The Formative Years of the House of Commons, 1867-91

Abstract

The practice of criticizing political institutions on the basis of their efficiency as pieces of machinery is so widespread in political science today that it is sometimes difficult to remember that institutions may be as important for what they are as for what they do. An elected legislature, in its scrutiny of governmental affairs, not only represents the dominant sections of the electorate that returned it; it also reveals, through the nature of its own organization, their attitudes towards the elected legislature and its place in their society. An appraisal of the capacities and incapacities of a legislature would be at best incomplete if it paid no attention to the beliefs and traditions reflected therein, for it would ignore the obvious truth that the quality of the legislature's work was conditioned by its social environment. In the paragraphs that follow, the emphasis is not upon performance, although that is not overlooked, but upon the legislature as a social entity, as a mirror in which one can see an important part of a community.The Canadian House of Commons during its early years offered the unusual and interesting spectacle of a legislature engaged in threshing out great issues while the legislative machinery itself was still under construction. Debates on important matters concerning the country at large ran parallel with acrimonious discussions about the nature and function of the House of Commons and its organization, and the government frequently tried (by providing, for instance, that each province was to obtain its due proportion of Commons' clerkships) to make the House a significant factor in the settling of disputes. Many institutions of the House (the speakership, the Hansard, and the Library, to name but a few) took their initial form as a result of forces which often bore little relation to legislation and debate.