That sounds good. I look forward to this.
I want to thank the committee members for the introductions. I think it was a worthwhile discussion we just had. Thank you, Mr. Chair, for enabling that. I think it does give us a glimpse of where we want to get to by giving this committee the opportunity to actually have this discussion. Going back to the motion and the amendment, I think we can get to that point. Whether it's through the amendment to the motion or through alternative means, such as the special committee that's been proposed by the opposition and third party House leaders, I think we can get to that point. To enable this type of discussion is absolutely essential. I've enjoyed the discussion that has taken place.
The comment from Mr. Johns about question period and the ability to have that discussion goes back to one of the issues that we have regarding Parliament.
Parliament is both the building in which we currently sit but it's also an institution. It's an institution that has certain norms, certain practices. How those norms and practices evolve affects how we operate.
If we look at times past when MPs used to travel on the train together, there was a great deal of collegiality. For several days, MPs would be on the train together and they had that opportunity to interact. We don't have that opportunity anymore. We have short flights. We have individual car rides. We don't have that opportunity to interact.
Mr. Johns' point is that it is essential to have the opportunity to go to question period and to flag down a minister. I can think of at least two examples, one an immigration issue and one a public service issue, where we've had that opportunity to speak with ministers. I really appreciate that insight.
I want to bring us back to the concept of the election of the Speaker of the House of Commons. It's one of those issues that has peaked my interest.
Just as many academics look at different things to study, I like to look at issues that don't have a lot written on them, the gaps in the literature, things that may be tangentially touched on but never actually directly discussed or reviewed.
In 2013, I co-published an article entitled “Legislative Dissent Without Reprisal? An Alternative View of Speaker Selection”. For those who wish to read the article in its entirety, it's published in The Journal of Legislative Studies, December 2013, volume 19, issue 4. It is available online. It's available for free download as well.The Journal of Legislative Studies provides for that.
Incidentally, The Journal of Legislative Studies is an academic journal, but it's actually edited by Lord Norton of Louth, who is a member of the British House of Lords' constitution committee. Later, I may touch on some of the United Kingdom examples of that.
The election of the Speaker is a fascinating concept and a fascinating procedure. Traditionally, the Speaker was elected on the nomination of the prime minister, or by the premier in a provincial legislature. That has been the case for a lengthy period of time, since Confederation.
At the federal level this was changed in 1986, following the McGrath report, and when Speaker Bosley gave up the position, Speaker Fraser was elected. In some of the provincial legislatures it took a little more time to get to that point. In Ontario it was first implemented in 1990.
My interest, however, is not only in the procedural element of the election of the Speaker, although that's important and certainly we'll touch on that, but in the issues that surround the election of Speaker and how the election of the Speaker is really dealt with in different examples.
One of the things I like to do is to look at provincial versus federal examples. I think the provincial example in Ontario of the election of the Speaker of the Ontario legislature is informative of how we can see this procedural process really affect the way in which MPPs function at the provincial level.
Very little research has ever been done on the election of the Speaker. It's largely dealt with in textbook format. It's mentioned that the Speaker is elected, but there hasn't ever been an in-depth study of the election and how it's undertaken.
For my interest, I think we need to see the election of the Speaker as more than simply a procedural, individually focused exercise, but rather as a collective exercise by a legislature. Specifically, I make the argument that the election of the Speaker through a secret ballot can actually be seen as a form of legislative dissent against the governing party by the party's own individual members of Parliament.
The example of the Ontario legislature is informative about this. I'll cite some federal examples as we go through as well. The process that the provincial legislature follows is informative about how we go about it.
To structure our thinking on this, we need to think of some of the thoughts and considerations that go into the election of the Speaker. From a government perspective, the government is eager to see a Speaker of the House of Commons or the Speaker of a legislature who is somewhat loyal to the governing party or at least open to working with the governing party. The opposition, of course, would prefer to see a Speaker who is perhaps more aggressive, perhaps more open-minded, and more eager to work in a maverick way.
In an ideal scenario, an opposition party would like to see an opposition MP as Speaker. There is no question of that. That would be the best scenario for an opposition party. In a majority government, that's very unlikely to happen. The next best scenario is seeing which of the government MPs or MPPs would be able to fill that role of being a more maverick Speaker.
The election of the Speaker is very important because of the format by which the Speaker is chosen. When we cast our votes for Speaker, we do so by a secret ballot. A secret ballot in the election of the Speaker is really the only time in our parliamentary careers when our votes are done by secret ballot. We don't vote on legislation by secret ballot. We don't vote in committee by secret ballot. It's done publicly, even if it's not always recorded. Typically on recorded division, names are recorded in the Journals. Sometimes we have voice votes when we don't force a recorded division, but typically even then, it's a pretty good indication of who is voting for whom, whether the opposition is voting in favour or against. For an individual MP, whether it's an opposition or a government MP, to vote against his or her party on a serious matter of government legislation is rare. We've seen some examples of it.
I haven't seen the statistics yet for the current Parliament. In former parliaments, we've seen different research done about which MPs are most likely to dissent from their party and what the loyalty index is for each example. In the last Parliament, there were actually some Conservative MPs who were highest on that list. In the current Parliament, I suspect there are a couple of Liberal MPs I could point to who are probably fairly high on that list, which is to their credit. However, we can see that because it's recorded in the Journals. It's recorded in the records of the debate. We know who votes for what piece of legislation because they rise in their place and do so.
When it comes to the election of the Speaker of the House or the Speaker of a legislature, we don't have that ability. No one but the individual member who marks their ballot—I was going to say “mark an X”, but now it's a ranked ballot, so it's to mark numbers—knows how they voted and no one knows the outcome. In fact, we don't even know the total numbers. We don't know what the first ballot or the first preference was, or the second ballot, or the third ballot. We don't know that and we don't know how many ballots it would take in the current situation, in which we don't have multiple ballots and we have a single alternative vote.
We can see the election of the Speaker as potential for a private act of dissent in which an individual parliamentarian, whether at the federal level or provincial level, can vote against their party's preferred outcome, can vote against what their leaders would ideally like to see.
I want to walk through the Ontario example. The federal example has some great opportunities and I'm going to discuss that at the end to see this standpoint, but the Ontario example is better. There are a few reasons I say that.
I don't know if I could consider myself a political scientist, using the word “scientist”, because I don't think political scientists are actually scientists but it's the word we use. However, wherever possible, trying to conduct a natural experiment in the real world is tough unless you can control some of the variables. Ontario provides a unique example for a number of reasons.
First of all, in the years since the secret ballot for the election of Speaker has been introduced, we've seen only majority governments in the years we studied in this article.
Second, it also provides us the opportunity to look at each political party having held government in Ontario: the New Democrats, the Ontario PC Party, and the Ontario Liberal Party. It provides us an opportunity to compare and contrast the election of a Speaker under each of those scenarios.
Third, Ontario has one of Canada's largest legislatures, second only to the federal House of Commons. It allows us to look at a large parliament, a large legislature, which will allow us to see the challenges going forward.
Finally, it allows us to see a natural experiment in the legislature in the fact that in 1996, in preparation for the 1999 provincial election, the then Mike Harris government introduced what was called the Fewer Politicians Act. It was an act that decreased the number of MPPs in Ontario from 130 to 103. It allows us to look at the size of the legislature, caucus, and the cabinet to see whether that's a variable in the election of the Speaker, how we might see that dissent play out in the election of the Speaker.
Ontario wasn't the first legislature to move to the election by secret ballot. That lies with our federal Parliament. At the time that I published this paper, P.E.I. and Newfoundland had not had contested Speaker elections. I'm not sure if that has changed in the last three or four years, but I will double-check and report back to the committee so it has that information.
The introduction of the secret ballot changes the dynamics. We can test the likelihood that different issues would have on the dissent of parliamentarians. One thing you can look at is party popularity at the time of the Speaker's election. We can look at the size of the cabinet and whether that has an impact. The likelihood of joining cabinet would affect the determination of whether they even seek the position of Speaker, and the percentage of new MPs entering a legislature at any given time would certainly have an impact on it.
A secret ballot, though, is not a normal part of a Westminster parliament. It's somewhat foreign to our system. It's not something we would find anywhere else in the Standing Orders other than in regard to the election of the Speaker. We were starting to elect our Speaker by secret ballot in the mid-1980s, but we'd have to wait until 2009 in the United Kingdom at Westminster to see them elect their Speaker by secret ballot. It's not a common approach.
Speaker John Bercow was elected by secret ballot after a fairly significant expense scandal in the United Kingdom saw their Speaker resign. It was a fairly significant break from tradition to move to that approach in the United Kingdom. We are ahead of the times in the sense that we've had this experience for nearly 30 years in Canada, as opposed to a very short period, a single data point, in the United Kingdom.
Even initially when we moved to this approach in Canada and we saw the election of Mr. Speaker Fraser in 1986, it was kind of seen as a fluke. It was kind of seen as that okay, we'd done this once, that we'd had the show, but now we should move on. We'd go back to the normal process later on, that even if it were a secret ballot, there would only be one candidate put up, and the government would still control the process. That was very much the sense of what would happen. At the time, different academics and former parliamentarians conducted reviews of this and they very much said that this wasn't something that was going to last. It was not going to be something that took hold.
One individual reviewing it at the time, Ned Franks, or C.E.S. Franks, originally from Queen's and now professor emeritus there, wrote:
I have every optimism and every hope that in the future, the House, regardless of party stripe, will choose as Speaker somebody the House trusts and wants to have.… I think the Speaker enjoys the confidence of both sides of the House and has a power over the House through this method of election that the Speakers never had before. Therefore I consider that a real plus.
Of course that was tempered by the pessimism that it wouldn't continue on very much past that.
The introduction of the secret ballot did stick around. It did last, and then it was slowly adopted at the provincial legislatures as well. In Ontario, 1990 was the first example of the Speaker being elected by secret ballot. In previous times, the Speaker would be nominated by a government minister, typically by the premier, would be seconded by the leader of the opposition, and then would be unanimously voted on by the House. That was the usual practice of the House.
The last Speaker not to be elected by secret ballot in Ontario was a gentleman by the name of Hugh Edighoffer, who was coincidentally the MPP for Perth, my home riding at the time, a Liberal MPP who had served many years, but he was unanimously selected. There was no indication that he was a poor Speaker. In fact, he was very well respected as Speaker. He opted not to run again in 1990 and retired with great credit from his fellow parliamentarians. But there was a growing sense of a need to democratize the process. So, when the NDP was elected in 1990, it was certainly top of their agenda to see that democratization of the legislature.
I wish Mr. Christopherson were here this evening because I will actually quote some of his comments later from this article, and I think he would have appreciated that.