On New Year's Day, BuzzFeed UK posted a lengthy analysis piece about how the UK Parliament is seeing a movement by its backbench MPs to take back control of Parliament after growing influence and power from its prime minister and government.  Given that the most common complaint about our own Parliament in Canada is that power is so centralized that we have a "court government" and backbenchers are often described as being cowed or powerless (sometimes by their own admission), what are the chances that we may see a similar rebalancing of power here?

To start with, we need to be mindful of some of the differences between how the Parliaments in Westminster and Ottawa operate.  In many ways, the backbenchers in the UK are far more empowered than their Canadian counterparts, simply because there are far more of them 650 MPs in the UK versus 338 in Canada, with the UK having a fixed Cabinet size to Canada's more variable one.  Because there are so many fewer opportunities for someone in Westminster to make it into Cabinet, as compared to a roughly one-in-three chance of being a minister or Parliamentary Secretary in Ottawa, it creates a more independent UK backbench from the start.  They know that their chances are slim, so there's less incentive for them to suck up to the PM, particularly if they are in a relatively "safe" seat, meaning they can push back more often.

Part of how this Westminster push has come about is also because their Speaker, John Bercow, has made it his mission to further empower MPs, and he's been rewarded by being returned as Speaker by those MPs on a couple of occasions now.  In Ottawa, the focus during Speaker elections tends to be on Question Period and decorum, and it's one that the current Speaker, Geoff Regan, is taking seriously.  And he's made progress decorum is far better in the Commons now than it was during the whole of the previous Conservative government (despite the bellyaching that still happens about it), but he hasn't done much for the whole empowering MPs.  The problem there, of course, is that he's constrained by what the Standing Orders allow him to do, and how much leeway they give him.  But you know who can change those Standing Orders?  Why, the backbench MPs, if they so choose.

One of the things that Bercow has made a point of during his Speakership is to revive the practice of Urgent Questions, that can call a minister to the Commons to answer questions on a specific issue that, as the name implies, requires the urgent consideration by MPs.  This increasing use of UQs in Westminster formed part of the BuzzFeed analysis of how backbenchers were taking back control.  This is one of those areas where Canadian MPs find themselves at a disadvantage, because we have no capacity for Urgent Questions in our rules.  What we do have, however, is a much more free-form Question Period on a daily basis.  Whereas the UK's Oral Questions are targeted to specific ministers on days other than Wednesdays, which are devoted to Prime Minister's Questions, there is less opportunity to quiz ministers about the issues of the day, which may be an advantage to Canada.  That said, given that our QP rules are rigid and a disincentive to substantive debate, that advantage may evaporate upon greater reflection.

I would also note that one of the reforms that the UK is considering is giving more power to backbenchers to recall Parliament during a recess, particularly around the practice of UQs during those times when the House isn't sitting.  Given that we don't have UQs in Canada, I'm not sure this is a practice that merits too much consideration here for the time being.

Backbenchers have more control of the Westminster Select Committees than they do in Canada, and this has been reinforced by changes that allow the chairs to be elected by secret ballot of the entire Commons rather than the committees themselves.  While this, along with the fact that Select Committees don't include parliamentary secretaries or Shadow Ministers, it means they operate more independently than our committees do.

One area that Canada does have over the UK is the way in which our Private Members Business is structured, where MPs have a few more structural advantages thanks to changes made in Canada over successive parliaments, which is to create a guaranteed ability for MPs to have their bills or motions debated.  The rules provide for an hour every day allotted to private members' business, and for it to be strictly time allocated so that they move through the process in a relatively expeditious manner, with the order of precedence determined by a lottery as a way of ensuring fairness.

But this is where we can see some of the dark sides of backbench empowerment creeping in.  For starters, there is a growing expectation that there should be a greater focus on private members' business, which starts to blur the role of MPs.  They are not supposed to be American-style lawmakers, but rather are supposed to hold government to account, and these bills and motions are supposed to be a tool to do so, rather than a competing legislative process.  Add to that, the drama this past fall with NDP MP Sheila Malcolmson forcing the Commons to vote by secret ballot to allow her bill to be debated despite it being declared out of order, because the government had their own similar bill, strikes me as a very dangerous blurring of lines.

The UK is not immune to this blurring, particularly as their confidence conventions are increasingly removed from the ability to defeat a government thanks to their Fixed Term Parliaments Act.  When their government lost a vote on a foreign policy matter around military intervention in Syria without triggering a loss of confidence (as it should have been considered a matter thereof), that starts to dismantle some of the key tenets of Responsible Government, which is what any empowerment of backbenchers should keep in mind.  I'm not sure that all aspects being contemplated do that.

So can Canadian backbenchers become better empowered as their UK counterparts are?  In a word, yes, but that comes with the proviso that MPs need to want to push for it.  As we have seen repeatedly over the past few years, MPs have little appetite to use the power that they already have that empowers them to do the kinds of things that UK MPs are doing to take more control.  It's a matter of education, and working together but they need to want to do it.  That's what we haven't seen enough evidence of here yet.