Calls of the Wild: Resignation Requests in the Canadian House of Commons 1957-2008∗
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Calls of the Wild: Resignation Requests in the Canadian House of Commons 1957-2008∗ Matthew Kerby [email protected] Department of Political Science Memorial University of Newfoundland St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador Abstract This research focuses on a particular class of parliamentary question: the call for a minister’s resignation. First, attention is paid to providing an initial look at where calls for resignation are situated in time and space. The second objective of this research is to examine the real effect of a call for resignation. Do ministers actually resign when they are called to? The answer is “yes, ministers do resign when called to . sometimes.” However, a closer examination is required to establish the true cause and effect in this relationship. Data drawn from an original dataset which records every call for resignation in the Canadian House of Commons for the period 1957-2008 is used to provide a clearer picture of the nature and relevance of parliamentary questions not only in Canada but in other Westminster parliamentary democracies as well. If the essence of Parliament is Government accountability, then surely the essence of account- ability is the Question Period in the Canadian House of Commons (1985, p.51). Hon. James Jerome Speaker of the House of Commons, 1974-1980 1 Introduction Considerable attention has been directed to the subject of parliamentary questions in Western democracies. Parliamentary questions are visible, they are recorded, they are often linked to contentious political events and actors. Parliamentary questions lend themselves for analysis by single case or large n quantitative studies; they can be treated as dependent or independent variables. It comes as no surprise that political scientists have spent considerable time and resources to study, or at least make reference to and recognize these phenom- ena (Wiberg, 1994). The general trend, at least within the Westminster parliamentary tradition, highlights Question Period and the questions contained therein, as an essential part in holding the government and its ministers accountable and responsible for their actions and policies (Franklin and Norton, 1993; Bowring and Chester, 1962). In principle, Question Period is the theatre in which governments live or die based on their ability to respond and satisfy the opposition parties and keep the barbarians at the gates. But parliamentary questions serve other functions as well. With respect to opposition parties, Question Period serves as a plat- form to publicly present alternative policies and to publicize a government in waiting in the event the existing government loses the confidence of the House of Commons. Question Period provides an opportunity for junior ministers and opposition critics to “strut their stuff”, demonstrate their abilities and further their career paths within their political parties. Lastly, Question Period also serves a representative function whereby public and group concerns can can be transmitted via elected representatives’ questions to decision making elites. ∗Paper presented to the 2009 Annual Conference of the Canadian Political Science Association: Section A1(a): Political Careers and Party Activists, Ottawa, Ontario, May 27, 2009. Not for reference without permission from the author as this is currently a work in progress. Thanks to Lesley Smith and Mark Williams for their capable research assistance. 1 Among the ways in which accountability and responsibility can be studied through parliamentary ques- tions, one path entails the examination of a particular class of question – a call for a minister’s resignation. Calls for ministerial resignations, as a subset of parliamentary questions, are an integral part of the prin- ciple of responsible government and its twin children: individual and collective ministerial responsibility. This subject has experienced a renaissance in recent years; current studies treat ministerial resignations as a dependent variable and try to explain the causes of turnover with reference to the duration of ministerial careers (Dowding and Kang, 1998; Dewan and Dowding, 2005; Berlinski et al., 2007b; Huber and Martinez- Gallardo, 2008; Kerby, 2007; Dowding and Dumont, 2009). Central to these studies, is the ability to identify when and in what context resignations and “non-resignations” occur. One way to approach this issue is to treat a call for a minister’s resignation as an “opportunity” for the minister to exit the cabinet. Whether the minister exits or not will depend on a number of factors. Alternatively, calls for resignation can be included as an independent variable in a causal model of ministerial duration and turnover. I expect that a study of calls for resignations will feed the current literature on political elite career paths as well as modestly inform at least one aspect of the current study of parliamentary questions. This paper provides a first glance at a new and complete dataset of calls for resignation in the Canadian federal House of Commons which span the 51 years that begin with the first Diefenbaker ministry (June 1957) and end with the completion of the first Harper ministry (October 2008). The first part of the paper provides an overview of the general pattern of calls for resignations in Canada with respect to their occurrence. The second part of the paper focuses on the effects of calls for resignation by presenting an event history model of ministerial duration which includes calls for resignation as an independent variable. I hope that this initial research will help to generate empirical propositions about the nature and changing conditions of parliamentary institutions with respect to constitutional convention and ultimately ministerial resignations themselves. The goal of this paper is not to build a model which explains the causes of calls for resignation or their occurrence; nor does it purport to develop a complete model of political elite turnover in Canada. Rather, the goal of this paper is simply to elaborate on what these phenomena look like before moving on to the next stage of research. 2 A (brief) history of parliamentary questions in Canada A review of Canadian parliamentary history reveals that Question Period as we know of it now was not an original feature of the parliamentary process in 1867.1 Following Confederation, there was no formal requirement for oral questions - only written questions. Nevertheless, oral questions were posed to the prime minister and the ministers during debates and speeches in the early years of the dominion. So much so that the Speaker of the House noted in 1878, It is customary for hon. members to ask the Government for any special information between the various calls from the Chair for the day, before Notices of Motion or the Orders of the Day. I am not aware that any hon. member has a positive right even to do that; but I think he must confine himself entirely to asking the information from the Government, and he must not proceed to descant on the conduct of the Government (House of Commons, 1878, p.1269). By 1878, the frequency of oral questions in the House of Commons had set enough of a precedent to establish the principle of asking questions as a convention and from this point until the 1940s, parliamentary questions were governed by informal rules, guidelines and some precedent. By the 1940s, Question Period (Questions on the Order of the Day, as they were known) had become an established part of the parliamentary day. The rules governing Question Period and parliamentary questions were still determined by guidelines established by the Speaker and his interpretation and relative adherence to precedence. There were repeated attempts to codify the rules governing Question Period but they were met with little success. It was not until 1964 that the first written codification of the rules governing the timing, length and content of parliamentary questions was established. In 1975, Speaker James Jerome set an important precedent by stating that asking questions in Parliament was a right and not a privilege, thus establishing the permanence of the institution. Since the 1 A useful history of parliamentary procedure, including parliamentary questions, can be found in Robert Marleau and Camille Montpetit, House of Commons Procedure and Practice, Canada. Parliament. House of Commons, 2000 2 1970s, successive speakers have introduced changes to Question Period in order to streamline and speed up the procedure. Presently, Question Period takes place every weekday that Parliament is in session. It begins at 2:15pm on Monday through Thursday, 11:15am on Friday and it lasts 45 minutes. There is a 35 second time limit on both questions and answers which can be asked and responded to in both official languages. The format of Question Period specifies that the speaker first recognizes the leader of the official opposition who asks a lead- off question. The prime minister or cabinet minister may choose to respond and the leader of the opposition is entitled to ask two supplementary questions. The lead questioners of the remaining opposition parties are then entitled to one initial and one supplementary question each. Once the cycle of opposition party questions is complete then members of all officially recognized parties (including the government party) can ask questions in rotation until the 45 minutes are up. An important feature of the Canadian Question Period, one which differentiates it from its British cousin, pertains to the absence of any requirement to submit