Late last week, the Government House Leader, Bardish Chagger, released a discussion paper that looked at ways to reform the rules of the House of Commons in a bid to make things run a little more efficiently.  I won't pan the entire paper because there are a few needed changes in there that I would endorse, but for the most part, any bid to make the Commons run more "efficiently" should be treated with suspicion and indeed scorn because most of those fixes have a funny way of having unintended consequences that make things worse and not better in the longer term.

We have a history of tinkering with the rules of the Commons to make things more "efficient."  One of the most prominent and existential is the way in which MPs review the Estimates, which is the lifeblood of why parliament exists.  Parliament exists to act as a check on the government (meaning cabinet), and the way they do that is by controlling the public purse.  If government wants to spend funds from the treasury, it needs parliament to approve it, and the way they go about doing that is by putting forward the Estimates.  In 1968, the Liberal government of the day changed the rules so that if MPs hadn't voted on the Estimates by a certain date, they would henceforth be "deemed" have been adopted you know, because the "efficiency" of keeping things moving along outweighs the whole point of why parliament exists in the first place.

This kind of abusive change is one of the reasons why I am very wary of trying to make parliament more "efficient."  When they eliminated evening sittings in the early nineties to make parliament more "family friendly," it meant that MPs no longer ate together three nights a week and collegiality suffered as a result.  That is one of the reasons why bid to introduce electronic voting in the Commons is of particular concerns more than just obliterating the solemnity of the act for MPs, it is one of the only times where all MPs are gathered together in one place.  Time together is how they get to know each other as people and not partisan enemies, and eliminating that time will have more dire consequences on the running of the Commons than just votes running a little more quickly.

While the paper talks about doing away with Friday sittings something that most opposition MPs have panned it also mentions the possibility of adding more time on the calendar for private members' business.  This is something I would argue against for the simple reason that MPs are already abdicating too much of their primary responsibilities of holding government to account and doing things like scrutinizing the Estimates.  Giving more time for private members' business gives more incentive for them to spend their time riding their personal policy hobby horses and advocating for their bills rather than doing their actual jobs.  They're not American lawmakers, and putting forward bills is not doing their jobs.

Restricting the use of time allocation by means of programming motions is also problematic because we shouldn't make things too easy for a government to ram their agenda through the Commons.  Opposition is a necessary role, and if there are bills or motions that they deem particularly odious, they should have a suite of tools available to them, be it filibuster or dilatory motions to slow it down.  While people may grumble about it, it's an important release valve that needs to be preserved.

This goes as well for trying to limit speaking times on committees.  Filibustering at committees is a legitimate tool and tactic (so long as it's properly policed speeches need to be on topic, for example), and shouldn't be eliminated just because governments find it inconvenient.  I also find the proposal to give parliamentary secretaries roles on committees to be particularly egregious because they are agents of Cabinet.  Committees are there to hold governments to account, not to do their bidding, and they need independence to do that.

Question Period comes up in the discussion paper, but I will say right off the start that I have no love for the idea of trying to institute a UK-style "Prime Minister's Questions" because it would limit the PM's appearance to once per week.  The last thing we need to do is give him more excuses to stay away from the Commons.  Once per week plus maybe another day for votes is not enough.  The PM is not a president he's an MP like all of the others, and "first among equals" in cabinet, and coming up with excuses to isolate him from the rest of the chamber violates those principles.

This isn't to say that all of the proposals in the discussion paper were terrible there were a couple of items that I would certainly find unobjectionable.  Extending the response period for written questions from 45 to 65 days is something that I could live with, and giving the Speaker the ability to split omnibus bills is certainly overdue.  Likewise, when it comes to coming up with a mechanism to prevent a government from abusing the power to prorogue parliament, I would certainly favour the proposal to restore prorogation ceremonies (like a Throne Speech, only the Governor General lists the government's accomplishments instead of their plans) because it's a public way to keep the government accountable and prevents the PM from simply phoning up the GG to request a prorogation the way that Stephen Harper did in one of his most egregious requests.  This is more preferable to their alternate proposal for tabling a prorogation report to be debated in the Commons, particularly because the pomp and ceremony of the GG's visit will focus the attention of Canadians better than a Commons debate would.  But we don't need to change the rules to make parliament more "efficient" we need MPs to do their jobs.