A couple of weeks ago, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked whether he still had his "admiration" for China, and Trudeau said that over the past couple of years with looking at different systems around the world as part of his government's aborted exercise in electoral reform, that he had come back to the Mother of All Parliaments, Westminster.

On the one hand, that's great news that maybe he's given up on the foolhardy crusade of electoral reform, and that he recognizes that our present system has more to recommend it than not, and that hopefully we can move forward with trying to meaningfully engage with the system as it exists rather than trying to bring in a bunch of reforms for the sake of reforms.  But then again, perhaps not.  Trudeau's response as to why he was so enamoured with the present system in Westminster shows that he's still keen on reforms:

Obviously, the U.K. does a significantly better job than us in programming legislation and getting that through the House.  I think there is issue to admire on that.  On the other hand, we were glad to adopt the prime minister's question period model from the U.K. I think there's lots to draw on when you look at our democratic structures from the mother of all parliaments.

You may recall that Trudeau and his House Leader, Bardish Chagger, got into some hot water early in the year when they introduced that "discussion paper" on proposed changes to help "modernize" our own Parliament.  Embedded in that proposal was a proposal around programming motions, which they touted as a way to give greater predictability to House proceedings, and more certainty to committees to plan and undertake studies.  Eventually, the weeks of filibusters forced the government to back down on the issue, but as you can see, Trudeau remains enamoured with the concept, which makes me wonder if this isn't something he's going to try and bring in again (though potentially in a slightly less ham-handed manner than he tried the last time).

As with so many things, we can't just graft on UK procedures into our own Parliament, despite their common roots, because the nuances don't add up.  Case in point is the attempt by Trudeau to create our own version of Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesdays.  While the government went ahead and made this policy despite withdrawing their discussion paper that included it with the somewhat sulky reminder that these changes won't be put into the Standing Orders so that future governments won't be bound to them, as though it were actually possible to bind future governments (which they can't) it didn't really go as planned.

When you watch PMQs in the UK House of Commons, it's a lively exchange with spontaneity and wit but more than that, there isn't the same kind of reliance on canned answers and pabulum talking points that we see here.  Why?  Because questions are submitted in advance, so that the team in Whitehall can come up with sufficient answers to brief the PM with before her once-a-week appearance.  That doesn't happen in Canada at all in fact, there would likely be another revolt and weeks more of filibusters if Trudeau dared to suggest that in order to give more complete answers for Wednesday QP, that he would prefer questions be submitted beforehand.

After all, the suggestion that he wanted PMQs in the Standing Orders was seen as a way of giving himself the ability to only show up one day a week.  And while that may have been a bit overblown, it didn't really improve the quality of the exercise.  Trudeau does, on the whole, still show up three days a week when he's not doing international travel, meaning that with these new Wednesday PMQs, he's now answering far more questions than his predecessors did in the course of a week.  The problem is that the vast majority of these answers are vague platitudes, because that's as much as he can be briefed on when it comes to some of the topics that backbenchers will throw at him.  Add to that, the opposition has made it a regular tactic to bombard him with questions that they know he can't or won't answer (sometimes for legitimate reasons, like being asked by the Ethics Commissioner not to discuss any conversations they had), and we instead get a PMQ that is dull and repetitive.  It didn't translate in the slightest.

And that's one reason why programming can't work here at least, not until we have a wholesale reformation of our debate culture in the House of Commons.  Programming works in the UK to a large extent because they have a single afternoon of Second Reading debate and move the bill onto committee (which are far more independent than they are in Canada), and they have stricter timelines because of yearly prorogations and need to clear the Order Paper before that rolls around.  Their debate rules keep interventions short, and comprised of actual debate instead of reading twenty-minute speeches at one another for days on end, especially with our insistence on interminable Second Reading debate, which continues to baffle anyone who understands how debate is supposed to function.

The other, more salient problem with this fascination with programming is that it fundamentally treats the House of Commons like a legislative sausage-maker rather than a body that is designed to hold the government to account.  Trudeau and Chagger may be frustrated that the process to pass bills is slow particularly in this parliament but it's not Parliament's job to simply churn out legislation, and I fear that there is this expectation that is what's being articulated in Trudeau's admiration of programming motions.  And with so many attempts to "modernize" rules in the Canadian parliament, they're not solutions to problems, but layering more problems onto existing ones, which just make things worse in the long run.  We need to get back to debate basics, but that's not what Trudeau or Chagger are looking to offer.