Vancouver Province
for February 7, 1999

The United States is not, I say heartily from the outset, a better place to live than Canada. I’ve never lived there and wouldn’t want to. But their system of government is far superior to ours.

For one thing, they know when elections are going to happen. And as far as their Lower House is concerned, they have another crack at them every two years. But what I think is very overlooked is the committee systems within the two political systems.

The bad part of the American system is that chairmanship of a committee goes on the basis of seniority but since our system is even worse than that, quarrelling with the Americans on that point would be mere quibbling. But American committees, Senate, the House of Representatives or joint committees, have real powers. They can subpoena and jail for contempt. Not even the President of the United States is immune from congressional committees. In fact, what makes them so powerful is that they are not in any way controlled by the president and his cabinet. Because the Legislative (Congress) and executive (President) branches are separate the only thing that happens when a bill fails is … the bill fails. That’s it. In Canada, because the Executive is responsible to the legislature, a government bill failing usually means the government must resign and an election is called. This has bred ironclad party discipline.

These differences are obvious, substantial and extremely important. While no system is perfect, Congressional Committees, when they go amongst the people and hold hearings on proposed legislation, can in fact do something in response to what they hear. These Committees have a great bearing on what happens on the floor of the House or Senate.

In Canada, where the Prime Minister calls all the shots, Parliamentary Committees tend to hold showcase hearings mostly listening to handpicked witnesses, government sycophants or chronic malcontents. Ordinary citizens, knowing the exercise to be a waste of time, staying home.

In the United States the President has nothing to say about who sits on a Congressional Committee, much less who chairs it – it is appointed by and reports to the legislative chamber itself. Because Congress is far less subject to party discipline that our parliaments, their committees tend to be free wheeling and unafraid to look into all nooks and crannies.

Congressional committees have enormous powers. The House Judiciary Committee, for example, can and does investigate actions of both the Legislative Branch and the Judicial Branch as we have seen with Presidents Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon and William Clinton. They can and do investigate judicial behaviour and can recommend bills of impeachment.

Commons and Legislative Committees in Canada are toothless. For one thing, in almost all cases, the majority composition and the chair is handpicked by the Prime Minister who will not hesitate to tamper with a committee’s work if it gets a tad too delicate for the Prime Minister’s political or personal comfort. In British Columbia most committees have but one meeting where the majority select the chairman the premier wants then adjourns at the call of the chair which in practical terms means the committee never meets again.

This is more than just a shame – it is an utter distortion of what the parliamentary committee started out to be, namely a way by which the Members of Parliament can hold the Cabinet’s feet to the fire. It doesn’t take a professor of political science to understand that under this highly controlled and disciplined system executive tiggy toes never get anywhere near hot coals.

We tend to look at government as represented by the Prime Minister and his cabinet. They might look a lot different and behave much responsively to the people who elect them if we had not so distorted the committee system that it’s become bad farce.