Committee witnesses in the Parliament of Canada

On 14 October Hugh Bochel presented a paper to the virtual conference of the Canadian Study of Parliament Group. The paper looked at witnesses to the committees of the House of Commons and Senate of the Parliament of Canada during the first six months of 2020 and showed that of the one thousand seven hundred people who appeared around one-third were female and two-thirds male. The Government (and its agencies) was by far the major provider of witnesses, followed by ‘representative organisations’, private companies, advocacy and non-profit bodies. As with the United Kingdom and Scottish Parliaments, committees dealing with broadly ‘social’ issues were more likely to hear from female witnesses.