Rules of the House of Commons

The House of Commons at work!

The Parliament is the lawmaking body of Canada. All the nation's laws originate in parliament, and all of the parliament's laws originate in the elected lower house, the House of Commons.

Most laws are introduced by members of the cabinet. Then there are a bunch of "readings" in which the bill is read to all the members of the House, then it goes to committee to be discussed and debated, then eventually it goes back to the floor of the parliament and everyone votes. If a bill passes in the House of Commons, it goes on to the Senate. The Senate almost always agrees with the House, as I explain in-depth on the Senate page. Once a bill is passed by both houses of Parliament, the Governor General signs it into law in a fancy ceremony.

Technically it is possible for non-cabinet, or even opposition MPs to introduce bills. Due to strong party discipline (see below) this practice is discouraged however, and rarely occurs. There are never bills passed that the majority party does not agree with. They rarely even go to a vote, in fact.

The other page described the major characters in the House of Commons. On this page I'll describe some of the basic concepts that underline how the House itself actually operates.

Minority or Majority?

The Parliamentary system can create two different kinds of government.
The first kind of Government is a Majority Government. This is the kind you usually see. After an election, one party usually has a solid voting majority over every other party in the House, so that government is said to be a "majority". Pretty straight forward.

An example of what a majority government looks like vs. a minority government. The slices represent the different parties and their seats.

But what happens when no one party has a solid majority? Then we have what is known as a Minority Government. This kind of government used to be rare when Candada had a reliable two-party system. Today, however, minority governments have become more common in the last couple of years because there are now four strong parties in the House, and their distribution of seats has gotten much more even.

In a minority government, the Governor General appoints the leader of the largest party as prime minister, same as usual. However, the rules of Parliament traditionally make a minority government very unstable, and difficult to manage. If a government is in a minority situation, it is usually a good idea to form an alliance with another party, until the coalition occupies a majority of seats.

Right now, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative Party has 124 seats, which is the largest amount of seats held by any one party. However, if you add up the seats held by all the opposition parties, you'll see that Harper's party is outnumbered by a combined total of 183 opposition MPs. In order to pass legislation the Conservatives thus need the support of at least 31 MPs from other parties, as 155 votes is the margin needed to pass legislation. When a government is in a minority situation, it is thus customary for the ruling party to try and suck up to the opposition party to which it is most ideologically similar. In previous minority governments this has often generated an NDP-Liberal Party alliance, since both those parties are left-wing (see Canada's Political Parties). However, the Conservatives are in a more difficult situation, as they are the only right-wing party in parliament. So it may be harder for them to get their legislation through.

Joe Clark (1979-1980) was Canada's shortest serving elected Prime Minister. He won a very unstable minority government and was non-confidence voted only eight months after assuming office.

Confidence Voting

One of the key principals of Parliament is the concept of the No Confidence Vote. Supposedly, if the House does not like the Prime Minister, they can introduce a bill demanding him to resign. If the vote passes, the parliament is said to have shown "no confidence" in his administration, and he must step down. However, because of strong party discipline, No Confidence votes can only be used successfully against minority governments.

If the combined number of opposition MPs greatly outnumber the government MPs, then there can be little hope of surviving a vote of no confidence, unless the minority prime minister is able to successfully beg the opposition not to. But most opposition parties will see little point in keeping a "lame duck" prime minister around longer than necessary. Once they force the prime minister to resign, the Governor General will almost certainly call a new election, and the people will get to decide what party they want to see form the new government. Minority governments rarely ever govern for longer than two years, and its pretty rare to have two back-to-back.

Canada has recently gone through quite a bit of minority government related turmoil. Here is the history to bring you up to date:

Party Disclipine

It is all but impossible for a majority government to be defeated by a vote of no confidence, and its equally rare for a majority government to get lose a vote on any of its legislative proposals. This is because Canada has extremely strong party discipline. Party discipline is one of the main differences between the politicial systems of Canada and the United States. In the United States, congressmen and senators are generally quite independent. They are members of a party, certainly, but the US has a very decentralized party leadership structure that makes it hard to enforce discipline. As a result, American politicians owe allegiance to no one person, and thus will often vote against their own party, when need be. Members of congress are primarily motivated by the needs of their constituents and their own political ideologies.

In Canada, things work quite differently. Members of parliament tend to all obey a certain "party line," and it is thus very, very rare for a Canadian MP to vote against his or her own party. This is largely because partisan leadership in this country is very centralized. The leader of the party holds a lot of power, and doesn't like to be embarassed. Severe punishments can result if an MP dares to vote against the party line. He can be expelled from caucus and forced to sit as an independent, his speaking privileges in parliament can be temporarily revoked, or he can even banned from running in the next election. With such rigid party discipline in place, the House of Commons is not generally a very exciting institution. As long as the current system stays in place, every single piece of ruling party legislation introduced will always be approved. When we have a majority government in place critics will often describe parliament a little more than a "rubber stamp" on the prime minister's decrees.

I recently came across this very good summary of the system, written by the Prime Minister himself, Stephen Harper, back in 1997 (many years before he was PM). He is speaking to an American audience explaining how the Canadian politicial system is different than the US one:

What the House of Commons is really like is the United States electoral
college. Imagine if the electoral college which selects your president once
every four years were to continue sitting in Washington for the next four
years. And imagine its having the same vote on every issue. That is how our political system operates.

In our election last Monday, the Liberal party won a majority of seats. The
four opposition parties divided up the rest, with some very, very rough
parity. But the important thing to know is that this is how it will be until the
Prime Minister calls the next election. The same majority vote on every
issue. So if you ask me, "What's the vote going to be on gun control?'' or
on the budget, we know already.

If any member of these political parties votes differently from his party
on a particular issue, well, that will be national headline news. It's
really hard to believe. If any one member votes differently, it will be
national headline news. I voted differently at least once from my party,
and it was national headline news. It's a very different system.