After attacking the Speaker, would Poilievre consider parliamentary reform?

While his party has made a cause célèbre out of its battle with the Speaker, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has periodically waxed poetic about the House of Commons — suggesting that its green upholstery is meant to symbolize the fields of the English countryside where commoners met centuries ago before the signing of the Magna Carta.

The actual origin of the House's colour scheme remains unclear.

The official guide to House procedure and practice says that, while the Senate's use of red is explained by that colour's connection to royalty, "the association of the colour green with the Commons is not so easily determined." A briefing note from the United Kingdom's Parliament states that the origin is "much less easy to explain" — though it does note that in the medieval period, "green was the colour of the pasture and the greenwood, of the village green used by all, in other words the colour of the countryman, the 'common' man."

Either way, Poilievre's fondness for such a romantic theory suggests at least a certain reverence for the institution.

"To serve here, in the House of Commons, is an honour for every member. Each of us should be proud to be responsible for working on behalf of some 100,000 people," Poilievre told the House last October.

"At times, however, we forget the order in which power is exercised. We think that the prime minister is at the top, with the House of Commons below, and the people down at the very bottom, but the opposite is true. In a democracy, the people have the power. We serve the people, and the government serves parliamentarians."

Given his apparent respect for the House — perhaps even his apparent concern for the impartiality of the Speaker — it's fair to ask whether Poilievre would embrace the idea of a House of Commons that is stronger and more independent than it is now.

Critics of how the last Conservative government (of which Poilievre was a member) approached Parliament might laugh at the question. Stephen Harper's government became synonymous with omnibus legislation, using prorogation for political purposes, limiting debate and tightly controlling backbenchers and senators.

But having come up through the Reform Party and the Canadian Alliance, Poilievre should be familiar with at least the rhetorical appeal of parliamentary reform.

"Canadians are justly proud of our heritage of responsible government," the Canadian Alliance platform stated in 2000. "But our parliamentary democracy is not all that it should be. Too much power is exercised by the prime minister instead of being shared by all our elected representatives. Excessive party discipline stifles open discussion and debate. Grassroots citizens and community groups feel that their opinions are not respected or heard."

Poilievre was a supporter of and assistant to Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day. Twenty-four years later, Poilievre became leader of the opposition himself on a platform that championed "freedom" and vowed to fire the "gatekeepers" who were apparently holding Canadians back.

In a way, Poilievre owes his own leadership to parliamentary reform. It was a mechanism in the Reform Act, a private member's bill introduced by Conservative MP Michael Chong, that allowed Conservative MPs to trigger the caucus vote that toppled former Conservative leader Erin O'Toole in February 2022.

Chong's bill was intended to take one small step toward rebalancing the power dynamic between party leaders and backbench MPs. As successive generations of MPs and observers have lamented, Canadian party leaders exercise an enormous amount of power and control over their caucuses — even more than in comparable parliamentary democracies.

In 2017, Chong co-edited a book on parliamentary reform — Turning Parliament Inside Out — with Scott Simms, who was a Liberal MP at the time, and Kennedy Stewart, who was an NDP MP. In it, the three parliamentarians underlined the problem of excessive party discipline.