The Samara Centre for Democracy released their retrospective on the 42nd Parliament this week, titled House Inspection, and it takes a look back at how the last parliament behaved on a number of metrics. It's important research to do, but I'm going to quibble with some of their methodology and findings. (And I know it may look like I'm picking on the Samara Centre, but I promise you I'm not they do really important work, but I'm just looking for that work to better and more useful).
The report has six key findings that the government keeps introducing large bills, that the use of time allocation has spiked over the previous two parliaments, that they spent more time scrutinizing and amending bills in part because of the Senate, that most MPs voted along party lines 99.6 percent of the time (the most rebellious voting with the party line 96.6 percent of the time), that committees got increasingly partisan, and that heckling did not decrease. Most of these are interesting findings, but much of them lack proper context, and the methodology around their findings was often flawed because they chose some fairly poor means of analysis.
On the subject of large bills, there was mention paid to omnibus bills, but there was little to no analysis of why those bills were larger. For the most part, the government didn't engage in abusive omnibus bills (meaning, bills where the subject matter was disjointed), but there were several perfectly acceptable omnibus bills in the last parliament, in large part because they were overhauling certain large pieces of legislation, such as their comprehensive transformation of transportation legislation in the country, or some fairly expansive Criminal Code reforms. None of this is examined in depth just the page-lengths of bills, which is pretty shallow as far as analysis goes. They also had some analysis on the percentage of government bills that passed, but had zero analysis of the fact that this government had a habit of introducing bills and abandoning them when they rolled them into other, larger bills sometimes more than once.
The use of time allocation spiked in the previous two parliaments, but little effort was made to drill down other than to glibly say "something has gone wrong; parties aren't able to cooperate on managing parliamentary time." While the 41stParliament saw time allocation used as a matter of course because that's how Peter Van Loan preferred to do things as Government House Leader, the underlying fact is that we do a shite job of scheduling debates in our parliament. We treat Second Reading entirely the wrong way, and spend way too much time ensuring that MPs read empty speeches into a mostly-deserted House rather than actually debate. It's a problem that goes beyond a government dealing with a hostile opposition that would frequently filibuster and force vote marathons to try to prove a point.
The statistics about the length of time spent debating and amending bills includes a page about the changes in the Senate, but speaks entirely credulously about them, and doesn't mention that the management of debate in the Senate has broken down entirely because the Government Leader refused to negotiate timelines, and the Independent Senators Group couldn't hold their members to any timelines that the caucuses agreed to amongst themselves. It has no mention of the act that most of the amendments that were passed came from the government often laundered through Independent senators something that speaks to problems with this government's drafting process more than it does with the "assertiveness" of the Senate.
The statistic on partly line votes is problematic for a number of reasons, primarily that the methodology simply plugs all of the votes in and crunches an absolute number without sorting out what were procedural votes, what were confidence votes, or private members' business. We also saw numerous marathon vote sessions in the last parliament, which dilutes the vote counts tremendously. A number of media outlets ran with the 99.6 percent headline without separating those figures out (and as we all know, these outlets like to both demand more independent MPs while also castigating leaders for "losing control" when MPs don't toe the party line). It would be far more useful to tell us what kinds of votes saw dissention in the ranks, but we didn't get that analysis.
The statistics about committee partisanship I found to be a bit troubling because "cross-party participation" on committee reports isn't a very helpful metric without context. Not all reports should be unanimous because it can water down the substance of the report, particularly if the objections are ideological. It's not too dissimilar from people who have grown alarmed that there are fewer unanimous decisions at the Supreme Court of Canada under Chief Justice Wagner it assumes that unanimous decisions are the best ones, when in fact they can simply turn on particularly narrow issues that don't answer much. Cross-party collaboration can be a great thing, but sometimes you need differing points of view spelled out. It's not a bad thing. Treating it like it is won't help anyone, let alone the work of parliament.
Their final point on heckling is another area where the methodology is completely baffling, because it simply counts the number of times that "Some Hon. Members: Oh, oh!" appears in Hansard. That tells you nothing other than the when the editors of Hansard chose to indicate that there was heckling. I can tell you as someone who has attended QP daily for the past eleven years (I've missed six in that time) that the heckling of the 42ndparliament, when the Liberals largely cracked down on it and applause that it was a far quieter Chamber than the 41stparliament, from a strictly observational standpoint. But hey, let's count the interjections in Hansard, because that's a useful metric! It's not.
Samara does some particularly good research, especially with their MP exit interviews and in some of the topics they cover. But this tendency to simply count things without context is giving a quantitative analysis to a qualitative problem. Parliament is not a counting game, and treating it as such is a disservice to the institution, and makes it harder to derive lessons for MPs to take from these reports.
Photo Credit: City Of Ottawa
