British Question Time Better Supports Parliament’s Core Function Than Canadian Question Period

Posted on 2011/10/08 by J.W.J. Bowden

Introduction

On September 21, 2010, I attended the Canadian Study of Parliament Group’s Fall Seminar on Question Period Reform. The event included two panels and Speaker Milliken, Michael Chong, and C.E.S. Franks as guest speakers. The Public Policy Forum held an event on the same subject the week before but doesn’t seem to have produced anything substantial.

Michael Chong first introduced a motion in the 40th Parliament aimed at changing the format of the daily Oral Questions, or Question Period (QP). The motion died upon dissolution, and the papers reported earlier this week that Chong will re-introduce the motion in the current 41st Parliament. Even though this conference took place last year, I still insist on blogging about it, a) because I didn’t create Parliamentum until this past summer but would have blogged about the event at the time, and b) because the topic is still pertinent to the 41st Parliament and the general discussion. I will summarize the salient points of each presentation. As I mentioned in “The Myth of Civility and Decorum in the British House of Commons”, I consider the issues of civility in parliament and the effectiveness of Question Period separate.

Speaker Milliken   

Speaker Milliken tried to assure that debate in Question Period remains civil and takes place at a normal volume.  However, he explained, participation in QP is determined by the caucuses and their whips.  During the 1970s, the Speaker began using a list in an attempt to bring order to the House, based on a pre-arranged agreement between the whips and house leaders; these negotiations do not involve the Speaker of the House. Milliken claimed that he “follow the list vigorously” during his tenure as Speaker. I would argue that herein lies the problem: the whips and front benches control QP for the purpose of party as opposed to backbenchers as advocates of their constituents’ concerns and legitimate questions posed to ministers that support parliament’s core function: holding cabinet to account on expenditures. Milliken explained that in 1997, the House decided to limit the questions and answers to 35 seconds each; however, this convention and inter-party agreement does not appear in the Standing Orders. Theoretically, the PM could answer every single question in QP, so the Speaker has no authority to compel a particular minister to reply to a given question. Milliken insists that while the Speaker is responsible for overall decorum, he cannot be held accountable to a non-answer given in response to an Opposition question.

Michael Chong’s Motion (M-517)

Conservative backbencher Michael Chong put forward a motion on the reform of QP. He points out that 40% of Canadians refuse to vote in the 2008 election, which in his view undermines the role of Parliament as the primary formulator of all public policies. Frankly, Chong’s assertion that parliament creates public policy shows that he doesn’t understand parliament’s core function: cabinet – the government – formulates public policy, and parliament holds it to account and scrutinizes its expenditures. Chong continued in his reasoning that since most Canadians (rightly or wrongly) equate parliament with QP, and since MPs need to reconnect with the public, the first logical parliamentary reform depends on QP because the media and public fixate on this aspect of the parliamentary routine. Much to my chagrin, Chong then invoked a hockey analogy; I loathe when Canadian politicians and media personalities do this in an attempt to make themselves the every-man. He argued that MPs – especially backbenchers – have become spectators in the QP, and thus they act like spectators by jeering and cheering. Chong agrees with Franks that civility in Parliament never really existed – but he intends to move beyond this point and set a new precedent.  In addition, Chong believes that the televised debates – which started in 1977 – did not cause this problem because Westminster and Congress televise their proceedings without the same acrimony of the Parliament of Canada.

While Chong never characterized his motion as such, it essentially amounts to the adoption of the British system. M-517 contains the following components.

M-517 — April 14, 2010 — Mr. Chong (Wellington—Halton Hills) — That the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs be instructed to recommend changes to the Standing Orders and other conventions governing Oral Questions, and to consider, among other things,

(i) elevating decorum and fortifying the use of discipline by the Speaker, to strengthen the dignity and authority of the House,

(ii) lengthening the amount of time given for each question and each answer,

(iii) examining the convention that the Minister questioned need not respond,

(iv) allocating half the questions each day for Members, whose names and order of recognition would be randomly selected,

(v) dedicating Wednesday exclusively for questions to the Prime Minister,

(vi) dedicating Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday for questions to Ministers other than the Prime Minister in a way that would require Ministers be present two of the four days to answer questions concerning their portfolio, based on a published schedule that would rotate and that would ensure an equitable distribution of Ministers across the four days; and that the Committee report its findings to the House, with proposed changes to the Standing Orders and other conventions, within six months of the adoption of this order.

Shelia Copps’s Idea To Eliminate Crown Prerogative and Responsible Government

I reported on the intelligent portion of Shelia Copps’s comment in the previous entry. She also made some misleading statements and, perhaps unknowingly, suggested the destruction of the principle of responsible government, namely the part that the government is responsible to the lower house for all spending.

Copps disagrees with Chong’s proposed reforms, especially the idea of the British rotating schedule, because, as she stated dismissively (and misleadingly): “ministers would love to only show up to work one day per week.” This is a deliberate over-simplification and mendacious misrepresentation  because Ministers do most of their work outside the House in cabinet and cabinet committees, and running their departments and their constituency offices.

Copps believes that Chong’s motion should become broader, which would of render it meaningless and useless. Copps advocates the destruction of responsible government and its replacement with a congressional system: she believes that parliamentary committees be able to propose and introduce legislation. I found this statement so patently ridiculous that I asked her to explain this comment during the question and answer session. I asked her something to the effect, “Why do you want parliamentary committees to gain the power to propose legislation, particular legislation that involves spending? Your proposal would violate crown prerogative.” Murmurs of agreement erupted throughout the audience. Shelia Copps responded craftily to my question by giving a politician’s non-answer for about three minutes! Franks also declined to comment.

C.E.S. Franks on the British Method

The British parliament runs on the timetable that cycles through every two to three weeks and covers the ministries separately, for instance: Monday, Home Office; Tuesday, Health; Wednesday, Wales, and Prime Minister’s Questions; Thursday, Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, etc. The Minister knows months in advance when he or she will have to answer questions in the House, and the Opposition knows when to submit questions. This informed dynamic produces a QT vastly different from our QP.

The clerks at the table review the MPs’ questions first and screen out those unacceptable due to content or tone.  Questions must be clear and concise and respect parliamentary language; the clerks offer advice to the MP on clarity and format, and the MP can petition the Speaker if unsatisfied with the clerks’ assessment. The content of the questions is restricted by several rules that Franks enumerated, such as bans on expressing opinions, asking about opposition policy, and hypotheticals.  If the Speaker determines that a question is not in line with the national interest, then the question cannot be asked again during the same session. He can also rule both questions and supplementaries out of order. All these rules create a system in which the Opposition asks relevant questions and the Government gives pertinent answers – a concept completely foreign to Canadian QP!

Franks estimates that if the British rules were applied to the Parliament of Canada, about three-quarters of the questions would be rejected and ruled out of order for violating the various rules on clarity and precision and the prohibition on hypotheticals and complex or loaded questions.  Many questions asked in Canadian QP currently take the form of the fallacy of complex question: “When are you going to stop beating your wife?” To which the government replies, “when you stop beating yours.”

British Question Time focuses primarily on backbenchers, and the weekly Prime Minister’s Question Time focuses on the party leaders.  The Speaker decides when the supplementaries on a question will end, which contrasts to the rigidity of the Canadian system.  Canadian Question Period, in contrast, serves the front benches, and our questions are not vetted for clarity or parliamentary language; Peter Milliken’s remarks at the beginning confirm this dominance by the front bench.

The website of the British Parliament lists the rotational schedule for Minister’s Question Time, which cycles through every four or five weeks. Prime Minister’s Questions occur every Wednesday. Their website also explains the various types of questions in the House of Commons, as well as the “written answers.”

Notice of questions in the Commons

“Commons oral questions are tabled by MPs at least three days in advance of Question Time. The questions are then printed in the Commons Questions Book. The order in which the questions are asked is determined randomly by a computer.

MPs who are called by the Speaker to ask their question do not read it out, but simply call out its number. When the government minister has replied, the MP can ask another question (known as a supplementary) and other MPs may also be called to ask supplementary questions. The Minister must reply to each in turn. Supplementary questions must be on the same subject as the original question.

The last 15 minutes (for those departments with a 60 minute question time) or 10 minutes (for those departments with a 40 minute question time) of question time is reserved for ‘topical questions’.

During the ‘topical questions’ slot, MPs can ask supplementary questions on any subject relating to the department’s responsibilities.”

Written Answers

“In addition to oral questions, MPs and Peers can ask government ministers questions for written answer. These are often used to obtain detailed information about policies and statistics on the activities of government departments.

‘Ordinary’ questions

In the House of Commons ‘ordinary’ questions do not have to be answered on a specific date. An MP will date a written question for two days after they have tabled it (ie, submitted it for answer via the Table Office). The convention is that the MP can expect it to be answered within seven days of the question being tabled. However, there is no parliamentary rule that states ordinary written questions have to be answered by a certain date.
Read Commons questions for written answer

House of Lords written questions

All House of Lords written questions follow a similar procedure. Lords enter questions on the Order Paper via the Table Office. Lords may table up to six questions each day and can expect an answer within 14 days.
Read Lords questions for written answer

‘Named day’ questions

‘Named day’ questions only occur in the House of Commons. The MP tabling the question specifies the date on which they should receive an answer. The MP must give a minimum of two days’ notice for these types of question. MPs may not table more than five named day questions on a single day.

Questions originally tabled for oral answer that do not get answered at oral question time are submitted to the government department as named day questions.

Answers

Answers are sent directly to the MP or Lord and printed in Hansard along with the original question.
Read written answers in Hansard

‘Will write’ answers

Occasionally Commons questions are answered in Hansard with ‘I will write to the Hon Member …’ The subsequent letters are not published in Commons Hansard but placed in the House of Commons Library for MPs’ use (but the House of Commons Information Office can supply copies of these).
Contact the House of Commons Information Office

Written Ministerial Statements

Until 2002 the government often used written answers to make statements but these are now published separately.”

Conclusion

The current Canadian format of Question Period eats up a significant portion of all the Minister’s schedules, as Michael Chong pointed out, which frankly wastes their time and detracts from their running their departments and tending to the other cabinet duties. Our ineffectual system also fails parliament in its core function of holding the government to account. I can only conclude that if we want to reform our Question Period, rather than devising a new system, we should simply adopt the British system, which has proven far more effective, in full. The British method works and better complements parliament’s core function of holding the government to account, particularly through its emphasis on written questions and answers; in contrast, the current Canadian format rewards theatre and focuses on style over substance.

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Posted in Question Period, Reform | 8 Comments

The Myth of Civility and Decorum in the British House of Commons

Posted on 2011/10/05 by J.W.J. Bowden

I support the adoption of the British Question Time model as a replacement to the Question Period in the Parliament of Canada, as I will explain further tomorrow. However, the overhaul of Question Period is altogether separate from the pseudo-controversy about the supposed lack of decorum in the House of Commons. Some Canadians stubbornly cling to the myth of a civil past and paradise for decorum in our House of Commons that never existed. For instance, they can never identify which of this country’s 41 Parliaments lived up to their ideal of decorum. Don Newman once proffered the absurd suggestion that the incivility of the House of Commons in the 40th Parliament results from the Reform Party’s legacy in the 35th Parliament (1993-1997). The tone of the 38th, 39th, and 40th Parliaments may have declined slightly relative to the Mulroney and Chretien years, but by no means did it attain the level of a national emergency or crisis of parliamentarism. It came about merely because all three of those parliaments were hung and thus lacked the stability and certainty of majority government. If you want to bear witness to incivility, look no further than the fist fights that regularly break out in the Taiwanese parliament.

One former parliamentarian of sound mind on this issue is Shelia Copps. At the Canadian Study of Parliament Group’s conference on Question Period Reform on 21 September 2010, she argued that parliamentarians have never been well-behaved and that during her tenure at Queen’s Park in the 1970s, many MPPs showed up inebriated prior to the arrival of television. Copps praised television for having eliminated these aspects of the good ol’ boys’ club but suggested that MPs still need to improve their decorum. As a member of the infamous Liberal “Rat Pack” in the 1980s, I consider her an authority on this subject!

More bizarrely, these same misguided reformers put the British House of Commons on a pedestal of high civility and treat it with biblical reverence. British parliamentarians are not more civil; they are merely more tactful and possess a greater wit when insulting one another that escapes their Canadian counterparts.

As you can see, British Prime Minister’s Questions often become quite raucous, or as the Brits would say, involve a lot of barracking.

British Prime Minister’s Questions, 9 March 2011: PM Cameron says to Opposition Leader Ed Miliband, “There’s only one person I can remember around here knifing a foreign secretary – and I think I’m looking at him!”

Chancellor George Osborne calls an openly gay Labour member opposite “a pantomime dame.”

Speaker John Bercow engages in a petulant denunciation to Conservative Chief Whip Patrick McLoughlin.

Speaker John Bercow fails to bring the boisterous House to order and grows increasingly frustrated at a cabinet minister.

On a lighter note, current Foreign Secretary William Hughes told a witty allegory about the troubled Blair-Brown relationship in the last parliament.

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Posted in Decorum, Parliament | 6 Comments

Decorum in the Australian House of Representatives

Posted on 2011/10/03 by J.W.J. Bowden

I enjoyed these clips of Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating versus his various Liberal opponents, John Howard, Alexander Downer, etc., and more recently the appearance of “Cardboard Kev”.  Those in Canada who criticize the behaviour of our MPs call for a return to decorum that never really existed, and the rowdy Australian MPs should help them put the comparatively mild-mannered Canadian MPs into perspective; after all, they don’t lapse into the second person or bring articles into the chamber! There’s something inherently hilarious about the Speakers screaming out “ORDER!” in an Australian accent.

Paul Keating to Alexander Downer: “How are you doing there, Curly? Old Darling? […]. This is the salmon that actually jumps on the hook for you!”

Paul Keating to Peter Costello: “Well, don’t be too ballsy over there. […] When I told our caucus last year that you were a low-altitude flyer, I was right, wasn’t I!”

Liberal member: “We want the Prime Minister here!” Out comes the cardboard cut-out of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

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Cabinet Appointments and By-Elections: Canada’s Lost History of Populism, Part 1

Posted on 2011/09/30 by J.W.J. Bowden

Peter Russell mentioned in his summary of the King-Byng Affair of 1926 that the old custom that parliamentarians appointed to cabinet would resign their seats and run in a by-election complicated the 15th Parliament even more than the gubernatorial-prime ministerial constitutional stand off already had. I find this practice intriguing, and it’s no coincidence that it lapsed into obsolescence after the minority parliaments of the 1920s.

The prolific writer and constitutional scholar David E. Smith observed in The People’s House of Commons that “Until the 1930s, and extending back almost a century, by-elections in Canada were statutorily required when sitting members (in Ottawa, the provinces, or the colonies before that) were appointed to cabinet.”[1]

My random trawling of YouTube for material on Westminster parliamentarism led me to a excerpt of Douglas Carswell, Conservative MP for Clacton in the British Parliament. Carswell argued that parliament used to provide a more effective check on cabinet in the 19th century and early 20th century as compared to today, and cited this same tradition that MPs appointed to cabinet would resign their seats and run in by-elections as evidence. Apparently this practice ceased to be in the early 20th century in the UK.

Some Canadian constitutional scholars (David Smith, Jennifer Smith, Peter Russell, etc.) argue that the injection of populism into the Westminster system (what David Smith calls “electoral democracy”) would irrevocably alter the Crown-in-Parliament and threaten the viability of responsible government itself. However, I content that this old tradition of running in a by-election upon appointment to cabinet within the life of a parliament shows that popular of approval of the executive complemented the confidence convention in the parliamentarism of the 19th century. Parliamentarism did not come about by design, but by evolution, sometimes accidental and peaceful, and sometimes violent. Surely a system that has existed for at least 800 years can better accommodate popular sovereignty in the 21st century, given this precedent from the 19th.

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[1] David E. Smith, The People’s House of Commons: Theories of Democracy in Contention (Toronto: UofT Press, 2007): 5.

Posted in Direct Democracy | 4 Comments

Presidentialism vs Parliamentarism in The West Wing

Posted on 2011/09/29 by J.W.J. Bowden

“The Wake Up Call” in season 6 of The West Wing features a sub-plot in which a Belorussian delegation came to Washington on a fact-finding mission so that they could write a new constitution for Belarus based on the American presidential model. However, Toby Ziegler attempts to convince the Belorussian delegation to look to a parliamentary system rather than following the American separation of powers and presidential-congressional system because the former would best provide stability in an emerging democracy.

The Belorussians protest: The President of Belarus “needs broad powers, like [the] American president.”

Zielger retorts, “Your country has had a history of brutal dictatorship. I don’t think a strong executive is such a good idea. Half the faculty at Yale law describes the American presidential system as one of these country’s most dangerous exports, responsible for wreaking havoc on over 30 countries around the globe. It is a recipe for constitutional breakdown.”

Professor Juan Linz of Yale University has written extensively on the merits of parliamentarism as a means of ensuring constitutional stability and preserving the rule of law in The Failure of Presidential Democracy. The presidential system results in a constitutional breakdown more easily than would a parliamentary system in emerging democracies because of the deadlock inherent in the separation of powers. In a country that lacks the civic virtue and liberal political culture of the United States, that kind of deadlock leads to constitutional crises, and even military intervention, and thus the breakdown of constitutional government, as many of the presidential systems in Latin America demonstrate.

The Belorussians’ perception of the American presidency as inherently strong illustrates the conventional evolution of the powers of that office. Again, I use “convention” deliberately, because the Constitution of 1787 hasn’t been formally amended in order to expand the powers of the presidency, but this trend has occurred throughout the 20th century, particularly after President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s expansion of presidential power coincided with his breaking of the two-term convention; Washington himself first set this precedent, and like the American Cinninatus, voluntarily relinquished political power voluntarily and returned to his estate. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s violation of this convention proved so severe that the Congress and the state legislatures adopted the only available recourse within a codified constitution: they passed the 22nd amendment, formally limiting each president to only two terms. The original form of the American presidency limited executive power, but over time, the broadening of the franchise in turn broadened the democratic legitimacy of the presidency, and therefore the powers and authorities of the office. No country adopting a presidential republic today would be able to justify a presidency as anti-democratic as the original American presidency in 1787. A parliamentary republic would offer a more democratic and more efficient alternative because responsible government subjects executive power to the people’s representatives in parliament.

Later on, the lead Belorussian emissary claims that a president would provide Belarus with “a unifying national figure.” This is by far the most suspect and debateable proposition in the scene. I reject the premise that an elected president (or an indirectly elected president, as in the United States) can ever achieve the status of “unifying national figure”, because it implies a presidency above partisan politics. Only a constitutional monarch can ever possess the personal authority (but not the power) to achieve this role as a completely non-partisan, unifying national figure because any elected office automatically entails divisiveness, political responsibility and accountability for government policy, and partisanship. Non-partisanship simply does not exist in the American political system; their closest equivalent is bipartisanship. The American presidency almost certainly does not provide a unifying national figure; normally, it produces a highly polarizing politician. Unifying national figures are not the subject of weekly approval ratings. Perhaps in the case of President Bush, he became a unifying national figure in the last two years of his presidency when 70% of the American people were unified in opposing him! President Obama has become a highly polarizing president, based on the latest opinion polls.

Christopher Lloyd’s character concludes the discussion on presidentialism vs. paraliamentarism a philosophical note: “The [written constitution] is just the beginning. A constitutional democracy succeeds only if the constitution reflects democratic values already alive in the citizenry.” This statement contains a curious contradiction: cultural norms (which lead to the development of political and constitutional conventions) should form the basis of any new written constitution, not the inverse. The written constitution should flow from “the democratic values already alive in the citizenry” – and therefore would not be the beginning. The American presidential republic succeeded where all the Latin American variants failed because the British American colonies already possessed a vibrant liberal culture and drew upon English Whiggish principles of individual liberty and constitutional limitation on executive power. The Americans are, as Edmund Burke said in Parliament, “the sons of liberty.” The American colonists who rebelled considered themselves the inheritors of the legacy of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and merely demanded that their colonial legislatures exercise the rights and privileges as the Westminster Parliament.

The separation of the Head of State from the Head of Government provides more stability than the separation of the executive from the legislature, particularly in a country that suffers from a history of abuse of executive power. This system, known in the Westminster system as responsible government, allows the Sovereign or President to become a genuine unifying national figure because the Prime Minister and the other responsible Cabinet ministers take political responsibility for all government policy before the people’s elected representatives in Parliament. The Sovereign or President merely carries out the advice of the government, and if the Prime Minister and Cabinet give bad advice, they suffer the political and electoral consequences. The American separation of executive and legislative powers diffuses political responsibility along these two lines of authority and thus creates inefficiency and deadlock. A mature liberal republic like the United States can surmount these instituitonal inefficiencies without any civil strife, but a fledging republic that carries the burden of a bloody and violent history with no tradition of the rule of law cannot so easily overcome institutional gridlock. Such instiutitonal gridlock can easily turn into constitutional breakdown and a descent into dicatorship at the hands of an executive President, both Head of State and Head of Government, who controls the armed forces.

Recently, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg travelled to Egypt and during and television interview there suggested that she “would not look to the United States Constitution if [she] were drafting a constitution in 2012.” Frankly, Justice Ginsburg is probably correct: Egyptians probably should not emulate the United States Constitution because a parliamentary republic would better protect liberty and ensure institutional stability. Justice Ginsburg suggested that Egypt look to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as an example; however, the Constitution of Canada would probably also provide a poor model.

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Posted in Parliamentarism v Presidentialism | 10 Comments