A Canadian Parliamentary Paradox: Party Cooperation and Legislative Influence in House of Commons Committees
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The prevailing literature in Canadian parliamentary politics focuses on the increasing polarization of Canadian political parties and the dominance of single parties when in majority settings, yet anecdotal evidence through politicians’ comments to journalists and think tanks indicates that cooperation exists. Similarly, parliamentary committees are rarely discussed as effective arbiters in the parliamentary process, but again, anecdotal evidence, particularly media attention on committee procedures during potential political scandals such as the recent SNC-Lavalin and We Charity examples, indicates that committees are important sources of influence and cooperation in the Canadian political system. This dissertation addresses this paradox in the academic literature on Canadian parliamentary politics by examining House of Commons standing and legislative committee amendments to government bills from 2004–2019. This measures two things: the influence of committees on government legislation and the level of cooperation in committees through the passing of amendments with multi-party support. In coding all aforementioned amendments and subsequently analysing them, this study has determined that, across the board, in minority and majority settings, under Liberal and Conservative governments, committees make substantial changes to government bills, indicating that committees are an influential actor in the political process in Canada. Additionally, cooperation does indeed occur in committees, even in majority governments, in the sense that opposition party members do get their amendments passed, and those amendments are sometimes substantial. Further systemic characteristics impacting committee cooperation were uncovered: the success of amendments is impacted by issue area, the party in power, unemployment levels, type of committee examining legislation and when a bill is sent to committee. This study thus concludes that committees are, in fact, a source of systematic influence on government legislation as well as party cooperation within the House of Commons, thus providing a challenge to some of the prevailing literature that highlights the dominance of the executive. Committees thus deserve more attention in studies of the Canadian parliamentary system.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.042 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".