The Decision-making Process

Introduction

Although the House of Commons is usually thought of as a deliberative assembly, it is fundamentally a decision-making body. Its rules and practices are ultimately designed to allow its Members to adopt or reject the proposals before it.

The will of the House is ascertained by means of a vote, which is the final step in the decision-making process. Once debate on a motion has concluded, the Speaker puts the question and the House pronounces itself on the motion. The seven decisions presented in this chapter relate to voting, and more particularly to recorded divisions, which occur if five or more Members rise to signal a demand for a recorded vote. In these votes, the House is “divided” into “all those in favour” and “all those opposed.”

The rules and conventions governing debate and the decision-making process ensure that the House can adopt or reject proposals under consideration in an orderly and expeditious fashion. The Speaker and the Chair Occupants are, of course, responsible for maintaining order and decorum during the entire decision-making process, and for deciding all questions of order. A number of the decisions included in this chapter pertain to decorum during recorded divisions. In some of his decisions, Mr. Speaker Milliken reminded Members that, for their votes to be recorded, they must take their seats and remain seated until the results of the vote are announced.

Mr. Speaker Milliken used his casting vote in five instances—more than any previous Speaker of the House of Commons. The Speaker must be impartial at all times and cannot participate in debate or vote in the House but, in the rare instances of an equality of voices, must break the tie using the casting vote. When this occurs, the Speaker normally votes to maintain the status quo and may briefly explain why the vote was cast in the way it was. Two of the decisions which follow describe two other instances of recorded divisions following which the Speaker and the Deputy Speaker used the casting vote. In both cases, however, it was discovered that mistakes had been made during the vote and a Member had been counted as having voted when he had in fact remained seated. Thus, in both instances, the casting vote proved unnecessary.