Legislatures

Paul G. Thomas is the Duff Roblin Professor of Government at the
University of Manitoba, the author of Parliamentary Reform Through
Political Parties, and the co-author of Canadian Public Administration:
Problematical Perspectives.

Legislatures are usually seen to be in a sorry state in Canada. They
have lost the respect of the citizens they are meant to serve, are
largely excluded from the formulation of the policies that affect the
everyday lives of Canadians, and perform poorly in terms of holding
governments accountable for their actions and inactions. David Docherty,
a leading Canadian scholar on legislatures, assesses these criticisms
based on a set of democratic criteria and finds them to be accurate in
general terms.

Docherty reports that Canadians elect people to legislatures, but
suspect that their representatives soon lose touch with their concerns.
The dynamics of power in legislatures allow prime ministers and cabinets
to have almost complete control over policy-making. Even in terms of
scrutiny of the performance of ministers and the bureaucracy,
legislatures are constrained by restrictive rules, insistence on party
discipline, lack of research capacity and access to information on a
timely basis, and committee systems that are subject to excessive
government control. It is not that legislatures are unimportant or
irrelevant, just that they have trouble living up to the central role
assigned to them in the theory of cabinet–parliamentary government.

Each of the book’s eight chapters contains a synopsis of the main
points. An interesting development at the provincial level is the
reduction in memberships of several legislatures, which means there are
fewer non-government members to hold ministers accountable. In the
federal Parliament, there is still high turnover of MPs at elections, so
that there are fewer experienced members with deep knowledge of how
government works. Docherty’s proposals for reform to make legislatures
more influential in the policy process are not all that original, but
reflect a realism about the likelihood of governments’ agreeing to
more sweeping changes that would make their job more difficult.
Legislatures exist to support strong governments in passing legislation
and spending, but they are also supposed to enforce the democratic
accountability of ministers and the public service. There is a tension
between these two roles. There is no neat institutional solution to
resolve this tension.

Legislatures is well-researched and clearly written, with an audience
of academics, students, and interested citizens in mind.