What Do MPs Actually Do in Committee?

A primary function of parliamentary committees is the many reports they produce. Why?

While the comical obstruction and general silliness of Question Period might get most of the public’s attention, much of the real business of the House happens in parliamentary committees. And the formal output of that work can be found in the many reports presented to the House.

Did I say “many reports”? Between October 7, 2004 and December 16, 2024 there were 3,263 reports presented to Parliament. And as you can see from the chart, their overall frequency doesn’t seem to have changed in any recognizable pattern over the years.

Reports are usually based on multiple committee meetings where expert witnesses are invited to testify, sometimes leading to lively dialog. Although from what I’ve seen, things rarely reach the sheer intensity (and accompanying dysfunction) common to many Congressional hearings in the U.S.

A typical report can fill a hundred pages or more and contain dozens of numbered recommendations. But a casual observer might draw the conclusion that, once presented to the House, many reports are simply ignored. This table breaks down the numbers by official Parliament¹.

The Reports column contains the total number of reports presented to the House, Responses represents the number of official government responses to tabled reports, and Concurred tells us how many reports were formally concurred in by the House.

Over the past seven Parliaments, an average of only 23.5 percent of presented reports received official responses, and just 19 percent were “concurred”. Does that mean the rest were simply buried?

Not necessarily. Only reports whose authors explicitly invoke Standing Order 109 require an official response (within 120 days). Many reports, however, aren’t designed to force a government’s to pass specific legislation. Instead, they might be presented to the House to inform MPs, spark debate, or raise public awareness.

It’s also important to distinguish between the House (consisting of all MPs) concurring with a report and the government itself adopting recommendations as official policy. One most definitely does not require the other.

With all that in mind, it’s not easy to assess how useful and practical a given report might be. It’s possible that committees might present overlapping recommendations in report after report over the years without necessarily implying that they’re being willfully ignored. But it’s equally possible that some reports represent little more than time-killing make work.

We can expect that choices made by committee members will, to at least some degree, reflect their party allegiances. That is, after all, why their constituents elected them. But are their reports especially politicized?

Unfortunately, I haven’t figured out an easy way to identify statistical trends in, say, recommendations over the years. So I thought I’d explore the kinds of topics committees choose to study and organize them according to the Paul Martin, Stephen Harper, and Justin Trudeau eras. I then asked my AI research assistant to read the titles of all 3,263 reports and categorize them by topic.

The bottom line? When it comes to topics of study, the guy who happened to spend the most time in the PMO didn’t seem to make much difference. Reports characterized as Federal Budget Estimates and Government Expenditures made the top of the list for all three periods. Criminal Code Amendments and Justice Reforms and Immigration Policies and Refugee Programs were also prominent through all three periods.

The absence of variation in topics, when taken alone, does suggest that choices aren’t particularly political. It’s also possible that non-political external forces (Privy Council Office? Department leadership?) are guiding the directions committees take.

But just knowing how the system is supposed to work - and how the government records and preserves the output - should be helpful first steps in more directed external oversight. In other words, now it’s our job as voters and taxpayers to watch over the shoulders of our representatives as they go about their work.

1. The 43rd Parliament, for example, stretched from December 5, 2019 until August 15, 2021.