Bill C-33 (Historical)

An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts

This enactment amends the Canada Elections Act to
(a) remove limitations on public education and information activities conducted by the Chief Electoral Officer;
(b) establish a Register of Future Electors in which Canadian citizens 14 to 17 years of age may consent to be included;
(c) authorize the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration to provide the Chief Electoral Officer with information about permanent residents and foreign nationals for the purpose of updating the Register of Electors;
(d) remove the prohibition on the Chief Electoral Officer authorizing the notice of confirmation of registration (commonly known as a “voter information card”) as identification;
(e) replace, in the context of voter identification, the option of attestation for residence with an option of vouching for identity and residence;
(f) remove two limitations on voting by non-resident electors: the requirement that they have been residing outside Canada for less than five consecutive years, and the requirement that they intend to return to Canada to resume residence in the future; and
(g) relocate the Commissioner of Canada Elections to within the Office of the Chief Electoral Officer, and provide that the Commissioner is to be appointed by the Chief Electoral Officer, after consultation with the Director of Public Prosecutions, for a non-renewable term of 10 years.
In addition, the enactment contains transitional provisions and makes consequential amendments to other Acts.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Let me just pick it up, if I can, Chair. One of the nice things about this amendment is that it speaks to how we're making the decision, and therefore, it pretty much opens us up to talk about any aspect of what's in front of us, as we can read into the chair's latitude.

I would just like to take a second, perhaps, to pick one of the issues that the government has placed in their discussion paper as it relates to the amendment, because the amendment would be the deciding formula as to how we make our decisions. Therefore, it's applicable to all aspects of the report. In my humble submission, that would make it germane to the point, and, I hope, keep me in order.

What I would like to do is just to spend a little bit of time talking about prorogation. The government has suggested that they want to do something there. This is another example, Chair, in which there were all kinds of opportunities for the government to find common cause around prorogation had they tried.

The first place to begin on that...and I'm trying to remember if Mr. Reid was there. I'm not sure if anybody else on this committee currently was there, but in one of those Parliaments, in one of those minorities—because they kind of came quickly and were a bit blurry—this committee was seized of the issue of prorogation, the same way that we're seized of the issue of the Chief Electoral Officer's report.

We brought in experts from across the country, constitutional experts. Actually, it was a motion that Jack Layton got the House to approve that sent the mandate here to PROC, and we spent—now, it's been a few years so my memory is a little fuzzy—at least four or five months on it. There were a lot of meetings and we generated a lot of information. There was not just expert testimony, but there were submissions that were made.

It was very complex, as you can appreciate, Chair, because once you start talking about prorogation, you're talking about the suspension of Parliament. There are a lot of rules around it. A lot of it is tradition. We were taking a look at what had been the tradition, what the rules were, and what was done in other jurisdictions. It was the kind of wide, expansive review you would expect.

I raise that because it occurs to me that if the government had indicated that this work had been done and that there was a wealth of information we could all use, again, that would have provided groundwork for discussions ahead of time. Maybe it would have meant a separate process around this, and maybe we would have linked it with other.... There are so many “maybes” about what we could have done.

We probably would have done that at the steering committee, and as you know, we do that in camera. We try not to be partisan. There's no BS. It's just us. There are only a handful of us. Basically, what we're trying to do is work our way through the various pieces that are in front of us to provide some cohesiveness to them, and then, ideally.... You know how a steering committee works. It cannot make decisions. All it can do is make a recommendation to the full committee. If you don't have unanimity, then the recommendation doesn't go to the committee. It just goes to the committee as a cold item with no recommendation.

It's a really good work environment, and whenever we used it in this Parliament and in the previous Parliament, the steering committee did exactly what we hoped it would do, and that was to sort through everything and take the time to get into the weeds, get into the minutiae, try out different ideas, and take into account all of the concerns, all that was there. A wealth of work was done.

I don't know whether the government intends for us to revisit that. Are they going to want to reinvent the wheel and do it all again? Are they planning to ignore all that?

Their opposition to this motion leaves the Conservatives and the NDP to conclude that it's the government's intention, as soon as they get the opportunity and once this filibuster is over, to use their majority to ram through changes to our Parliament.

I use the prorogation because I was there for all those meetings. I know the amount of work that was done, and it seems to me we could have been halfway there by just saying we'll take a look at that as a side piece, see where it gets us, and then how it fits into the overall.... That's the kind of thing you do when it's give and take, when you're all trying to work to a common cause. In this case, it's our understanding that the deadline of June 2 is very important to the government. It doesn't really matter why. I don't know why, but that's the deadline they are married to. Again, if we had enough goodwill, then we could have attempted to work toward a process that would accommodate that. It's only the government moves that have caused all this ill will. We didn't have this before.

To be fair, we hadn't yet got to some of the heavy lifting on the Chief Electoral Officer's report. Every time somebody said they were going to have a problem with that, we would say we'd set that aside, move on to the next low-lying fruit, and find the ones we can agree on. Some of those tough things were still to happen, but I think what's important is that we were working as a team. When we raised concerns, it was often as much personal, our own experience of what we knew from elections, as it was partisan. Besides, what is partisan about deciding where you can put signs? It's hard to make that partisan.

Prorogation is much the same thing. It's really not so much partisan as it's government opposition. You know why. This all came from the great prorogation where all of Canada watched a doorway for hours and hours. That's when Jack Layton said, “This is not right. The government shouldn't be allowed to run and hide from a confidence vote”, and so those kinds of practicalities were taken into account.

As I said, what we ran into, of course, was the complex rules, but a lot of it is by tradition, so you need people who understand that history and can explain it to you. We did all that, but the way the government's presented this now and said June 2, at the same time as they just rolled in and said Bill C-33 on May 19, the next thing you know they are going to want to know where the strawberries are, because this is starting to get a little bit strange.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

There is an end to this; it's just not foreseeable really soon.

So, returning to the 23rd report, on March 6, Chair, you rose in the House and you presented this report—proudly, I would assume—on our behalf, just as you did the 11th report, proudly, I would assume, which we.... I have spelled out that we have said in here that this was all done by consensus. You'll recall the wording: in this approach to the study, the committee attached importance to reporting back to blah, blah, blah, and taking into account, and that we would only do it by consensus. I can search for the exact words if you want, but you know they're there.

Turning to the new report, I had been making some reference to the good work we were doing on the Chief Electoral Officer's lengthy report. I think it would take something like 30, 40, or 50 meetings to actually go through that entire report and create our own report. It's a big undertaking. I've done it before in previous parliaments. For the most part, it's just been hard work, not controversial in terms of how we did that work. That was with Mr. Lukiwski, who spent a lot of time on this committee.

Again, you'll recall, Chair, that I had referenced that we have what we call the low-hanging fruit process, that we were doing it in sections. There was some methodology to our approach: we were doing it in sections. The goal was that at the conclusion of each section, we would do an interim report to the House, so that the work we were doing could be fed into the.... Hopefully, ostensibly, the government would take into account what was said here, notwithstanding the uh-oh around Bill C-33. I think we got around that one. Notwithstanding that little bump in the road—put that over here—for the most part, the whole idea was that we would issue reports, I think at least three, in sections, and we decided internally that we would approach those things that we could possibly, somehow, humanly find agreement on, and put those in the report.

Those things that clearly didn't lend themselves to an obvious readily available consensus we put aside and put in another pile, to take a shot at on another day. This, I think, is the first one. Whether it was first or second, I can't recall. I don't know if you can recall, Chair. Anyway, this was the first or second one.

I see the analyst offering something. Was it the first one? Thank you very much. That confirms that this was the first of at least three, probably four, reports by the time they did a separate one trying to tackle the issues that were going to be tougher. Probably they'd be thinner reports, but there would have been at least four in total. This was the first one.

This is also, again, part of the problem with the timing, such that the minister came in and asked us to do some selective work on the rest of the report, and report to her by May 19, and then this other thing landed in front of us, and originally they wanted it done by June 2.

I mean, really, who's thinking over there, or supposed to be?

Anyway, that remains a problem. It would be nice to get at it, because it would mean we've dealt with this problem. The only way this goes away is if we, the opposition, get our rights.

As per the format of the last one, you'll recall that it was pretty much the same report that “The Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs has the honour to present....” It was the 11th there; it's the 23rd here. This was an “Interim Report on Moving Toward a Modern, Efficient, Inclusive and Family-Friendly Parliament”. This is “An Interim Report in Response to the Chief Electoral Officer’s Recommendations for Legislative Reforms Following the 42nd General Election”. Neither one is little stuff. This is all deep, complex things, and yet look: Mr. Badawey was talking about how much he enjoyed that discussion. That's because once you get into that kind of respectful give and take where you're not trying to beat each other up and you're not trying to get one better on the other party, where you're actually working together, that's where it's not only enjoyable but productive; unlike this, which is non-productive, other than it's us defending ourselves.

On the second page, we, all of us, government members, chair, vice-chairs, members, all of us said this in doing our report. Remember, this is us, the same committee, the government members, the very same people:

In conducting its work, the Committee attached importance to completing its study of the first two chapters of the CEO's report and providing the House with its assessment of the CEO's recommendations in a timely manner.

Again, I want to point out how co-operatively we are working with the government. “Timely manner”—the only thing that's timely, in terms of the government and its agenda for bringing legislation, is getting our feedback, and, if it's true to its word, taking into account what we've had to say and factoring that in to help inform its decision. That's respect.

We could have caused the government some grief if we collectively said, “You know what? We have a great chance here. We have this report that's going to take 50 meetings anyway, so what do you say we stretch it and make it 75 and really make it hard for them to get anything done?” We didn't do that. We did nothing remotely like that. It was not even suggested, not even as a joke. We all take this work seriously.

This committee is, in some ways, like the steering committee of the House. This is the only committee that meets at the same time every week. The only committee. Every other committee rotates, but we don't. Every other committee actually gets created only when we generate a report that says it should be. I'm not trying to pretend that we're making all the decisions around here; it's the makeup of the committee, and it comes from the caucuses and the whips.

But my point is that this is unlike any other committee. Everybody on here, from the newest rookie to the oldest veteran—

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

It would be even more so if that's the way it really happened, because nobody believes it. It didn't happen that way. It didn't happen that way at all. My sense is, and I can't give you the particulars, but I think we all know that the PMO's fingerprints are all over this thing. There is no way after what we went through with Bill C-33 that any of the government members would be bringing in a notice of motion as draconian as this one without the absolute 100% okay from the Prime Minister, the House leader, and the whip. The first time, it could be a mistake. You know, first time, shame on you, and that kind of thing. But here we are again a few weeks later and it's the same darn thing.

The last government didn't want to appear reasonable. They wanted to appear to be strong and winners. It was a whole different approach, so in a lot of the things they did, they were at least on brand. I'll give them that. They were very disciplined.

I don't understand the government: sunny ways but shutting things down, transparency and ramming through changes with only one...even Harper didn't try to do that. That's how bad this is. He didn't even try to do that. So here we be. The government has identified the areas in which they want change. We know what those motions are. Some of them they tried out in previous vehicles. Motion six, remember that debacle? It was the same kind of thing. Every time you guys try to play Mad Max, it doesn't work for you. It's the same darn thing then.

We find ourselves now with no alternative except to do exactly what we're doing, which is to fight to defend what is arguably the last real tool that an opposition member has in their tool box, which can at least slow down the government. We can't stop it. It has a majority. It's going to get its way at the end of the day and it's going to win votes 10 times out of 10. I used to be part of a majority government provincially, not as massive as the one we have here, but a comfortable enough one that every time I walked in the House, I had that feeling that we were the government and we were going to win this vote. I haven't felt that since.

A couple times they were in minority, which is a whole different other story that we may need to get to later to fill time as we go through this, but not for tonight.

What the government has done is to identify the things it wants, including taking away our right. Here's the thing about it, Chair. Filibusters are a lot like strikes. You will know, Chair, from our time together, that originally I'm a product of the Hamilton labour movement. That's where I came from. That's how I got into politics, and I still self-identify as someone from the labour movement. That never leaves you. I look at these things and I want to find a way to get through them. I want to find a way that we can come to grips.

But for the government to then go through these things and cherry-pick the things it wants.... There was no consultation ahead of time, no discussion of any give or take, no saying it was looking at certain things. If you're serious about co-operation, there are ways for those kinds of discussions to happen, but it's clear that this government had no intention and has no intention. I don't know why, but the knee-jerk reaction seems to be to go from trying to be the nicest people in public life in the world to suddenly being the most vicious. It's happened two or three times. I don't get it. I don't at all get it.

I understand that the calculation here is probably one of a long game. It's taken a look—because that's what you do when you're in government—and it's said, “Okay. Let's go to when the next election is and work backwards and identify the things”—we used to call them our signature pieces—“our keystone pieces and make sure that they are brought in in a timely way and they're implemented and we're watching those”. I think they have deliverology, which is the same sort of thing. You're usually working backwards from a date to identify things you'd need to do at a certain point.

I'm assuming that the calculation is that there are things the government wants through the House by the time of the next election, and that the ability to all but guarantee that they can get them, on any time frame of their little heart's desire, is worth the pain and the price that we opposition members are trying to make them pay.

I assume that this is the calculation. The budget's tomorrow. The fact that this happened today is not a coincidence. We know that. Obviously, the government's hope is that we'll blink.

The government needs to understand that there is nothing more important in front of the opposition right now than defending our rights. Again, we do this a lot, but there are members of the government benches who've been in opposition and who know that someday they're going to be back.

Trust me, if you ever achieve this, there will come a day, especially for the younger ones, when you'll be in a situation sitting where I am, let's say, or on this side, and the government's over there. You'll be reaching for every tool because of some outrageous thing that is really wrong. You'll reach into your quiver for that arrow, and it ain't going to be there. Then you'll say to yourself, “Hmm, it seemed like a really good idea at the time.” The people on the government side will say, “You know, at the time I thought it was a bad idea, but right about now I think you guys were probably right. It was a good rule change. Well done. Thank you. We appreciate that.”

What could an alternative have been? Just about anything would be better than this. I mean, for anybody who's watching....

The other thing to say to the government is that there probably aren't many people paying much attention right now, but that number will grow. There are a lot of people, especially people who used to vote for us, for the NDP, who went with the Liberals. It was for a bunch of reasons, but for many of them the signature piece was electoral reform, specifically proportional representation. They've paid a real price for backing off this. Those people are very upset, really upset. This will affect those very same people.

Why you want to do that to your brand is beyond me. That's what I'm not getting. Brand is everything. A new government spends most of the first four years building that brand, the brand of their choice. From what I can see, this is not it. Undemocratic, ramming things through, taking away rights from the opposition, forcing committees to go around the clock and filibuster to defend the right to have a filibuster—that's your brand? Really?

Is it the “Liberal Conservatives”, or “Conservative Liberals”...? The Conservatives over here would probably tell you that they wouldn't stoop this low, and not to attach their name to this idea. You have to give them their due, because they didn't do that. They did some horrible things—I was there—but they didn't do this. It was this government—I'm going to keep coming back to this, because this is the most annoying thing—that promised to be different. They were going to be respectful of committees. Where's the respect?

Bill C-33, I was willing to forgive you that one. I mean, the government was in a tough spot. I understand the politics of it. I get it. They were in a tough spot. They were taking a lot of heat. They were getting negative reports on electoral reform. They wanted to get something positive out there to provide a bit of a counter to it. I get that, but that doesn't in any way justify the ham-fisted way it was done.

The minister—the second minister, not the first one—all but said that. She came a little shy of that. Okay, I can understand what the advice was from her ministerial staff, but she came a very long way towards saying, “You know, we screwed up, and we didn't show this committee respect.”

Although I didn't get an absolute promise that it wouldn't happen again—I can see why, given what's happening today—at least what was said gave us enough, because we had the desire to get back to working positively. It gave us enough to take what was said and use that to say, “Okay, it's a pass. It's a C. It'll get us there. Let's get back to the electoral reform report. That's the primary focus. That's what's really important here.”

I wouldn't normally talk about these things, but in this context, because the government has to vilify us for what we're doing—I know it's coming—I need to publicly remind my colleagues that certainly I, as one member of this committee, did everything I could, and successfully, with others, to get us back on track. Up until even yesterday at the beginning of the meeting we were fine.

By the way, that's another thing, too. We haven't talked about all the money that was wasted today by the way the government's doing it, not just on this but all the time that the staff took, the very professional staff who came here from the Office of the Chief Electoral Officer. They did their homework. They prepped. They were all ready to go. We were all ready to go. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, I guess I can't go too far on what was said in camera, but suffice it to say, in a blink, we were public and this thing was being jammed down our throats. That's how quickly it changed.

On the motion in front of us, the amendment, again this is the kind of area where with no discussion and the government refusing to go here or to offer an alternative or to try to find a compromise, they're leaving it clear to all of us that they are prepared to use their majority to ram through changes to our House of Commons. Their majority, their ramming...our House, our Parliament. That doesn't sound like the campaign trail. It was so different on the campaign trail.

I had suggested a compromise that worked before. I suggested earlier today, Chair, that perhaps we could look at the Cullen model that was used for the special committee that reviewed democratic reform. That got us off the dime and got us into a positive venue. Now I must say for the record, too, that it was young Daniel Blaikie who actually conceived of the idea, but it was Nathan who said, “That is a good idea.” He took it, ran with it, polished it, and changed it around. I want to give Dan his due for the initial concept, but Nathan's the one who gave it life and Nathan did an excellent job on that.

Maybe that's something we could still do to get off this dime. Is the Cullen model something that would help us get through this impasse? The government says that it's sincere about wanting to have give and take, and consult. All the usual words that you use when you do mean it, they're using now. Maybe that's the mechanism that lets us get going.

But that's only if the government actually did want to have consultation, discussion, openness, transparency, and all that other stuff they talked about in the election that they don't seem to want to live up to anymore. Again, if those things had been suggested either at a House leaders' meeting or at a steering committee here, anywhere, at any venue, any opportunity, other than “our way or the highway”.... That's the way the last guy did it. This government was going to be different. They're different when it suits them, but they're not different consistently.

They're not really different. It amounts to another broken promise. We're getting quite a collection of them—biggies.

The Cullen model would also allow something that I don't think has been raised yet, but I did slip out of the room a couple of times. It may have been mentioned, but not a lot, and that is, what about the rights of members of the House who don't belong to recognized parties? We went out of our way in the Cullen model to ensure that they got a say in the election rules that were being reviewed. It's their election, too. Where are their rights in all this? Where is their opportunity to have input and consultation? The government doesn't seem to have even thought about it.

Again, you know, it's talk one game, act another game. The Cullen model would provide us with an opportunity to have a fair discussion where everybody gets their say. The structure enhances or pressures the members to find compromise, and there was a mechanism whereby less than everyone could conclude a decision and have it carried on. You had the ability to work your way through things in a way where everybody was agreed at the beginning what the rules—that new structure—would be. None of that discussion....

What we have in front of us right now.... It will be interesting to see how many amendments we end up with from the two opposition parties by the time this whole process is done. We might be setting a new land speed record with that one. For now, we have a motion that calls for a requirement that there be all-party agreement. The government doesn't agree with that. They don't agree with that. They don't agree with a compromise. They don't agree with.... The only thing they seem to agree with is that whatever they want to do, they can do it. That, they agree with.

It was also interesting, even today, to watch...and this was in public, not in camera, so I can talk about it. Mr. Chan, a government member, raised this right here just a few hours ago. He raised the idea of perhaps.... You recall, Chair, that I tried to get this committee to adjourn the debate on something that we hadn't caucused yet. That would have allowed us a chance to take it to our caucus tomorrow to get a mandate, so that when we spoke at committee, we had the support of our caucus. We would know what their thinking was and that we were speaking on behalf of our caucuses. The government said no to that.

I mean, how unreasonable. We are debating right now a motion and a policy change that affects everything we do in the House, and the government thinks it's okay that we don't get a chance to take it to caucus first. Come along. No one out there—no matter how much you decidedly look at your Blackberrys and iPads, no matter how much you try to glance away from the wreckage of this—the people out there aren't buying it. You can't defend it. How can you defend forcing members to debate one of the most important policies we could possibly debate—the rules of the House—without even having an opportunity to take the discussion paper and the motion to our caucus?

You did call it a discussion paper, didn't you? Except you denied us the chance to discuss it. How is that fair? How do you defend that one? Yet every one of the government members lined up to say, “No, you debate now. We say now”. We had people from the Chief Electoral Officer here, we were all ready to do it. We had our papers all over, ready to go, and the government suddenly said, “No, we're going to deal with this motion right away.” I asked for at least a two-day deferral and it was refined by my friend, Mr. Reid, who had the better idea to adjourn just the debate—rather than the whole meeting—and allow us to get back to do a day's work on the Chief Electoral Officer's report. That was a great idea. I accepted that as sort of a friendly amendment. It was a good improvement on what I was trying to do. What did the government say? No. The government said no.

That was early on. As question period was approaching, Mr. Chan—he's a very reasonable man and I enjoy working with him—suggested, reasonably, I guess actually forgetting that the Liberals aren't in reasonable mode right now.... I'm sorry, Mr. Schmale mentioned it and then you responded. I don't want to get it wrong. I certainly don't want to wrong you on this. I'm going to wrong you, but decidedly where you deserve it, not on something you don't. If it came from Mr. Schmale, that's fine.

But it's fair to say that Mr. Chan did respond positively and say, “Fair enough, maybe we could suspend for question period and then come back”. When we asked what time we should come back, that's when the senior staffer came over, had a huddle on the side, and had a couple of words. The next thing Mr. Chan said was “No, we're going to keep talking through”.

I have had members of the Liberal Party brag to me about how that didn't happen and was never going to happen. They said, “Remember, Dave? Under Harper, the staff was always there telling them what to do, just like a bunch of puppets and seals. We're never going to do that. We're here as independent members. We're going to think for ourselves. You can count on that, Dave; don't worry. We're far away from that nonsense.”

Not so much, because that's exactly what happened.

Mr. Chan reasonably responded, because in my opinion he's a reasonable man, and said that, yes, it made sense that way, because we were going to do this for days or weeks. For him to say, “Yes, we'll take a few minutes to go and let everyone exercise their right to be part of question period” and have it countermanded by the staff, vetoed by the staff, well, why don't the staff just sit there instead so we can get some work done directly and get rid of the middle people?

Folks, particularly the new members here, this is the kind of stuff we used to hit the government backbenchers in the Harper government with all the time, and they deserved it. Now you're letting it be done to you. It's not me. I'm the one who's doing the words, but none of this would be happening if it wasn't for your actions. You're bringing this all upon yourselves. Not all yet, but slowly and surely you're working your way through all the areas that you said you would do differently. Guess what. Watching a senior staff person come over and dictate to the MP sitting there what the decision is going to be, especially when it reverses the decision of the sitting MP, is about as far away from respecting committees and accepting that they are masters of their own destiny as you can possibly get.

Why? I don't know. All I see is a failed political calculation. Does the government have any idea how resolute we are on this side of the House? This is the closest the Conservatives and the NDP have worked for, well, as long as I can remember. I was starting to think and going further, but this is the closest for a long time. It's not because suddenly we agree on everything, but one thing we do agree on is that this is wrong and doing it this way is wrong. If you're going to try to take away one of the few tools that we have left to be effective opposition members and you think we're going to blink for any reason, the government is misreading this.

I can tell you that it goes all the way to the top in terms of the resoluteness of the two opposition parties. I know that Madam May feels the same way—she has been here once—and I have a sneaking suspicion that the rest of the independents are going to feel pretty similar, especially since they don't even get a say. They don't even get a say, and the government didn't give any thought at all about the opposition members. Who are they? Who cares? We're the majority and what we want is what matters. We have to deal with those official parties, and we will. We'll fix them, don't worry. The other ones, well, they have no power and we'll just make sure they stay that way.

You were going to be different, though; that's the thing. It's not as though I have to hold up some high ideals and make it look like you backed them. The Liberals were the ones who were giving all these lofty speeches during that bloody 11-week campaign, so you had lots of opportunity to repeat to everybody how you were going to be different. Telling people one thing and doing something else is not doing things differently. Canadians have had their fill of that. The government said, “We'll be different; you can trust us, Canadians.” They did, and now, by this kind of nonsense, the government is insulting those very same Canadians who put their trust in them.

I don't know what's going to happen to the changes to the electoral act. When I turn my mind back to a few hours ago when we were actually doing productive things, I had some sense of maybe where we were going. I have no idea now. Let's just take a second to mosey on down that trail.

The new Minister of Democratic Institutions asked us to try to complete our study of the Chief Electoral Officer’s report, which is pretty lengthy by the way, by May 19, and we really hadn't already gotten our heads around how we were going to do that except that we were prepared to try. Again, based on the idea that if it looks like timing is going to be a problem. If the government wants to give us some indication of areas that they prefer to move on earlier rather than later, then we can rejig our work so they can have the benefit of our....

That's all gone now, Mr. Chair. As long as we're tied up in this none of that's going to happen, so does that mean that the Conservatives.... I mean the Liberals. You start getting into this stuff and the old ways kick in.

Does that mean the Liberals have decided that their ability to have 100% control in the House and in every committee is more important than removing some of the Bill C-23 ugliness, the unfair elections act? Or does it mean that you're going back to not respecting the committee and their opinion like Bill C-33? Because you can't have both. You can't have us locked into this pitched battle for days and weeks on end and expect us to complete a report that we weren't even sure we could finish under the existing schedule if we're not even talking about it. So what does that mean? Does that mean the government's going to say something's got to give, and it would look like listening to the committee and respecting the committee and waiting for our report is what's going to give, which puts us right back where we were with Bill C-33. That's not that far away from the process that was followed with Bill C-23, the unfair elections act.

We already heard Mr. Reid admit that the opposition approach to Bill C-23 did damage. I didn't even have the Liberals with us fighting Bill C-23 as strongly. They did fight it but not as strongly as the official opposition is now linked with the third party to make sure this doesn't happen. There are two injustices: ram through the changes that you want, opposition be damned, and then put in whatever electoral changes you want, committee consideration be damned. Is that where we are? Is that what this committee is now reduced to? It looks like it.

We've been struggling with our work plan to try to fit everything in. I just mentioned the most acute one. We have a lot of important work and anyone who's been on this committee for any length of time knows that we don't go too long before somebody from somewhere sends us work that we have to deal with. The Speaker refers things to us. The House refers things to us. Bills come in here. Even though we've set our work plan it's always a struggle to stay, and that's when we're all co-operating, respecting one another, and fighting in common cause to get through an agenda because we believe it's in the interest of the people we represent to do so. Where's that? I'd love to hear somebody from the government tell me.

What are you going to say? Is it we're going to start meeting six days a week? Is that the solution because that only works so far? We could do something like that maybe if we were going to the Cullen model where we're, again, working together and we set out how we can do this. It may be possible, but the government doesn't want to talk about that. They have no interest. The ones I feel sorry for are the backbenchers who are sleepwalking through this.

I know some of them get it and they know how dangerous this is to their brand in their own ridings. I know some of them get it. The ones I feel sorry for really are the ones who don't get it and they're just going along and doing what the government told them. They say, “Yeah, okay, I'll support that. Sure, yeah, okay,” and they go back to their ridings and it's like whoa what happened? We all know.... I don't want go too far into this. I wouldn't raise it if it wasn't in the media but there it is, low-lying fruit. There's already a little bit of that tension that we all know exists between cabinet and backbenchers, and I've been both.

I've been the backbencher who felt frustrated, and I've been the cabinet minister who is carrying the responsibility. I get it. You have a couple of days coming up when you're going to be struggling with these things. The fact that you don't think there's maybe enough consultation with the cabinet and with the caucus before things are done is not new—trust me—and anybody who is in your caucus who has been in government before will tell you we've been here before.

Things like ministers coming into ridings and you don't know about it, and you get all ticked off because the minister is coming in and you didn't know, are not new. This is not new. You're having these kinds of stresses. I suspect that, especially among the ones who really get politics on the ground and have a good political gut, they're going to go into that caucus meeting tomorrow morning or the quasi-retreat on the weekend and there's going to be a lot of expression of serious concern about what's going on, because this stuff is hard to defend, not because it's complicated but because it's so wrong.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

On division? I think it would be unanimous.

I say all of that again, and I want to try to end on a positive note. It's hard, given the subject matter in front of us, but I do put that forward, and I mean it very sincerely. If it changes, I'll let you know. If we cross the Rubicon where, “You know what? I don't want to talk to you guys anymore. Forget about it”, I'll let you know. Up until then, it's a standing offer, because I don't find this particularly fun. I don't find this particularly productive, and I don't think taxpayers are going to be all that impressed either.

I think the government's going to have a heck of a time trying to blame us. Maybe they could accuse us of being obstructionist or something. Good luck! Given your own background on Bill C-33 and on the whole approach, especially when you compare it with the approach that could have been taken. Why did you miss that opportunity? I don't get it. Why didn't they sit down and try to find some common ground so that even if we're at odds, it's maybe on a few little things that we could try to.... Even if we had to have a bit of a set-to over it, it would be narrowed. Right now, it's the whole thing. We're in the ditch. We're in the middle of a filibuster defending the right to filibuster.

I'll just go so far as to say that I choose to believe that there are quite a number of government members on the other side who are not feeling good about this, because this is not exactly sunny ways. This is not exactly consultation. This is not co-operation. This is not respect. All the things the government promised, and I will go so far as to say that when my colleague from Hamilton, Filomena Tassi spoke about those things, I believe she believed it and came here believing that was the way her government would act. In some ways they have. It's not as if it has always been like this, which is another reason it's so surprising.

I don't expect anybody to comment, but I have to believe this is not sitting well with a lot of Liberal members, especially the new ones who came in, in the last Parliament. Everything before then was the olden days and this is the new era and they've certainly tried to conduct themselves in that fashion. This has got to be one of those things in the pit of your stomach where they think they really don't want to defend this back home. However, that's their decision to make.

I would again reiterate the offer to have any kind of offline confidential discussions so that if they break down nobody is losing face. I've been around a while and I know how these things are done. I know how we got to “yes” back in the seventies, but it doesn't happen this way.

Chair, I would just urge any influence you have as a bona fide, full-fledged member of the government caucus to influence that, because you've been doing an excellent job as chair. You had big shoes to fill. Joe Preston was probably one of the best chairs of PROC to come around in quite some decades, not just Parliament, and it was mostly through the force of his personality.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

That's great. Thank you very much, Chair. I appreciate that.

I want to say how much I've enjoyed the last few hours, and I say that only partly tongue in cheek. I do enjoy hearing from Mr. Reid. It's always interesting. He knows his history, and I like history. I'm no expert, but I enjoy it. I'm pleased to pick up where he left off and to continue to point out why what's going on is so unacceptable.

Maybe to warm to the subject, I would start on a positive note; that is, I want to say to the government that this is not where we want to be. I can't speak for others, but the proof for my own motivation is the leadership role that I played in helping us get back to the Chief Electoral Officer's report, even though I was the one who blew it up the first time. The fact was that once we had dealt with that, the minister came in, and we got as much out of the minister as it appeared to me that we were going to get, and it was sufficient—barely—to allow us....

Then, colleagues on the government side, in camera and in public, you know that I was one of the leading voices for getting us back to work, and we did so. Very quickly, we managed to set everything aside. We were working, but now we're back into it again, for the same kind of problem, which is the government just dropping something out of nowhere in the middle of the floor and causing all this kerfuffle.

I said that I was going to try to start out by being positive, so what I want to do is just to reaffirm this. I like negotiating. I'm an old negotiator—and now I am old—from way back. I love negotiating. I love the give-and-take. It's like a poker game and I love playing poker. I don't win much but I love playing the game.

I want to say to the government that if there is any way at all that they are interested in the House leaders getting together—or whips, or members of this committee, or a combination thereof for any group at all that the government would like to identify—we in the NDP certainly are quite prepared to sit down, and I suspect my colleagues are, but I'll leave it to them to speak for themselves, and to try to find a reasonable compromise that recognizes the government's right to set an agenda but also respects the right of opposition in our role. I think we could find that if we came together in goodwill.

I want to say—and I say this much more in sorrow than in anger—that I wish that approach had been taken in the beginning. I have a sneaking suspicion that we wouldn't be here like this. As bad as we are, this is the worst I've seen it. This is worse than Bill C-33. It's worse because we're going around the clock, and the government knows.... They were with us in opposition and they know what we do. They know that we already have rotations, we already have schedules going, we have people who are going to be coming in through the night, and we're working on schedules for next week. We see where we are.

This is serious. Also, it's not very productive. It's not going to get us anywhere, other than two forces staring at each other. That's where we are right now, unnecessarily so. That's what is upsetting. I's that it didn't need to be this way. If the government wants to review these things....

Again, when the minister came in and said that she'd like us to try to get our work on the chief electoral report done by—what was it?—May, I think it was, our heads exploded, and we asked how we were going to do that. We didn't suddenly say, “No way—nothing.” I offered that we would do what we could. I said that to her privately. I can't say anything more than that as it was a private discussion, but I did offer privately and reaffirmed publicly that if we could find a way where this committee, if the government worked with us to identify areas where they wanted to bring in legislation.... I'm supportive of a lot of things the governments wants to do, not all of it but a lot of it, especially the removal of some of the ugly Bill C-23 stuff.

If we could have sat down and worked on an approach that would let us get through this and deal with it in a fair-minded way.... I was saying that I offered to the minister—and I think the official opposition was onside—that if we could, we would accommodate the minister's schedule, even though we don't have to do that. We're masters of our own destiny, but hey, we offered to do that, and we said that if they wanted to identify to us areas where they wanted to bring in legislation and would like the benefit of the thinking of this committee, then we would take that. If it was out of sequence with how we were going to do it, we were open to that.

I still remain open to the idea of moving our work so that we get at that in a timely fashion, which helps the government in terms of informing them of our thinking, so they can then introduce legislation. We get away from this Bill C-33, dropping a bill in the House before you've even heard from the committee, and then out the other side of your mouth telling us how important the committee work is. That just doesn't wash.

It's not like there's no evidence that we could work together, or there's no evidence that there's desire on the part of the opposition to be co-operative. Part of our mandate is to review the Standing Orders anyway. I would have been open to having that discussion, but I have to tell you, the ham-fisted way that this has been dealt with really feels like the last government. This feels a lot like Bill C-23, which really should inflict horror in the government members to find themselves sitting right where Harper's MPs sat. They're doing much the same as what Harper did on Bill C-23, only this time, instead of the election laws, it's how we run our House. It's the same attitude, that same bully approach.

I never thought I'd see anything like that, especially with the new government. I have to tell you, I'm not understanding any of this. I don't understand how the government thinks they're going to win on this, or how they think that ramming through changes to our Standing Orders is going to make the House work any better. There comes a point, Chair, where no matter how much we might want peace, if the government absolutely refuses to extend the olive branch of peace, then what I worry about—and, Chair, I say this to you as someone who is as non-partisan as our system allows—is that I'm not sure this committee can continue to function if we keep having things like Bill C-33 and this motion happening at this committee. I would be a fool, as one member, to continue to be co-operative with the government when all they seem to do is kick us in the arse. Why would I do that?

That's not my preferred way. I've been doing this for over 30 years. Having fights with the government, or fights with the opposition if I'm the government, is not new or exciting. I'm tired of all that. I have to tell you. I don't get a lot out of it.

What really turns my crank is when we get together with disparate political beliefs, different experiences, but come together in goodwill. Then we collectively try to find—like when we're doing reports—language that accommodates your concern and my concern. That I find stimulating because it goes against the grain. That's not easy to do in an adversarial system. Therefore, for me personally, after all these decades, that becomes a far greater challenge than just standing on some soapbox screaming and hollering. I've done that for decades, everybody's heard it, and we're all getting a bit tired of it, I suspect.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Don't confuse me. It's easily done.

They would come by and have input. We believed that it was meaningful, like it mattered that we would take the time. We struggled. We don't just agree with everything automatically. Usually it takes some kind of change, but really, with such positive work and a good combination of veterans and new members, so that we had a good mix, we were doing good work. I think every one of us would say that we were doing good work on behalf of Parliament and on behalf of Canadians.

Then, when they dropped Bill C-33 on the floor of the House, it was as if it was all a ruse, just a joke, a make-work project to keep us busy, or it was pro forma.

I just went through 10 years of that, of a government that looked at committee work that way, and I was really looking forward to getting back to a world where committees mattered, to the important work that the mother of Parliaments perceived when this kind of Westminster parliamentary system was put in place. The whole idea was that the real work would happen at committee. That's why we're a little looser with the rules. That's why we can call each other by our names and not just our ridings.

That's why at committee you can speak until you're done, so that if we're going to talk about water quality and my riding represents a good part of the Hamilton Harbour waterfront, I'm going to have a lot to say about it, or I may have a lot to say. The one nice thing at committee is that once you take the floor, you can go until you're done. That doesn't mean that everything is a filibuster, but it means that if you want to take your time and spell out an issue that affects your constituents as it relates to the matter in front of you, if you're going to build that case, it's complex, and you want to break it down so it's understandable, that may take 20 or 30 minutes or maybe an hour, or maybe a little longer depending on the subject matter.

That's one of the beauties of committee, and we don't have that time in the House. Remember that we come here believing that our main priority objective is to reflect the wishes and interests of our constituents. Because there is so much going on in the House, we all accept that there are going to be time constraints, as difficult as that is.

If I may say so, though, Mr. Chair, at least in the House in the early part of a new bill or motion, you at least get 20 minutes plus 10 minutes of questions and answers with colleagues, for a total of 30 minutes that you have to deal with an issue that your constituents consider important. I want to point out that under one of the proposals the government would make, that would be eliminated. That whole idea dies here: at committee, you get 10 minutes at a time. It doesn't matter how complex the issue is. It doesn't matter how much you need to break a whole lot of.... Nothing matters except that time limit, and now it starts to become a very different creature.

I again want to express how disappointing it is at that level that we're here. I'm trying to be fair-minded, but on balance I couldn't even give the government a fifty-fifty to say that they've honoured 50% of the commitments they made to committees. They've made some. They did honour some, but I have to tell you that when the rubber hits the road, when real politics start to take over and we have real issues in front of us and the government is feeling the pressure, whether it's from entities or the clock, they're acting more and more like the previous Harper government in terms of their lack of—

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

I did, because we couldn't continue with what was going on before. That had to come to an end. I guess a minority would have been even better than the current one, for obvious reasons. Anyway, I won't get too much into what could have been. Those tears are gone.

I will talk about what did happen, and that was that a party got elected that said they were going to respect committees once again, because Parliament used to have respect for its committees. Of everything we do here on the Hill, I consider committee work to be my favourite part. My top thing, of course, is being in my riding, which is same for all of us, but here, I love committee work. This is where stuff happens. It moves quickly. You get a chance to be far more personal in interactions and to work together.

We still have our battles from time to time, but the whole idea was that committees would now be respected and that we wouldn't see this business of moving in camera, with vicious stuff happening in camera, and then having to come back out and not being able to say anything because the rules tie your hands. We were going to have transparency and respect. I was really looking forward to that.

In some ways and in some areas, they've delivered, but right from the get-go on this committee, the first thing I had to do—I think it was even at the first meeting we had—was to mount a mini-campaign of my own to get the parliamentary secretary off the committee, whereas the government had promised that the parliamentary secretary wasn't going to be there in the first place. You can talk about a voting member but where is he now? I haven't seen him for a long time, so it looks like message received.

You know what, Chair? The government members of the day argued. They were so incensed when I accused them of needing him to ride shotgun.

Of course, I was baiting all of you and you all rose, as I would have, too, and responded with —I'm paraphrasing, no names—“Hey, I can make my own decisions, I'm an MP.” That's fair enough. Mr. Graham talked about being here before too and how that was all insulting. Anyway, we got through all of that, and lo and behold, look around: we don't have a parliamentary secretary anywhere within earshot of this committee. But they had to be chased. That was a little disappointing.

I was hoping that it was a one-off, because they have done some other things that are important. They have increased the resources for the committee, which is the first thing. Of course, the previous government was slowly strangling the ability of committees to do their work. Certainly, they never left Parliament Hill, except on the rarest of occasions. Heaven forbid that Canadians would actually get a hands-on opportunity to talk to their own government.

Mostly it was going to be about tone and respect, and then you'll remember, Chair—it wasn't that long ago—that we went through the issue of the report from the Chief Electoral Officer regarding changes that he would recommend we make to the election laws, having reviewed and learned lessons from the election we had just had in 2015. It's a regular undertaking. We do it every year.

We were actually working very well together under your leadership, Chair. It's an in camera exercise, so I can't speak in too much detail, but it's certainly fair to say that we had a great esprit de corps and that we recognized that the election laws don't belong to the government, or the official opposition, or the third party, or independents. The election laws belong to everybody.

We were working our way through it. We were following a process that we've used before here, starting in other Parliaments. You can call it the “low-lying fruit process”. All it means is that where we can agree on things readily or with a minor change to wording, we would include that in a report and move on to the next item. We would go through those as quickly as we could. As soon as we got to an item where one of the caucuses or even one of the members said that they had a real problem with an item and it was going to give them real pause for concern, we would take that signal as meaning that it was not low-lying fruit and not easily agreeable, so we needed to set it aside. We had that second track.

It meant that when we got to those, a lot of the political give and take was yet to happen, but it's amazing how many things we could agree on that would then allow us to give an interim report to the House, which would then allow the government to consider the opinion of this committee on the changes recommended by the Chief Electoral Officer.

With the government having promised that they were going to treat committees with respect and give their work serious consideration in the development of policy and legislation, everything seemed to be going fine. Then I walked in one morning—I think it was a Thursday—at 11 o'clock, and within that hour, because the House usually starts at 10 o'clock, the government had dropped Bill C-33 on the floor. Now, Bill C-33 was about election laws. In and of itself, it's not a huge issue, other than the fact that some of the changes they wanted to make in Bill C-33 were items that either we were currently seized of or hadn't dealt with yet but were on our agenda to do.

Let's wait a minute. Let's have a look at this picture. The government says they're going to respect the work of committees. They're going to consider their work important input in the development of government policy.

Oh, I've just been advised that it's scheduled for debate in the House next Thursday. That should be fun.

Take the work we're doing. The government says they're going to listen to us, and then they drop this bill, which by its very existence is insulting to this committee, and they break their promise. How can you say on the one hand that you're going to respect what committees have to say and consider what they have to say in the development of policy and legislation and then turn around and drop a bill on the floor that deals with those very issues? The committee has not even finished with it and, in some cases, hasn't even started on it. Where's the respect in that?

To some of us, that was such an egregious action that it seized up the work of the committee. At that moment, we stopped reviewing the Chief Electoral Officer's recommendations, and for this simple reason: why bother? It would seem that, foolishly, all of us, including me, members of the Conservatives, the government members, anybody else who came by, independents who dropped by the committee, the Greens—I'll give you your Greens, Madam—the Bloc, the other independents—

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

You just reminded me of an item for our agenda that came up today.

I set out the schedule for the rest of the week, but if Bill C-33 does come before Parliament this week, because that bill is coming to our committee, I'm going to suspend during that discussion in the Commons so we can all be there to hear whatever they're talking about. I say this just so people know. It might be on Thursday.

Sorry to interrupt you.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Mr. Chair, you can see where we are, especially, sir, compared to where we've been, notwithstanding our little kerfuffle over Bill C-33, which derailed us for a short period of time. Some of us went out of our way to help get this committee back on track, if you'll recall. Most of the time, we've been very respectful of each other and of each other's rights. We've listened to one another politely, even when there is no media, nobody, around. That's the way we've been functioning. I've been on this committee for quite some time—not as long as Mr. Reid—and the committee works best, Mr. Chair, when we have that. You're our leader, helping us work collectively as a team, a team that includes each of us in the opposition too. It's easy from the government side, but we in the opposition have offered up that willingness to be part of a team and to work collectively on the issues that we have, especially on this committee because most of the things we do are non-partisan. The rule changes in the House should be non-partisan.

Mr. Chair, I'm appealing to you in your capacity as our chair. You have the authority to adjourn. I am personally, as a matter of privilege, asking you to please step in, preserve what's left of the ability of this committee to work as a single entity, and allow us to approach these rule changes in a way that's as fair and respectful as we've done everything else. I'm asking you to use your unilateral authority as the chair to adjourn this session. Allow us to get to our caucuses tomorrow to talk about this. Then let's come back on Thursday. That is not some gymnastics of parliamentary athletics. That's just polite common sense and respect. We haven't even had a chance to take this to our caucuses. Where on earth does the government think it's going to get the credibility to go out into the public and defend not just what you're doing, but how you're doing it? I'm asking you, Mr. Chair, to save the government from itself. Preserve the good work of this committee, the spirit of co-operation that exists, and adjourn this meeting. Let some fairness, common sense, and real democracy enter into this procedure. Mr. Chair, I implore you to please do that on behalf of this collective.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Mr. Chair, before the break, I was in the midst of reading the letter that I'm sending to Minister Gould today with regard to essentially the scheduling conflict we have between the items on the agenda for this committee that are coming from that minister's office, because we are the committee that takes care of the democratic institutions portfolio, and the Standing Orders review that we've been given.

I went through a series of four questions, one of which has four subsidiary items. The four subsidiary items are the items that are coming from her to us: the CEO recommendations report from the 42nd election; Bill C-33, currently at second reading; her proposed bill on political financing; and then, of course, our Standing Orders and how they work together.

Now we'll come back to my actual text of the letter I will write to her, continuing on from where I left off:

As you know, [the procedure and House affairs committee] can always be seized with questions relating to matters of privilege at any time, which can serve to disrupt pre-planned study schedules. Two such matters have been debated in the House of Commons just this past week.

I would be grateful [to you] if you could convey a response to my questions herein to the Clerk of [the procedure and House affairs committee] for the information of [all] committee members. You are, of course, under no obligation to make reference to this letter.

Then I go on and say some other stuff. I may as well finish it off here:

On the matter of your offer to meet in-person, I would like to take you up on your offer in the short-term, however the unpredictable but largely-continuous...meeting schedule [of the procedure and House affairs committee] does not presently allow me to commit in advance to being available to meet you at a particular time. That said, my staff are happy to work with yours to find a time that would work with both our schedules on short notice.

I think I'm going to add a little note in there to her as well to say that I'm also available to meet during off weeks because, unlike many members of this committee—most notably yourself, Mr. Chair—I don't have a riding that is far, far away. Perth feels like it's a million miles from Ottawa, but it's actually a one-hour drive from wherever you're sitting right now, if there's no traffic. I could come in and meet with the minister if she's in Ottawa. As a minister, she might be here during the break week.

Anyway, that was what I said to her.

As I was going through this, a thought occurred to me regarding the—

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

I'm kind of merging the two. I can understand why my friend might be confused, but I was talking about the Liberal election. The Trump election plays into this too; there is a merging of the thoughts. I can appreciate where I'm maybe not being as clear as I need to be when I'm talking about mandates and newly elected people.

Thank you for that, Mr. Reid. I will be on guard to try to be clear in my differentiation.

No, it's quite the opposite. Again, I'm talking about the beginning, which almost seems like it was a different party or, at the very least, a political lifetime ago. Really, we're only talking about weeks, not even months, since they suddenly became as vicious as they are now. There had been indications. We saw things, such as, for example, Bill C-33 and motion number six. This stuff was already there. It just hadn't burbled to the top.

In reference to the Star editorial, I'll read it again. It's good for the government. Where is it...?

Sorry, Chair. I'm not trying to deliberately delay.

It says:

This jibes with an Ekos poll that found that, after decades of erosion, public trust in government spiked after Trudeau’s election win.

I was commenting on how well they played that out, just like a symphony, for days, weeks, and what became months. It looked like it was going to be years. It was politics at its best.

Again, I remember some of those heady days. Our honeymoon didn't last quite as long as this one did, and most don't, but, boy, the government just played it brilliantly. I give the government full marks. There was nary a stumble. Where there's a stumble, a picture of the Prime Minister underneath a headline that attacked the government, just like the Star editorial, takes a lot of the sting away.

This is the only thing that has really stuck in a big way. There have been some other things.

We should have known when we saw motion six. That was unreal. It practically suspended every right the opposition had. The only saving grace was that there was a time limit, but that doesn't change the fact that for a period of months the government was about to give itself spectacular omnipotent powers to run roughshod, at will, over the opposition.

If anybody thinks I'm being a little histrionic in that, go take a look at motion six. Find out what ministers could do by declaration alone. I haven't visited it in a while, and I stand to be corrected. I believe a minister could actually end debate by a declaration. If that's not accurate, there was a similar application. It was, like, unbelievable, let alone having it come from a Liberal government, let alone a Trudeau-led Liberal government.

The only thing that caused the government to back away was the explosion on the floor of the House, when there were accusations of people being manhandled. That brought everything to an acute head. The Prime Minister had to apologize. To his credit, he said that he would take action to ensure that the tone changed and that we would see that action imminently.

To the Prime Minister's credit, within a couple of hours, the government House leader, who I referred to earlier in terms of his respectful request of this committee, Mr.Dominic LeBlanc, rose in his place and announced that the government was withdrawing motion six. That took all the sting out of it. That took the air out of it. Everybody calmed down. That did give us a chance to get back on track.

Most of us thought, okay, that's the last we'll ever see of that ugliness, because even Harper, in his wildest dreams, would never have suggested that he take that kind of power—raw power—and remove what little rights the opposition still had. Lo and behold, motion six finds itself in a reincarnated form known as a “discussion paper”. It's not quite as ugly as motion six, but it is politically ugly in its own right in terms of what it suggests the government would like to do to the nuisance opposition.

To continue with the editorial:

Canadians embraced Trudeau's positive vision and took hope from early signals. His openness with the media, for instance, is a clear improvement over his predecessor.

It was a pretty low bar, which he more than cleared, I will say, but it was a low bar.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Yes, my friend would like that. There is a point at which you and I will honestly separate, and that's why democracy is so wonderful: to allow us to do that.

I had to learn. That's why I'm passing on this free.... I have the scars to show how I learned this. When the new government comes in, for the longest time you're going to be elbowed, you're going to be reminded, because it's the comparison that makes the case. Over time I learned to stop being so sensitive about it, certainly stopped defending every little attack, and stopped owning it. As people took their shots, I wished I'd had a BlackBerry then: it would have been easier to disappear into, but as I said, suddenly there were very important documents that needed very close attention, and that's all I looked at until it was done. I waited until it was done and then I came back.

That's how I got through it. I strongly urge my colleagues to do that in the Conservative caucus, especially those of you who weren't here. Every time you say something, you take a piece of ownership of it. Don't do that. You still have lots of room to take credit for the things you want to brag about that the previous government did and, when there's any criticism flying around, get your head down. There's nothing to gain in defending a majority government that just went down in flames. In this matter I know whereof I speak, truly.

We shall, then, continue.

while we don't endorse the opposition

I keep repeating that part. I keep doing that, and it's not good.

While we don't endorse the opposition's histrionics, we do share its cynicism regarding the government's proposals. Some of them are clearly designed to make life easier for a majority government. And that is unacceptable.

Keep in mind the changes they want to make.

We haven't reached the part where there's a reference to the fact that the changes they want to make, they want to make unilaterally.

Any majority government like Mr. Trudeau's controls the House of Commons, which means it holds almost all the parliamentary marbles. It can pass the bills it wants, and cut off debate when it suits it. It typically also uses its majority to control committees, further ensuring that little gets in the way of its legislative agenda.

Again, Chair, I harken back to the fact that in two instances this committee acquiesced to the request of the government that we focus on something that was important to it. We did so willingly. The first time—and again I won't go to great lengths, but you'll recall—the former government House leader, Dominic LeBlanc, came here and very respectfully laid out his case, laid out what his government was looking for and asked us to join in making it a priority, and spelled out some of the things they were hoping our committee could achieve.

Within days, we were doing that work, resulting in a report that we all supported, which went to the House. You, Chair, presented it to the House on our behalf. That was without the government having to use power once—nothing. It didn't even have to look askance. It didn't even have to hint that if we didn't do what it wanted, there was going to be trouble. There was none of that. I was there.

I've been on this committee in other parliaments. I know the difference, and I know you do, Chair. Normally when a majority government, a new government, especially when it's a big change, comes in, there is some recognition on the part of the opposition that it won the election. We get reminded of that only 60 seconds of every minute.

To hear some of the government members tell it, you would think our purpose in being here is just to disrupt everything they want to do. Yet I can point to consistent evidence that we have done exactly the opposite, that this committee has worked well together even to the point where we're in this pitched battle, and yet Mr. Reid and you and everybody else was doing what they could shuffling around, coughing, looking at their shoes, to give me an opportunity to get in from the traffic and get in my place. That's how much residual goodwill exists in this committee. Even in this kind of environment that decency is still there. It gives you just a little bit of an idea of how effective we can be when we're all working together.

We've done some good work. I asked last night, and I ask again, if anybody can show me where this committee has been anything other than positive and moving forward and trying to work in tandem with the government, other than on Bill C-33 when it dropped that on the floor. I won't revisit that in detail, but you will recall, Chair, that it disrupted all the work we were doing because it was disrespectful of the committee's work. It basically made it a make-work project. It tabled a bill without waiting for our input into it.

This government promised that committees were going to matter, that it was going to respect them, and it was going to respect their input. I can't think of a better example than to reinforce the fact that within days—not motions, and squabbling, and off to the subcommittee, and fighting there, and taking forever, and us not wanting to give the government the benefit of succeeding at implementing its agenda—none of that was there. The evidence is in what we did. I will stand by the evidence that has to be there in Hansard to show how we approached this.

That's what the government can achieve just by asking. That's before we even get to the all but omnipotent powers of a majority government in the Canadian parliamentary system.

When The Globe and Mail makes reference to it having its majority on committees further ensuring that little gets in the way of its legislative agenda, that's again at the point where it has to actually use that power to force the opposition to follow in a direction it doesn't want to go.

Such was the goodwill on this committee. None of that was needed. In fact, we were quite pleased to do the work, because it did reflect some of the values and priorities coming out of the NDP caucus and, I suspect, also out of the Conservatives. We had lots of good reasons to want to do it, but my point in saying that is to show that when this committee, because of the nature of the work we do, is in non-partisan mode, which is probably 80% to 90% of the time, we do good work.

When The Globe and Mail makes reference to the amount of control that a government has at committee, that's before we even get to the part where it can get things done just by asking nicely.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

I haven't heard any evidence that Bill C-33 is there, so we're unlikely to suspend before 11:00.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

On a point of order, Mr. Chair, just regarding the times we're going to suspend and reconvene at, our plan had been to go from 9:00 until 11:00 a.m. today. There had been talk of suspending early at 10:00 if Bill C-33 is in the House. I'm not sure if Bill C-33 is there or not. There was some talk about that. That's the first thing I want to clarify. Is Bill C-33 there?

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

It has come up. There seems to have been very limited coverage. If you're looking for media coverage of it, you normally find it mentioned as a subsidiary item in articles about how—because we're a collegial committee here, I always want to put these things in non-partisan terms—it has been suggested that it's inappropriate that there be cash for access fundraisers, or at least that's how they're characterized. The minister is present. You pay something close to the maximum allowable contribution and then have the opportunity to have some face time with the minister. That's the practical impact of those. The government has been responding to it and saying it's taking action.

The Liberal Party on its own has said that it is now going to make public about 48 hours in advance, I think, where the events are occurring: the dates, times, and locations of any meetings at which this kind of interaction is taking place. That's what gets the coverage—their response—but sort of hidden in the middle of the article will be something else about the minister saying that she intends to introduce legislation to deal with this. Typically, further up in the article, it's mentioned that they won't be changing this contribution limit, which is obviously one of the ways in which it has been suggested one could deal with this issue. She mentioned in a fairly recent article about a week ago that the intention was to introduce that legislation this spring.

I was quite surprised by that. It was actually drawn to my attention by our party's chief fundraiser, who said, “Hey, what's up with this?” He phoned up and said that I was her critic so I was to find out whether that was happening. Former senator Irving Gerstein was the one who called me. I actually told him, “Irving, it's not happening in the spring, but look, I'll go and confirm it with the minister.” I went over to her desk and asked her, and she said, “Oh, yes, it's this spring.” Then she reminded me of an earlier meeting where she had told me. I had simply misheard. It hasn't received much publicity, but it is intended for this spring, absolutely.

At first I thought it seems precipitous and hasty, and then I thought it through and realized that to get this piece of legislation through so that it has royal assent by December 31, given the fact that the schedule over in the other place does not always move with alacrity, I actually can see why she would want to have it in the House and, for that matter, entirely through this House by the end of June.

There are other scenarios I can imagine. I have thought of this. In fact, I was going to raise this. It's not in the letter, but it's a good question that all of us on this committee have to think about, which is, given the amount of material we have before us, whether we're going to have to consider having this committee sit during the summer. Now, that doesn't deal with every issue. It doesn't deal with something that has to go through this committee and then back into the House by June.

If, for example, her goal, and I'm not saying this is her goal.... Well, let's take Bill C-33 as an example. I think it is her goal to have Bill C-33 through this committee, back in the House, and then through third reading in the House by the end of the spring. I haven't asked her that, but I assume that's her intention. Maybe it's the House leader I should ask.