Tragedy in the Commons (17 page)

Deliberation and consultation by a committee often contributes to the passage of a legislative act from bill into law. In these cases, after a bill reaches second reading, the proposed legislation is dispatched to be considered either by a standing committee, such as finance, or by a committee struck purely for the purpose of considering the effects of that specific bill. Various experts and interested parties are called to testify about the proposed legislation in hearings before the committee; and once testimony closes, committee members collaborate to consider, propose and recommend amendments to the bill.

As the Compendium indicates, committee proceedings are ostensibly public, but in practice they’re rarely covered by the media. Perhaps for that reason, and in contrast to the theatrics of the House, the MPs said committees were marked by collegiality and constructive debate. In committees they immerse themselves in the details of proposed legislation and propose ammendments, or study and report to the House on emerging issues. “You are fighting all the time, but it’s a sparring that’s at a level where you want to get a good report,” said Liberal MP Bill Graham.

The presentations of witnesses before committees allow the Canadian public at large to have a say in committee work. “We were always meeting with groups, which was tremendously helpful in terms of getting to understand the issues that people were concerned about around the country,” said Conservative MP Monte Solberg. Travel in areas potentially affected by a certain legislation was another excellent
way to gain citizen input and allow MPs to craft legislation that better reflected citizens’ needs. One MP who chaired the agriculture committee recalled the importance of visiting farmers directly. “We toured the country, bringing forward a series of recommendations and offering help to provinces who were in difficulty with agriculture. We met with people, and saw how agriculture [had] changed,” said former Liberal MP Charles Hubbard.

Former MPs attributed the productivity of committees in part to their largely non-partisan environment. “Committees are where most relationships get established. You sit there for at least four or five hours a week with the same individuals. You find out who they are through their questions, their ideas, and you develop respect for them,” said Liberal MP Omar Alghabra. And, Graham noted, committees require MPs to “take off their partisan hats and say, ‘Okay, we are going to work on something here to get the best possible thing we can for the country, recognizing we have different political attitudes.’ ”

MPs recalled committees as a place where diverse perspectives and expert knowledge were gathered. They represented a venue for expert witnesses to provide context to legislation’s potential effects. “We bring in the best experts in the world, we deliberate over the important issues of the day. It’s quite something. If you were to come and watch, I think you would go away thinking, ‘Wow, this is good. My country is in good hands,’ ” said the late Liberal MP Andy Scott.

The committee system isn’t perfect, however, and when pressed, some MPs admitted they had real concerns about committees’ effectiveness. Take Scott’s experience. Scott was a New Brunswick Liberal who came to Parliament as an MP for
the first time in 1993. His field of expertise was literacy and skills training, the area in which he had worked in Fredericton as a senior policy advisor to New Brunswick premier Frank McKenna. Soon after he first arrived in Ottawa, Scott was surprised to hear he’d been placed on the health committee—surprised, he said, because he didn’t know anything about health care. “I should be on the human resources committee,” Scott insisted, to no avail. “I was baffled that it didn’t seem to matter.” Many MPs mentioned a similar frustration that their initial committee appointments were unexpected or unsuitable, and did not match their experience or interests.

Making the appointment process even more arbitrary was the fact that, regardless of party, MPs found they had no formal opportunity to request a particular policy focus, and no recourse if they considered a particular committee appointment inappropriate or not of interest. “I couldn’t go to somebody and say, ‘Look, you’ve got me on the wrong committee,’ ” Scott said. Scott began to feel the extent of the party’s control over him. He realized that to the parties’ decision-makers, the interests and experience of individual members perhaps didn’t matter all that much. In Fredericton he would have spoken up and been moved the next day. But in Ottawa, he realized, things were different. “That wasn’t the way it worked. ‘You’re on a committee because that’s where we put you and don’t worry if you don’t know enough about it; we are going to give you notes anyway.’ ”

Liberal MP Andrew Telegdi was similarly confounded by the process. “They put me on the public accounts committee. I was not keen on being on public accounts,” he said, naming a committee that reviews the work of the auditor general, among other matters. “I couldn’t get myself changed.”
He ended up becoming the committee’s vice-chair. It was on this committee that Telegdi witnessed what he regarded as an egregious mismanagement of human resources. Despite its topic, the public accounts committee had only two chartered accountants among its members, one of whom was Liberal MP Alex Shepherd. Shepherd, however, had voted against the wishes of the party leadership on the gun registry, and as punishment, according to Telegdi, the party higher-ups took him out of public accounts—leaving only one accountant on the committee. “It didn’t make any sense,” said Telegdi, who believed the move “weakened the committee.”

“If I would fault my leaders,” said former Liberal MP Sue Barnes, “I never felt that they’d learned our backgrounds. And it was funny because if you were put on a justice committee, you were thought of as a justice person, when maybe your expertise was in health. People in your caucus saw you as what you were working on, and sometimes it was a match, and sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes it was a pigeonhole that people never escaped.”

Another problematic observation was that for all the talk about the level of the debate and expertise, committees didn’t much affect policy and legislation. Conservative MP Randy White put it bluntly: “People will tell you ‘I’ve done great work on a committee.’ But you really have to say, ‘You did good work. You travelled. You studied this and that. But what did you accomplish? Show us where the legislation changed and what you did.’ ”

Other MPs commented that the work of committees wasn’t adequately integrated into the government decision-making process. For this reason, former Conservative MP Inky
Mark, for one, complained that committees weren’t productive components of the legislative process. “Waste a lot of money, waste a lot of time,” said Mark. “I mean, we study and study and study things to death and they become nice packages to collect dust. It [policy] does not change.”

Several factors contribute to such lack of productivity, as reported by the MPs we interviewed, many of whom had served in minority Parliaments. Elections could be called at any time, bringing an end to committee deliberations, studies or reports. Or the recommendations of a committee might be at odds with governmental priorities. Liberal Marlene Catterall, for instance, said that few committees studying emerging issues produce budget estimates, making implementation of their recommendations more difficult. Others noted that the governing party is only required to respond to a report within a hundred and twenty days and is not obliged to act on a committee’s advice in any substantial way. Catterall believed committees could do far more to push the adoption of their recommendations: “Committees should take the government’s response, critique it and then publicize those views,” she said.

Tenure and experience are important to committee work, we heard. The longer MPs served together on a committee, the better they got to know each other, and the better they worked together. The significance of tenure, beyond being part of a “team,” is that MPs can become topic experts. This expertise helps them create or debate policy more thoroughly—which, in turn, makes them better MPs and makes it more likely that their work will have influence.

Some of our interviewees, however, deplored the fact that party leadership ignored the potential benefits of tenure.
As they described the proceedings, it became clear that many believed committees had become a tool for party leadership to exert control over individual MPs. Leaders could disrupt and subvert the committee process, replacing MPs without notice or consultation. For committee proceedings that the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) found politically sensitive, musical-chairs machinations were typical. Conservative MP Ken Epp recounted an occasion, for instance, when the governing Liberal Party replaced all its members just before an amendment vote. “Some committees I was on, we had members of the committee, we listened to witnesses, we would come up with agreements on amendments, and the day of the vote on clause by clause the whip substitutes every member of the committee on the government side,” Epp said. “They’re out and a new bunch of guys are in whose only qualification is that they will vote the way they’re told. They haven’t been there for the debates. They haven’t heard the arguments. They haven’t allowed themselves to be persuaded. All they are is obedient to the cause.” His recommendation? “I would like to see that changed. I would like to see the committees have independence from their party whips and we would get better legislation.”

The musical-chairs phenomenon was particularly characteristic of committee proceedings that were due to be televised. “Debates are much more reasonable in committees that aren’t televised,” said Liberal MP Paul DeVillers. “You televise a committee and you get the same nonsense; you don’t get the usual members of the committee. Parties substitute their hitters to come into the committee when it’s a televised committee, as opposed to the people who are there normally, doing the work.” (Most committee proceedings are now
webcast.) Paul Martin agreed. “Televising committees is just absolutely the worst thing in the world because all of a sudden the attempt at non-partisanship, the attempt to be reasonable, goes out the window,” he said. Another deplorable thing that happens, he added, is that substitute members are intentionally placed on committees as “verbal assassins” with a mission “to attack people personally if their views are different.”

Meddling of this sort is damaging to MPs’ cross-party working relationships. “One of the things that would be ideal would be for the parliamentary secretaries not to sit on the committee,” said Conservative MP Monte Solberg. “The parliamentary secretaries for the various ministers will, with a wink and a nudge, tell the government members what position to take. And I don’t think that’s helpful in the end. It removes some of the independence of the committees and once it’s perceived to be the case that the government is trying to jam something through, then the goodwill evaporates and any relationships that you have become secondary to advancing your party. So that’s probably the single biggest thing that could be done.”

Party whips can also grant or withhold assignments to sought-after committee posts as a means of rewarding or punishing more junior MPs. “One of the ways in which the whips have control over you as a Member,” said Bill Graham, “is they can approve your travel and they can approve your committee position. Everybody wanted to be on the foreign affairs committee, but if you didn’t play ball you were out of there and you could go and sit on the library committee for the rest of your life.”

Graham and Martin were the two party leaders we interviewed who said they supported continuity in committee
membership through the duration of a Parliament to protect committee work from partisan interference. “I am a strong proponent of that reform,” said Bill Graham. “You are appointed to the committee and you’re there for the duration of the Parliament. That preserves the integrity of the committee system.”

IF COMMITTEES ARE
effectively private for lack of media attention and public interest, caucus is private by design. The term “caucus” has several different meanings in Canadian political life. It can refer to a group of MPs from a given party gathered to discuss and formulate the party’s official position on a given topic. While Parliament is in session each party holds a meeting of MPs for this purpose at least weekly. Caucus is the “belly of the beast”—the space where MPs are closest to their party. If the party directs the MPs’ actions on the floor of the House, said the MPs in our interviews, then it was in caucus that they had a chance to turn things around and influence party policy. Only MPs, senators and a few senior political staff attend caucus meetings; members of the public service, the media and the general public are typically refused entry. And by convention, what takes place in caucus is off the record and not to be discussed outside the party (although leaks are not uncommon).

The term “caucus” also applies to the more informal but remarkably effective groups within a party that meet to provide input on, and to develop policy in specific areas. Smaller caucuses can be created to address any area of interest or issue, to focus on specific regions, or to advance the interests of a particular group. There are also caucuses about a single topic—an auto caucus, for example. In some cases, a
multi-party caucus can be set up to bring together MPs from different political parties who share a common interest.

The off-the-record nature of caucuses allows members the freedom to discuss how they really feel about an issue. Some of the debates can be off-colour, and the debating can be spirited, interviewees said. “One thing about our caucus—there were drag-me-out debates. You’ve got people with one opinion, people with the totally opposite opinion and you try and meet in the middle. It’s a huge, huge thing,” said Conservative MP Carol Skelton, who credited Prime Minister Stephen Harper with great skill at bringing his caucus to consensus. “He’s really, really good. The PM stays there for the whole caucus meeting. He’s always there. He’ll get right into it, too. Basically at the end you come out with a consensus. It might take you the whole time, but you come out with a consensus.”