The Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (or as it was originally called, the Empire Parliamentary Association) was founded in 1911.

IN HOUSE OF COMMONS Committee Room 15 at Westminster on l8 July 1911, a group of parliamentarians from the United Kingdom and the five then self-governing dominions (then Australia, Canada, Newfoundland New Zealand and South Africa) of the old British Empire agreed to form an association. These members, gathered in London a month earlier for the coronation of King George V, constituted the first formal meeting of the Empire’s Parliamentarians.

Under the Chairmanship of the Rt Hon W. Hayes Fisher, MP, of Britain, the Parliamentarians gathered in the Commons committee room agreed unanimously to a motion moved by Mr L. S. Amery, MP, and seconded by Mr Hamar Greenwood, MP, both of Britain, that the Empire Parliamentary Association should be established to ‘provide more ready exchange of information and to facilitate closer understanding and more frequent intercourse between those engaged in the parliamentary government of the component parts of the Empire’. The Association would be non-partisan, but members at Association activities would be free to give ‘the fullest expression to their political views’.

Membership of the Association was extended to include colonies and others with ‘representative governments’, so in the 1920s Malta, Southern Rhodesia, India, Ireland, Ceylon. Bermuda, Barbados, Bahamas, North Ireland, three Canadian provinces and five Australian states all joined. 

EPA to CPA

Following the war, Parliamentarians returned to London in 1949 to change the EPA into the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (the CPA), heralding a new era of expansion that was to follow with the emergence of many colonies to independence.

Branches were formed in countries such as Kenya, Fiji, Sierra Leone and Malaysia. The small islands of the Pacific and the Caribbean joined as equal members with such huge fellow members as India, Britain, Canada and Australia.