If you go back to the creation of the standing committee structure, the assumption was that you had this kind of nasty, wild stuff happening on the floor of the House of Commons at the last moment. But if you could create a series of standing committees, with defined, substantive mandates, and then put relatively continuous memberships into them, the members would work in a more collegial, non-partisan way across party lines. They'd get to know each other. They'd get to know the issues much better than existing structures gave them the opportunity to do. And they would have constructive inputs to make on the estimates.
In my view, if you look at the history of the committee system, not so much for estimates but for other things the committees do, there are certainly lots of examples of this expectation having been met to a considerable extent.
At the same time, the reality of the Westminster Parliament, under modern conditions, is that you have parties engaged in ceaseless competition. And that has certainly made its way into the committee structure. You basically have a great deal of the old wine of partisan behaviour in these new bottles. The result has been a fair bit of disillusionment with the standing committees and what they could do as you come forward through the 1980s and 1990s.
I worked for the committees. I think we really had quite a cycle of somewhat unrealistic expectations. I can think of one of the parliamentary reports that fed into the committee reforms that actually anticipated that the committees would take Canada out of the narrow Westminster model and would create a system that was somewhere between congressionalism and Westminster. That was a really ambitious intention, to say the least. Not surprisingly, high expectations have been followed by a measure of disillusionment.