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.

I faintly remember a time where I had a bit of optimism about Question Period.  After a decade of the exercise being continually debased with a collection of non-sequitur talking points being read off of sheets of paper, a new government that talked about respecting Parliament had taken charge, and most of the ministers in the new Cabinet appeared to be making an effort to look like they weren't reading.  Sure, some of them were a bit formulaic, but that wasn't wholly unexpected.  We had a PM who appeared to be making an effort to show up and answer questions, and we had opposition leaders who seemed to want to set a more respectful tone in the way they asked questions.  It was a refreshing change.

By the end of 2017, there is a definite sense that things are on the decline once again, possibly to the point of plumbing new depths.  I'm not talking about decorum that's one thing that has improved significantly since the last parliament, and between the Liberals' clapping ban, and a Speaker who is making a great effort to name and shame repeat offenders so much so that he actually had one MP removed from the Chamber for refusing to pipe down, for the first time in longer that I've been in the Press Gallery we no longer have a QP that is dominated by jeering, hooting baboons.  So, small victories.

No, things took a turn for the worse when we got a change in leadership in the opposition ranks.  Thomas Mulcair, when he got demoted to "interim" leader for the better part of a year-and-a-half, went from someone with a (somewhat overblown) reputation for prosecutorial eloquence to someone whose bitter sarcasm and vitriol left a bad taste in everyone's mouths.  His replacement has refused to seek a seat, and that leaves another placeholder in his stead who makes a good effort, but for whom we cannot take as seriously as someone who will be taking that fight into the next election.

For the Conservatives, however, things have backslid to a shambolic mess that is painful to watch.  Under Rona Ambrose, there was a fair share of overwrought questions and hyperbolic rhetoric, but there was a range of questions every day, and there was an actual attempt to look like there was an exercise in accountability going on.  Scheer has backed away from that entirely.  The questions are no longer overwrought they are disingenuous to the point of being mendacious.  Facts have been so distorted that they treat everyone watching like idiots, because even the most cursory fact-checking will show that the resemblance to reality is barely even tenuous.  Most of the time, the connections they try to draw with their questions make conspiracy theories look better researched.  And then there is the attempt to be provocateurs, with ill-considered moves like trying to put Rachael Harder into chair of the Status of Women committee and then complaining that the Liberals are sexist for opposing the choice, while trying to both fan the flames of the weaponization of free speech on campus at the same time as backing away from the alt-right's mouthpieces in Canada.  Scheer's trying to brand himself as a Dollarama knock-off Anne Coulter that doesn't quite fit with the "positive politics" he professed during his leadership bid, but that's not the worst part.

What Scheer has done to debase QP more than anything is his tactic of trying to make repetition his tool of choice.  We have to sit through the same question over, and over, and over, and over.  And over.  Each repetition gets more hysterical than the previous one.  Apparently, this is Scheer's version of playing the long game, trying to "build a narrative" through constant repetition of the same dishonest portrayal of the facts that puts into practice the line that if you repeat a lie often enough it starts to sound like the truth.  Any attempt to get any accountability in QP anymore is gone.  Now it's all about trying to get clips of Trudeau not answering the questions put to him with the full knowledge that these questions are either unanswerable or are traps designed to be used against him and most of the actual issues of the day of real consequence aren't being asked at all.  We've gone through two Auditor General's reports now where the subject matter was barely touched in QP.  And somehow this is supposed to be an exercise in holding government to account.

As for the government?  The attempt to answer questions has been curtailed with a sense of risk aversion that has morphed into an instinct to respond to every and all questions with a heap of pabulum.  They don't even start to engage on the issues, or fight back against the false narratives being put around them, until it's far too late.  Whether it's with Harjit Sajjan's "architect" boast, the filibusters in the spring about proposed parliamentary reforms, the CCPC tax changes this summer, or Bill Morneau's conflict disclosures over the fall, the government doesn't fight back until it's too late.  And those talking points are even more repetitive than the questions being asked, so when they do finally respond the way they should have on day one, those of us listening are already at the point of being willing to gnaw off a limb to get out of the bear trap that we find ourselves in, observing it without tuning out.

This isn't the way that things are supposed to happen.  Wooden exchanges of scripted questions and answers that made life so intolerable between 2011 and 2015 were bad enough, but monotonous mendacity versus pabulum is making this an exercise in tedium.  I long for the days when Bob Rae was the able to extemporaneously stand up and give some real accountability, with wit and wry humour.  That's not something I'm sure that Andrew Scheer is capable of, and it's more the pity.

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.