last week’s rankings appear in parentheses. Continue…

The Backbench Top Ten

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, November 21, 2010 at 3:08 PM - 10 Comments

The Backbench Top Ten

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, November 14, 2010 at 4:29 PM - 4 Comments

Our weekly, and wholly arbitrary, ranking of the ten most worthy, or at least entertaining, MPs, excluding the Prime Minister, cabinet members and party leaders. A celebration of all that is great and ridiculous about the House of Commons. Last week’s rankings appear in parentheses. Continue…

The Backbench Top Ten

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, November 7, 2010 at 8:05 PM - 2 Comments

Our weekly, and wholly arbitrary, ranking of the ten most worthy, or at least entertaining, MPs, excluding the Prime Minister, cabinet members and party leaders. A celebration of all that is great and ridiculous about the House of Commons. Last week’s rankings appear in parentheses. Continue…

The Backbench Top Ten

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, October 31, 2010 at 5:43 PM - 0 Comments

Our weekly, and wholly arbitrary, ranking of the ten most worthy, or at least entertaining, MPs, excluding the Prime Minister, cabinet members and party leaders. A celebration of all that is great and ridiculous about the House of Commons. Last week’s rankings appear in parentheses. Continue…

The Backbench Top Ten

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, October 24, 2010 at 1:31 PM - 0 Comments

Our weekly, and wholly arbitrary, ranking of the ten most worthy, or at least entertaining, MPs, excluding the Prime Minister, cabinet members and party leaders. A celebration of all that is great and ridiculous about the House of Commons. Last week’s rankings appear in parentheses. Continue…

Let the people ask

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 at 1:18 PM - 0 Comments

Michael Ignatieff’s relating yesterday of a question from a young man named Derek harkens somewhat to a program the Reform party attempted upon arriving in Ottawa in 1994.

In ye olden days, during those dreary days before electronic mail, Preston Manning’s side set up phone and fax lines to receive questions from average Canadians that could then be put to the government of the day during QP. Manning’s second question of Prime Minister Jean Chretien, in fact, was asked on behalf of Dr. Dean P. Eyre of Ottawa.

A week later, Reform MP Randy White attempted to relate a question from Raymond Watts of Surrey, but was admonished by the speaker of the day, Gilbert Parent, on procedural grounds. It’s unclear, at least to me, how much longer the program lasted. Its existence was still being boasted about a month later, but by the end of that year, the Reform side had more or less abandoned its larger goal of turning QP into a genteel exchange of relevant information.

The general notion though of constituent questions is quite central to Michael Chong’s hopes for QP reform. Continue…

The Backbench Top Ten

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, October 17, 2010 at 3:35 PM - 0 Comments

Our weekly, and wholly arbitrary, ranking of the ten most worthy, or at least entertaining, MPs, excluding the Prime Minister, cabinet members and party leaders. A celebration of all that is great and ridiculous about the House of Commons. Last week’s rankings appear in parentheses. Continue…

The Backbench Top Ten

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, October 10, 2010 at 4:14 PM - 0 Comments

Our weekly, and wholly arbitrary, ranking of the ten most worthy, or at least entertaining, MPs, excluding the Prime Minister, cabinet members and party leaders. A celebration of all that is great and ridiculous about the House of Commons. Last week’s rankings appear in parentheses. Continue…

One small step

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 9:05 AM - 0 Comments

Last night, after a proposed amendment was defeated, the House voted 235 to 44 to approve Motion No. 517, thus instructing the standing committee on procedure and House affairs to recommend changes to the standing orders and conventions governing oral questions. That committee has six months now before it must report back to the House with those recommendations.

The Backbench Top Ten

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, October 3, 2010 at 1:38 PM - 0 Comments

Our weekly, and wholly arbitrary, ranking of the ten most worthy, or at least entertaining, MPs, excluding the Prime Minister, cabinet members and party leaders. A celebration of all that is great and ridiculous about the House of Commons. Last week’s rankings appear in parentheses. Continue…

The Backbench Top Ten

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, September 26, 2010 at 2:37 PM - 0 Comments

We resume our weekly, and wholly arbitrary, ranking of the ten most worthy, or at least entertaining, MPs, excluding the Prime Minister, cabinet members and party leaders. A celebration of all that is great and ridiculous about the House of Commons. Last week’s rankings appear in parentheses. Continue…

Power to the backbencher

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, September 20, 2010 at 10:25 AM - 0 Comments

Michael Chong explains some of the historical precedent that informs his proposed QP reforms.

Until the 1980s, members had the right to rise in the House, catch the eye of the Speaker and ask questions of the government, questions that were driven by the concerns they heard from their constituents the previous weekend when they returned home to their ridings.

The changes that stripped members of the right to spontaneously rise, catch the eye of the Speaker to ask a question were introduced by Jeanne Sauvé. Every day, each party submits their list of approved questioners to the Speaker. The Speaker recognizes only those on the list.

Fixing parliament

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, September 15, 2010 at 4:49 PM - 0 Comments

There is a flurry of activity this autumn around the general topic of improving procedure in Parliament so decorum will also improve. This month’s issue of Policy Options has a useful cover package on the theme; the IRPP will have a session on the same topic soon. On Thursday the Public Policy Forum has its own shindig. Mike Chong, the Conservative MP whose private members’ motion on Question Period reform is behind much of the current discussion, will figure at both events.

In June of 2009 I wrote my own proposals for fixing Question Period. Two of the ideas I presented there — increasing the length of time allotted for questions and answers, and requiring the Prime Minister to attend only once a week, with other ministers taking questions on other days — resemble parts of Chong’s motion. He’s discarded other ideas and introduced his own. I decided to post the link to that earlier piece as a sort of prelude to the conversations in the weeks ahead.

'Can it be changed, and if so, in what ways?'

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, August 30, 2010 at 4:36 PM - 0 Comments

A week after the Public Policy Forum’s conference on Question Period, the Canadian Study of Parliament Group will have its own day of discussion. This one will also include Michael Chong, this time along with the NDP’s Denise Savoie and Liberal Glen Pearson.

The Backbench Top Ten

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, June 20, 2010 at 4:15 PM - 15 Comments

One last time before pausing for the summer: our weekly, and wholly arbitrary, ranking of the ten most worthy, or at least entertaining, MPs, excluding the Prime Minister, cabinet members and party leaders. A celebration of all that is great and ridiculous about the House of Commons. Last week’s rankings appear in parentheses. Continue…

The Commons: A day like any other

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 8:35 PM - 40 Comments

The Scene. As Bob Rae began the first question of the last Question Period before this third session of the 40th Parliament pauses for the summer, a respectful silence took hold.

The subject matter was this morning’s release of the final report from the inquiry into the Air India bombing. Mr. Rae commended the government and the inquiry’s commissioner. The Prime Minister stood and added his thanks to Justice Major. Mr. Rae probed for specific details of the government’s expected response, Mr. Harper offered assurances. The two danced quite delicately on the edge of combativeness, this adversarial system at its most sensitive.

Not until the Speaker called on the polarizing member for Ajax-Pickering, the Liberal Mark Holland, did the noise return to the chamber, government members groaning and moaning as Mr. Holland abruptly and loudly changed topics. Continue…

The Backbench Top Ten

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, June 13, 2010 at 3:55 PM - 10 Comments

Our weekly, and wholly arbitrary, ranking of the ten most worthy, or at least entertaining, MPs, excluding the Prime Minister, cabinet members and party leaders. A celebration of all that is great and ridiculous about the House of Commons. Last week’s rankings appear in parentheses. Continue…