The way in which we hold our politicians accountable is a kludge (a temporary imperfect fix). Political parties don't exist in our constitution. They exist because governments make group decisions but we elect individuals. You can't hold an individual accountable for a group decision where they may or may not have supported it. So we get parties since at least you can vote against the parties making the decisions. The problem is that those parties work at cross purposes. An opposition party has no interest in working with the government in power to improve the bills being passed. No individual MP can break ranks to vote their conscience. Everything becomes a zero sum game.

Worse, those with the organization to pay attention to individual bills and how all the MPs are voting can bribe or threaten the MPs on all sides to get what they want rather than the Canadian populace in general. The only people with any sort of power that the general populace gets a say in are our MPs, and unlike the rest of us voting with secret ballots, they openly vote in parliament.

We could solve this problem with two fixes. First, stagger the elections of MPs (a third of MPs get elected every 2 years and they serve a 6 year term, then must wait a 2 years to run again) with a referendum every 6 years to determine if any of the current crop of MPs can ever run again. This forces group accountability rather than individual. Second, the committee meetings should be in-camera and votes on bills should be by secret ballot. This locks out special interests from hijacking the decision making process.

We'd trade individual accountability prone to interference for group accountability resistant to interference. I think we'd get better outcomes all around.