The Role Of Parliament In Canada's Democracy

Since 1867, the Parliament of Canada has been the heart of Canada’s democracy. In fact, Parliament is the legislative branch of government in Canada with the lower house being the elected House of Commons and the upper house being the Senate. In Parliament, issues of the day are examined, the government is held accountable, and policies and laws are decided on. Although Canada has been a democracy for the last 150 years, Canada’s political institutions are in need of reform as distortion in representation at the House of Commons as well as the effectiveness of the senate are undermining Canada’s democracy. To be able to understand the extent of the issues in the legislative branch of government, it is important to know how each chamber operates
The House of Commons is made up of 338 members of Parliament that represent different constituencies which vote in Canada’s federal elections (Courtney, 2015). More importantly, the electoral system in which members of parliament are elected is called first past the post system and the candidate with the most votes wins the elections with plurality voting (Cross, 2010, p. 130). On the other hand, the second chamber of Canada’s Parliament is the Senate. The Senate is regarded as the chamber of “sober second thought” as the Senate reviews legislation from a less partisan perspective while representing Canada’s regions (Letwin, 2016). However, based on constitutional convention, the elected House of Commons is the dominant chamber in Parliament with the Senate rarely opposing the elected legislators’ will (Letwin, 2016). In terms of governance, the concept of responsible government makes the executive branch of government accountable to Parliament (Sharman, 2008, p. 8). Thus, the role of both chambers of Parliament becomes evident as they make up the legislative branch of government which under the concept of parliamentary supremacy is supreme over the other branches of government such as the executive and judicial branches of government (Sharman, 2008, p. 4). It is, therefore, necessary to examine the issues within both chambers
In other words, the House of Commons does not represent Canadians proportionally which causes major issues for women, immigrants and new Canadians, visible minorities, indigenous peoples, as well as the alienation of some provinces. Canada adheres to the representation by population principle in democracy; however, Canada has deviated from the principle of representation by population (Mendelsohn, 2010, p. 1). In fact, when compared to other federal countries such as Germany and Switzerland, distortions in the House of Commons are far worse than the acceptable international norms as “61 per cent of Canadians are underrepresented in the House of Commons, and Canada’s visible minority communities are particularly underrepresented (Mendelsohn, 2010, p. 1). Although the principle of representation by population requires seats in the House of Commons to be distributed in proportional terms and based on the share of the national population, the seats are rather distributed based on “historical seat-count guarantees” (Mendelsohn, 2010, p. 2). These historical guarantees such as “no province can have fewer seats than it has senators, and that no province can have fewer seats than it had in 1985” are no longer valid as the only proportionally represented province in Canada is Quebec (Mendelsohn, 2010, p. 2). Therefore, having some provinces and territories that are underrepresented or overrepresented is an issue