Tag: Will Stos

Consistent Constituency Offices: The Case For Minimum Standards Of Records Management and Maintenance

Article 5 / 11 , Vol. 47 No. 4 (Winter)

Consistent Constituency Offices: The Case For Minimum Standards Of Records Management and Maintenance

When a parliamentarian is defeated, retires, or otherwise creates a vacancy, what happens to their constituent case files? Are they shredded? Transferred to the next parliamentarian? Returned to the constituent? Stored someplace for an indeterminate period? Who gets to decide where these documents and this information goes? Parliamentarians who may experience partisan control while in their legislatures tend to have greater independence and freedom to manage constituency matters that come through their office. But this freedom can create havoc for constituents and tie up limited resources if their successor must rebuild the file from scratch. Establishing minimum requirements for constituent records management and maintenance can provide a sense of stability, continuity, and institutional memory when there is turnover of elected officials. In this article, the author explains why the current independent business model of constituency offices ought to be replaced by a regulated professional model that better serves the interests of constituents while still protecting a parliamentarian’s independence and ability to innovate or customise service delivery.

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A Focus On Constituency Offices 

Article 2 / 11 , Vol. 47 No. 4 (Winter)

A Focus On Constituency Offices 

It’s been a decade since the Canadian Parliamentary Review’s first produced a theme issue on constituency offices (Vol. 37, No. 2, Summer 2014).  We return to the subject matter in depth again for several reasons.

This topic continues to be of great interest to parliamentarians and their staff; yet, strangely, it has not been as well explored by researchers as other aspects of parliamentary democracy. Moreover, in the years since our first theme issue, security issues surrounding parliamentarians, their offices, and their staff have come to the fore. Within this larger theme issue, we feature three articles which specifically examine the impact of security threats on parliamentarians in this sphere.

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A Focus on Electoral Boundaries Redistribution

Article 2 / 11 , Vol. 47 No. 1 (Spring)

A Focus on Electoral Boundaries Redistribution

Canada’s population is growing, but not uniformly. Some provinces and territories have had a faster pace of growth than others,

and while certain communities or regions within these jurisdictions are growing, others are shrinking (in real terms, or as a proportion of the total population in a province or territory).

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A Focus on Parliamentary Support Services

Article 1 / 12 , Vol 46 No. 3 (Autumn)

A Focus on Parliamentary Support Services

If you ask a member of the public to picture a federal parliament or a provincial or territorial assembly, the two images that spring to mind most often would be the buildings themselves, and the various MPs, senators, MHAs, MLAs, MNAs, and MPPs who sit in the chambers within them.

But spare a moment to think about the people who maintain these buildings, who work to support parliamentarians as they fulfill their constitutional roles, and who enable these democratic institutions to welcome tens of thousands of visitors each year in person and speak to countless others through an online presence.

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Parliamentary Relatives: The Langs of Yukon, Alberta and Ontario

Article 1 / 9 , Vol 46 No. 1 (Spring)

Parliamentary Relatives: The Langs of Yukon, Alberta and Ontario

Twin brothers Archibald Donald Lang and Hector Daniel Lang, known as Archie and Dan, were well-known fixtures of Yukon territorial politics for decades. And, when Dan made the switch to federal politics upon his appointment to the Senate in 2009, he was not the first member of his family to serve in the Upper Chamber. In fact, he wasn’t even the first member of his family who bore the name Daniel Lang to serve as a senator. The twins, their grandfather, their great uncle, and their first cousin once removed, were part of a family with a long history of public service. As Dan notes, “Public affairs was always the first topic discussed at the dinner table.”

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A Focus on Parliamentary Administration

Article 7 / 11 , Vol 45 No. 1 (Spring)

A Focus on Parliamentary Administration

Many Canadians have never seen their federal, provincial or territorial parliaments in person. As a result, when asked to picture what goes on in these buildings, the image that may come to mind is most likely what they may have seen on television or the Internet: a fiery Question Period exchange, a recorded vote on contentious legislation, or perhaps scenes from a budget address or Speech from the Throne.

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NWT Makes History… Again

Article 8 / 9 , Vol 44 No. 3 (Fall)

NWT Makes History… Again

Will Stos is Editor of the Canadian Parliamentary Review.

On October 1, 2019, a general election in the Northwest Territories ushered in a profound change to the make-up of its Legislative Assembly. Prior to the election, just two of the territory’s 18 MLAs were women. After a determined campaign to encourage more women to become involved in territorial politics, nine women were elected along with 10 men in the newly reconfigured 19-member assembly. NWT had gone from having the lowest proportion of women parliamentarians in an assembly to the highest and virtually achieving gender parity. A 2021 by-election has brought women MLAs to a majority position in the assembly. In this article, the author recounts the events leading up to this historic moment.

The Northwest Territories has been called a trailblazer in terms of diversity and representation. Since responsible government returned in 1983, a majority of its MLAs and premiers have been Indigenous. Nellie Cournoyea became the Canada’s first Indigenous woman premier and only the second woman premier in the country in 1991.

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CPA Activities

Article 8 / 11 , Vol 44 No. 1 (Spring)

New Saskatchewan Speaker

On November 30, 2020, Randy Weekes was elected Speaker of the Saskatchewan Legislature. The Saskatchewan Party MLA defeated five other challengers, including incumbent Speaker Mark Docherty, Greg Ottenbreit, Hugh Nerlien, Nadine Wilson and Lisa Lambert.

COVID-19 protocols meant the election had a very different look and feel than previous elections. Legislative officers sanitized the wooden ballot box after each round of voting and when Speaker Weekes addressed his colleagues after his victory he faced a rearranged Chamber. Only about half of the Assembly’s MLAs were present and they sat in spaced out desks behind plexiglass shields.

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