When Experts Raise the Alarm: Bill deliberations in House of Commons Committees

• In Event: Candidates, Legislators, and Parties

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine the role of policy expertise in the Canadian legislative process and, in particular, the bill deliberations of House of Commons committees. I argue that--in a well-functioning committee system--the depth of a committee's scrutiny of a bill should be positively related to the volume and scope of concerns about the bill raised by non-partisan policy experts in the pre-committee stages of the legislative process. To test this claim, I collect an original dataset of all bills considered by parliamentary committees from 2001 to 2015, a period that covers Liberal and Conservative governments with and without Commons (and therefore committee) majorities. The main outcome of interest here is the number of meetings during which the committee considered the bill, which varies greatly across bills. To this dataset, I add measures of the expert criticism of each bill--as reported in the media between the date of the bill's introduction and the first day of its consideration in committee. By collecting data on hundreds of bills over a 15-year period, I am able to test for several theoretically important factors that may moderate the relationship between expert concern and committee deliberation, including partisan control, electoral pressure, and the legislative experience of committee members.

Author

• John R. McAndrews, University of Toronto