We might hope that the new leader is the one who is also the choice of the parliamentary caucus.
The point here is, this is a big difference in terms of our political culture because you have that leader who connects with the caucus. Of course, they have to work with the caucus, and the caucus can hold them accountable, and there's an interplay there. The leader is a reflection of the will of the membership of the party; whereas, in the British system, there is a different culture around this.
The British Conservative Party had just moved to a system where the caucus.... This was an innovation. Before, it was the caucus who selected the leader, but the system they moved to, through which the current Prime Minister May was selected, was the caucus kind of winnowing the field down to two people, and then those people.... There would be a vote among party members on who that person would be. It happened in this case, after all that, that the prospective opponent in that runoff race to Prime Minister May actually dropped out. It was effectively the caucus again continuing with this tradition that made Theresa May the prime minister.
That creates a huge difference in terms of the dynamic that exists between members of Parliament and the leadership, and that informs every aspect of our institutions. It's something that we debated here in terms of the Reform Act, 2014, in the last Parliament, whether or not we should put in place rules that formalize the convention in Canada, which have been used in Australia and the U.K., of having the leader potentially be removed by the caucus. That is something that would be new as a convention in our system. Certainly, I don't think there's anybody involved in active politics who is proposing that caucuses should choose the leaders. I think many individual members of all of our parties would be concerned about that idea because we have that idea of member engagement.
When we talk about the way in which our system functions, we have to take that on board and we have to realize that the importance of strengthening members of Parliament is perhaps a more difficult task in the context of our system, recognizing that difference. Maybe in the British system you can say party leaders can have these conversations because they necessarily have to reflect the will of their caucuses. In our system, I think we need to be much more concerned about the impact that programming could have in an environment where our leaders are selected quite differently. There are many other differences.
I talked earlier in my remarks about the way in which nomination contests happen in the British system. It's very different from the way they happen in our system. In our system it's reflective of the geography. In the British system it would be fairly common for a person seeking public office to interview in a number of different constituencies before being selected in one. That doesn't work as well in our system because our constituencies are so far apart. There's a greater emphasis on the immediate local experience that members of Parliament bring from their ridings because of how far apart and therefore how different our ridings are from each other.
It is not enough to say that we can push this through quickly without requiring unanimity and all these things, that we can just move it on through because it's the way it happens in the British Parliament. The British experience is different. It reflects different realities and different aspects of the way in which those institutions operate, even institutions that appear to be relatively similar.
I will say this as well to Mr. Simms' point, that we already have the ability for what he talked about to happen at an informal level. I mentioned some potential concerns about that, but at an informal level, of course, House leaders can get together and say they're going to work with their caucus, and hopefully there's agreement to allocate a certain number of days informally for discussion of certain bills.
When folks are getting along, that happens. We say, “Okay, we're going to let this bill collapse at the end of the day, and we're going to let it go to a vote because that's what we agreed here. We need more days on this bill, fewer days on that bill”, and so on. Of course, that can happen now. If you want to call that programming, then it's programming, I guess, but it isn't the kind of programming that's envisioned by the discussion paper—again, a discussion paper that the government wants to be able to implement changes from entirely unilaterally.
I think the informal process in place can work and should work. It gives the opposition options to go nuclear and not co-operate. It gives the government an ability to go nuclear by bringing in time allocation. But because of the risks associated with either of those options—the political risks, the risks of public criticism—we have an incentive to try to co-operate as much as possible, and if we are not co-operating, to make sure that it's the other side that's looking unreasonable, and not we. That's the incentive that we have in place. I'm not saying that changes couldn't be discussed and perhaps made, with a consensus, but broadly speaking the system works. There is an ability for both sides to ratchet up the pressure, but there are disincentives for doing so and there is an incentive for people to co-operate.
Finally, I'll say this with respect to Mr. Simms' points. Of course, we can say that there are changes we should consider. I welcome the opportunity to hear from witnesses, to maybe have here some of the people who are acquainted with the British experience, and to pose some of the questions that I've posed. However, their political culture is different because of the way they select leaders, the way the nominations happen, the expectations around members of Parliament, and the number of members of Parliament. That actually makes a substantial difference. When you have about twice as many members of Parliament, that changes the opportunities that exist for members of Parliament to be a little more independent. There is also the existence of other kinds of committees, committees of backbenchers that hold the front bench of their parties accountable in a particular way.
There are differences, but I'd love to be able to proceed with this study and have the opportunity to pose those questions to people from the British system who were involved in the front bench—in government, in opposition, or perhaps both, at different times in their career—and to talk to people whose politics have been more characterized by activity on the backbench, and who perhaps found themselves seeing things differently from their front bench.
During the coalition time in the U.K., this was a particularly interesting dynamic. I think some people in the Conservative Party suspected that David Cameron really liked the coalition with the Liberal Democrats because it allowed him to govern in the way that he kind of wanted to govern anyway. There were Conservative backbenchers who were quite unhappy with some of the decisions that the coalition made, and this was part of that ongoing dynamic. During the Tony Blair government, we had the Iraq war, which of course was very controversial within British society broadly speaking but in particular within the Labour Party.
They had these dynamics, and we could hear about them in committee, if we proceeded to those studies. We could hear from people involved in all those different debates back and forth, and ask them how the different aspects of their standing orders inform the way in which those front bench-backbench debates happen. How did they use the standing orders to their advantage? How were the standing orders used against them to their disadvantage? Those are all things that we could hear and that I would be very interested in hearing. I think all of us would.
We can have that discussion, as long as we agree on some ground rules that say all parties will be involved in a decisive way, not just involved in the committee hearings, but actually involved in the decision.
It is right and sensible. It's not just one party—the entire opposition is united in saying that we will not go forward unless we can agree on those basic ground rules of the discussion. Then absolutely we can have a discussion. We can proceed and explore these issues in a deeper way, and we should. Nobody here is saying that the Standing Orders—