The Basis of Representation in the House of Commons

Abstract

The Canadian House of Commons, superficially at least, is so obviously a representative assembly that an examination of the basis of representation therein may perhaps seem a waste of time. Yet one cannot proceed far in a study of the House of Commons without becoming aware that some aspects of representation rest on bases whose existence receives little explicit recognition, and that the theories of representation which are explicitly accepted in Parliament are often contradicted by the facts.A major obstacle to the understanding on parliamentary representation is the broad disagreement among authorities as to what representative government is, and what it ought to be. This problem will not be settled here, but it must be recorded that the best-known works on representative government, which range from the reasoned pronouncements of John Stuart Mill to the impatient murmurs of proportional representation societies, are uniformly reticent in defining the institution which they are discussing. Concise descriptions of particular kinds of representative government are common, but genuine definitions are not. A British Royal Commission on Electoral Systems worked for several months in 1909 and neither the commissioners nor the witnesses who appeared before them attempted to assess accurately what the fundamental purpose of an electoral system was. Again, John Stuart Mill believed that a single legislature could represent a nation, and being happily ignorant of twentieth-century psychology, he was able to argue further that representative institutions could be improved by taking thought. G. D. H. Cole, on the other hand, has stated that the representation of a whole population by one body is impossible; Parliament, he says, represents everybody for everything, and therefore nobody for anything—and his way out of this impasse is to urge the creation of an apparently indefinite number of representative assemblies, each of which would discharge one specific function.