With Liberal MPs holding a majority of seats in the House of Commons, government House leader Steven MacKinnon moved a motion on Thursday that would see that majority reflected in the allotment of seats on House committees.
This would be an entirely remarkable development — the sort of procedural housekeeping that occurs at the start of each Parliament — except for the fact that it was happening a year after the last general federal election.
It is for that reason — and for the remarkable events that have transpired over the last 12 months — that the change to committees was not simply waved through the House this week with unanimous consent.
“If ever the Conservatives have a majority in Parliament, given their argument right now, will he commit and will he promise to Canadians that Conservatives will not have a majority on committee?” Liberal MP Karina Gould asked Conservative House leader Andrew Scheer during debate in the House on Thursday.
“Had the Liberals gotten a majority through the ballot box, we would not be having this conversation,” Scheer responded. “They only need this motion because they are trying to overturn the results of the last election through the committee makeup.”
Gould and Scheer are unlikely to agree on a path forward. But beneath the partisan acrimony and overheated language, there are useful and important questions about how Canada’s parliamentary democracy works, and how it is supposed to work.
The lingering fuss over floor-crossing
The root of Conservative complaints remains the fact that the Liberal majority includes five floor-crossers, including four former Conservative MPs. Those five changes in party affiliation were pivotal in moving the Liberals from 169 seats (three seats short of a majority) to 174 seats (two above the threshold).
The complaint that Canadians didn’t vote for a majority government is flawed — none of the ballots in last year’s election gave voters a choice between a majority or minority government.
However much parties and party leaders might influence who Canadians vote for, Canadians elect parliaments, not governments. (It wasn’t until 1972 — 105 years into Canada’s existence — that party names even appeared on ballots in federal elections.)
Government House leader Steven MacKinnon tells Power & Politics his government has earned a majority, which will soon be reflected when the Liberals seize control of key House of Commons committees.
But it’s still fair to object to specific floor-crossers or worry that floor-crossing risks feeding public cynicism about parliamentarians or the democratic process.
Insofar as an MP crossing the floor to another party might seem to contradict what that individual has previously claimed to stand for, it’s unsurprising if at least some voters take a dim view of such moves.
For that reason, Liberals still might want to tread carefully with how they use their majority.
But it’s also fair to ask whether trying to legislate against floor-crossing would do more harm than good.
MPs have had at least two opportunities in the last 25 years to change the rules. A private member’s bill that would have forced a byelection if a member switched parties was defeated in 2005 by a vote of 60 to 189. Seven years later, a similar bill was defeated by a vote of 91 to 181.
Three weeks ago, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre endorsed a suggestion that voters be given the power to trigger a byelection if an MP crosses the floor. But the Conservatives don’t seem to be pushing the idea too hard.
There are some practical questions to be asked about any proposed rules around floor-crossing.
How, for instance, would Poilievre’s proposal or an outright ban deal with a situation like what happened in February 2004, when all Canadian Alliance MPs and 15 Progressive Conservative MPs chose to sit together under the banner of the newly former Conservative Party of Canada?
What about the Canadian Alliance MPs who, a few years before that, left their party and formed a group called the Democratic Representative Caucus?
Beyond the practical concerns, limits on floor-crossing risk further empowering party leaders and whips, at the expense of individual members. And at the heart of the debate about floor-crossing is a question about what should be considered the fundamental building block of Canada’s parliamentary democracy: the individual members who are elected, or the political parties whose banners they run under?
If switching parties is fundamentally wrong, what about voting against the wishes of your party? Should MPs be beholden to every element of their party platform?
Is a majority too powerful?
The Conservatives aren’t just concerned about how the Liberals came to constitute a majority, but also what the Liberals might now do with that majority — specifically, that Liberals will be able to stymie opposition efforts at House committees, thus greatly reducing the ability of opposition MPs to scrutinize the government.
“What the Liberals are proposing … is to in fact give themselves 58 per cent of representation on those committees, which would ensure that nothing the opposition wanted to do at those committees would actually happen,” Conservative MP John Brassard told the House on Thursday.
As the Liberal government moves to seize control of House of Commons committees, Conservative House leader Andrew Scheer calls for an amendment allowing opposition parties to hold the government to account in three key ones.
It’s not unreasonable to assume a committee where the governing party has a majority will act very differently than a committee where opposition MPs have a majority. Once Liberal MPs control House committees, those committees will be that much less likely to launch investigations into matters that might embarrass the government or accept amendments that the government doesn’t support.
That might actually be an argument against ever allowing one party to hold a majority of seats. Or it could be an argument for pushing back against the influence that partisanship has over matters like committee business — reducing the strict party discipline that allows party leaders and whips to control parliamentary proceedings.
And given that it would be hard to ban majorities — though a move to a proportional representation electoral system would at least make it unlikely that any one party would ever hold a majority of seats — it might be easier to focus on making committees and their members more independent and empowered.
Putting committee membership beyond the immediate control of party whips wouldn’t necessarily lead to all of the investigations, hearings and legislative amendments that opposition MPs might like to see. But it would at least increase the ability of committees to more often act with a mind of their own — regardless of whether Parliament is operating with a party majority.
In that way, the path forward for Parliament after these remarkable 12 months might have less to do with reinforcing the importance of party affiliation, and more to do with actually empowering the individuals that Canadians elect to represent them.
