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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 November 2014
Although, as Professor Norman Ward pointed out in The Canadian House of Commons: Representation, statistical studies of the personnel of Parliament are not entirely satisfactory, they are none the less valuable to the political scientist for they help him to a better understanding of legislative bodies. The nature of a parliament is partly determined by the characteristics of its members. Thus the British House of Commons, with its membership broadly distributed in many occupations and its many trade union members, has a collective approach to contemporary problems of government different from that of the American Congress dominated by lawyers; and a legislative body with a large proportion of Roman Catholics will handle legislation on divorce in a manner quite different from that of a parliament composed almost entirely of Protestants.
The present study does not consider whether the various segments of the Canadian population are represented in proportion to their size in the nation, nor question the quality of Canadian representation. It is simply an attempt to discover some of the measurable characteristics of members of the House of Commons elected June 27, 1949. An effort has been made to indicate trends by comparing the results of this study with the conclusions reached by Lionel Laing in his article on the characteristics of members of the twentieth Parliament. The major source of data has been The Canadian Parliamentary Guide. Although the information is not complete in all biographical sketches of members, the absence of only a few items does not seriously alter the final statistical picture. No attempt has been made to include information on members elected in by-elections since June, 1949.
Statistical data for this study were collected with the aid of Thomas Saad, graduate assistant in the Department of Political Science, West Virginia University.
1 Toronto, 1950.
2 “The Nature of Canada's Parliamentary Representation,” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, XII, no. 4, 11, 1946, 509–18.Google Scholar
3 Ibid., 510.
4 Computed from ages reported by 253 members.
5 McKinney, Madge M., “The Personnel of the Seventy-Seventh Congress,” American Political Science Review, XXXVI, 02, 1942, 67.Google Scholar
6 In the seventy-seventh Congress, 311 of the 531 members were lawyers. McKinney, , “The Personnel of the Seventy-Seventh Congress, 72.Google Scholar
7 In the seventy-seventh Congress only 11.1 per cent of the members were farmers as compared with 18.7 per cent elected to the House of Commons in 1949.
8 A much greater number of the members could be classified as journalists although they did not so designate themselves in the Canadian Parliamentary Guide. For instance, the leader of the Opposition, George Drew, has written many important articles which have appeared in Maclean's Magazine, and the inimitable Jean-François Pouliot served as special correspondent for La Presse in 1937.
9 Based on reports by 245 members.
10 Ward, , The Canadian House of Commons, 127.Google Scholar
11 Laing, , “The Nature of Canada's Parliamentary Representation,” 516.Google Scholar