Procedure and House Affairs Committee on May 17th, 2007

[Michel Guimond, Bloc, Montmorency—Charlevoix—Haute-Côte-Nord, QC]

I will speak for 30 minutes.

[Jay Hill, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River, BC]

Thirty seconds or thirty minutes?

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Order, please!

[Michel Guimond, Bloc, Montmorency—Charlevoix—Haute-Côte-Nord, QC]

Mr. Chairman, I was not sure whether Mr. Preston was filibustering or not. I listened to him, it was interesting. However, when he gave the example of two feathers, I found it difficult to see its relevance.

When we were studying the referendum Clarity Bill that prevented Quebec from choosing its own destiny, a bill that was tabled by Mr. Dion when he was a minister, I launched a filibuster that lasted five hours and 45 minutes. Time and time again, members from all parties would refer to subsection 101(2) of the Standing Orders, whereby “speeches in Committees of the Whole must be strictly relevant to the item or clause under consideration”. Marleau-Montpetit, on page 780, refers to the rule of relevance: “Speeches in a committee of the whole must be strictly relevant to the item or clause under consideration. If a member's speech is not relevant to the debate, the Chair is empowered to call the member to order and if necessary, warn that he or she risks being reported to the House”. The member could lose his or her right to speak.

Mr. Chairman, since I have absolute faith in you, I am convinced that you will strictly enforce subsection 101(2) of the Standing Orders and that you will make sure that the last minute of Mr. Preston's speech be relevant. In any case, I am certain that he is almost through.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Merci.

Let me just deal with this.

I'll let you speak now.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

Very quickly, Mr. Chair, I only want to point out the apparent contradiction between Mr. Godin's point of order and Mr. Guimond's point of order.

Mr. Godin was arguing that Mr. Preston was repeating himself and saying the same thing—which was relevant and on point—too many times. Mr. Guimond is saying he's not on point, he's not relevant, so there is a contradiction. If you are repeating yourself but still on point, how can Mr. Godin or Mr. Guimond argue that you're not relevant?

[Jay Hill, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River, BC]

He's too relevant.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

All right, colleagues.

On Mr. Godin's point of order, I will caution the member to stay on point. However, my feeling was that he was pretty relevant but I will simply caution the member to stay relevant.

Mr. Guimond, I believe you're referring to committee of the whole, which is not relevant for this meeting, so I'm still going to give the floor to the member.

Thank you.

Mr. Preston, please.

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Well, good. I'll try to be very relevant now, because I was speaking about the role of this committee.

Since it will be the role of this committee to vote on the issue at hand, at some point, it will be up to this committee to determine whether the work of the subcommittee was an absolute waste of time, and thus whether I could have been off, doing some other good work in this House, or whether the subcommittee—and not only me, as chair of the subcommittee, but also the other members of this committee who sit on that committee—were actually doing relevant work and doing it the way they were supposed to do it.

Earlier in my dissertation today, I brought up the rules and regulations, which I thought were very relevant because we really are trying to determine the non-votability of a piece of legislation. This committee will need, at some point, to determine whether the report from the subcommittee is either accepted or not accepted. In fact, you'll say, hey, subcommittee, you did your work; or, we don't need you at all, and we'll just stay as a big committee and do all the work in the future.

If that's what you're saying, we may have trouble moving other pieces of private members' business forward, because the subcommittee, of course, would say to itself, what is our relevance? Why are we here? Why does the subcommittee have to meet at another time than this committee? Why does that subcommittee need to meet at all if in fact the committee of the whole, the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, actually gets together and overturns the subcommittee's decision? Why, in fact, would the subcommittee on private members' business of this committee even meet?

[An hon. member]

Exactly. Why? Good question.

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

That is absolutely correct.

[An hon. member]

That raises an interesting point.

[An hon. member]

You should repeat it, because it's not on the record.

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Right. It raises another point that I'll get to in a little while, when we get to it, because I have another point of Mr. Owen's I also have to talk about to see whether he and I are substantially the same.

I think the relevance of this is clear; the relevance is extremely clear. I mean, I'm not sure we could be more relevant, because we're in fact talking about a subcommittee of this committee. How could we not be relevant if in fact the subcommittee is talking about the committee and the committee's talking about the subcommittee?

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

What is the definition of relevance?

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Order.

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Relevance?! Oh, I'm sorry, but we're looking it up. We'll have that answer for you shortly, but it certainly isn't relevant to what I'm speaking about.

Truly, the answer here is in fact just that. As a subcommittee of this committee, we have done what I think, immodestly said, is some very good work, such as on the non-votability of legislation. At the same time, while refreshing the order of precedence, we ruled two pieces of legislation non-votable. Because we submitted them back to this committee as two separate pieces, one's being looked at, the other isn't. We also sent back at the same time the subcommittee's report on the new criterion and on the remedies. So it was a basketful of work the subcommittee did. Yet, here we all are, challenging the subcommittee's work and saying it was not right and not correctly done.

In fact, this is what is relevant about the point I'm making: it truly is the duty of the committee to look at the work the subcommittee did. It's not about the minutiae of the bill; it has nothing to do with what's in the bill, but has to do with whether the bill is substantially similar to another piece of legislation brought forward earlier in this House. It's plain and simple: it's simply about the similarity of the two bills.

If you try to take this too deep, if you try to get into thinking, oh, yes, but it was changed by this—the word “essential” was added here, and this t was crossed this way—you're getting deeper than a lake trout and you're not into where the criteria really come to pass.

What should really come to pass is whether it is votable or non-votable, based on the criteria set out by the orders the subcommittee needs to work with. Is it votable?

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

A point of order, please, Mr. Preston.

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

I'm sorry. I thought I'd lost my audience for a moment. As an actor, I feel bad when that happens. I recognize Madam Redman is hanging on my every word, and she was interrupted, so I just thought I'd give her the chance not to miss anything.

But back to the relevant—We are not talking about substantially what's in the bills. We're talking about if they are substantially similar. If they are found to be substantially similar, then you must rule it non-votable. That's the rule. It's not about whether, in my party or in your party, this is the type of bill we'd like to see move forward. That's not what this is about, because as I've already explained, with Mr. Benoit or even Mr. Dion's bill or even Ms. Bell's bill, we're totally non-partisan as to what's not votable. We seem to have done it all. So this is about this committee defending its subcommittee and letting it go forward and doing its work.

The subcommittee has done its work well. We think it's moved forward on the changes to the criteria. We think we've moved forward on the changes to the remedies to what happens should somebody's bill be moved non-votable, and of course we believe we've done the work well on moving forward the legislation as being non-votable. That was one of our true missions. That's what we're really discussing here today: Is Bill C-415 votable or non-votable, versus the criteria we've already set?

Mr. Silva came before us the other day and talked about some of the other additions to the bill. But as I said, we've already covered the fact that “substantial” and “substantially” is what we're trying to deal with here. Is the bill substantially the same? If you really compare them—clause-by-clause, word-by-word, word search versus word search—you find them to be, with a few changes, with the word “essential” added a couple of times, but the purpose in the end seems to be fairly identical, I dare say substantially similar. I dare say it because “substantially similar” is the only criterion we need to meet. If we would like to, in fact—and that brings me to the point in the work of the subcommittee—the subcommittee was charged by the Speaker to look at the criteria used for private members' business. We did, and we've added a small piece to this one criterion so in the future we could come to non-votability at an earlier stage.

But I challenge this committee, if you would like us to look at the word “substantially”. If that's not the criterion you'd like us to use for finding similarity between two pieces of legislation, then please bring forward—this is procedure and House affairs—that you'd like us to look at the criterion we're using. We have looked at it already. With the help of the great researchers and the clerks, we'd be happy to look at the criteria again. If you're judging your subcommittee on doing its work improperly, perhaps you're misinterpreting the word “substantially” and perhaps you're misinterpreting some other words in there. Or perhaps we are. Perhaps you'd like us to change the word to be “—if two exact bills come forward—”. If that's indeed what you're looking for, then that's easy. It would have to match word for word and we'd be able to set that and set the criteria that would be very easy for us to judge. We could almost do it on paper without even having to meet.

But it has a subjective meaning to it in the fact that it says “substantially the same” or “substantially similar”. So here we are trying to deal with substantially similar pieces of legislation. Your subcommittee has ruled they are substantially similar and has written a report to this committee that says that. We'll be looking forward to this committee's backing up the subcommittee to that effect and saying we agree with the work the subcommittee has done.

As I stated earlier, we also brought back a full report, not only on the non-votability of this bill, but on the changes to those criteria. I think I've covered that enough. But the other piece we also covered in there was the remedy. I referred before to how hard it was in previous years for private members' business to come forward.

So we really do look forward to the fact that now, even if we find a piece of legislation non-votable, even if that truly does happen, we have a remedy for those people to move forward and put forward other pieces of private members' business. So they can, in fact, represent the people in their ridings and the people of Canada well by still putting forward legislation. Your subcommittee has also done that work. There are some true changes built in there, because it could be treated differently.

I'll start down the road of summarizing where I've been. I think we'll talk about the different rulings we've made here. We've talked a lot about the overall subcommittee report on private members' business and what was votable and what was non-votable. And we've moved that forward to give Mr. Silva the chance to come forward. And Mr. Silva did come forward the other day and told us his views on why he thought the subcommittee had perhaps gone too far in thinking of what was votable and what was non-votable.

The other piece he discussed with us was a ruling from the chair. I think I covered a bit of that earlier, but I'll look at this. These are really two different events in the course of this same private member's bill. The Speaker made a ruling from the chair at a point the day before or the day after the Subcommittee on Private Members' Business had met. He was being asked at the time to rule it in order or out of order, and he was in the middle of his ruling when the member for Scarborough—Rouge River, I believe, stood and asked the Speaker that day if he knew that the subcommittee was meeting and that their decision was pending. And the Speaker said thank you very much for the information and carried on.

So we recognized at that point that we were really dealing with two different rulings, if you will. There was the ruling on non-votability by the subcommittee, and that's what we're discussing here today, and then, as Mr. Silva brought up, there was the ruling by the Speaker.

I brought it up earlier, and I certainly have a copy of the Speaker's ruling here. As I said, other than when he may have been interrupted and asked by the member for Scarborough—Rouge River about the non-votability of it, the word “non-votability” is not in here. So he ruled the bill in order, and as I stated earlier, I certainly interpret that to mean that it's in order.

Mr. Silva's bill could easily go forward and be discussed, as could Mr. Benoit's bill. Mr. Benoit chose to do that when his was deemed non-votable. He chose, in fact, to move forward, because his bill was still in order as a private member's bill; it had just been deemed non-votable. So he was able to bring the bill forward and then have it discussed at each reading in the House. At the end of the day, it certainly wasn't voted on, because it was non-votable. Mr. Silva has exactly the same ability to do that if he would like.

There are other options, as I said. There are other remedies he could seek such as putting forward a different piece of legislation or another one of his own that he already has on the order paper or something else that could come forward.

Mr. Chair, I think we are sometimes, in this House, drawn along party lines. There are certainly times during votes in the House when we can expect to see which party will stand for which issues and which parties will stand for other issues. I know that in the party I serve and am proud to serve, we have the ability to vote differently when it's private members' business. We have the ability to stand on our own conscience on private members' business. We have the ability to vote our conscience.

It may seem from time to time that our conscience is always right, that that's true, but we do have that ability. I recognize that there are other parties in this House that do the same thing. Mr. Godin I'm sure would say it about his. I'm sure that all parties would say that when it comes to private members' business, we get a little bit different on how we vote. This is a piece of government legislation, and of course it may challenge us to the end.

Sometimes you read into it because you know the person whose piece of private members' business it is, you've had personal time with them at some point or you've been on committee with them, and you know them from other places, so you know them to be good and honourable people, so you choose to vote with them or against them, not only based on the piece of legislation that comes forward, because a lot of times it may or may not affect your individual riding directly, so you sometimes will make the decision based on even who the person is who's bringing forward the legislation.

That does happen in private members' business. I'm sure I've seen it on your side of the House or on other sides of the House, and it's the same as ours. When it's one of our colleagues whose private member's business is up for vote that night, they're extra friendly, they're coming around and making sure you're going to be there, they're coming around to see how you'll vote, and sometimes I think that truly happens in all parties.

Truly, I've met some of my colleagues from all of the other parties when it was there, for their bill to be voted on, and that surprisingly I'm running into them, even just outside my lobby to try to give that little extra twist at the end to say yes, I need your help tonight, and I hope you'll give it. As I said, sometimes you know the person well, and other times you know them only from passing, but it's a wonderful sight to see when a standing vote takes place. As you see, we often try to apply so many votes in this House because we like to get on to other things sometimes, but in private members' business we often don't; we give the member the courtesy of watching the members stand for a standing vote. Even when we sometimes know what the outcome will be, whether the outcome will be a sheer pass or even unanimous, as we've seen in some of the votes that we've done even this year in this House.

We see the numbers wanting that standing vote to take place because it's a special time for them, they've taken a lot of work and effort not just to put the bill forward. That may sometimes be the easy part, but the work and effort of seeing it through different readings in the House, and seeing it through the committee work that sometimes has to happen on a piece of private members' business, there's something very special about having a piece of private members' business move forward. I'm very pleased to say that I find that part of the job a very enjoyable piece, and I don't take the job lightly of looking at private members' business to ensure that we're bringing forward true and good pieces of legislation.

Pardon me for just a second.

Truly, the answer isn't about your colleagues putting forward pieces of legislation and whether they're good people. As I said, Mr. Silva and I know each other reasonably well, but that wasn't about whose name was on the bottom of the bill; it was about the criteria we used in order to look at the bill and compare it to others and compare it to the fact, and compare it to what will move forward. I guess that's the answer.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

If you don't mind stepping away from the table, everybody else is having discussions. I have zero problem with that.

Please continue, Mr. Preston.

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Sorry, I thought you were asking me to step away from the table, Chair. At this moment, though, I think I'll finish where I am.

[Yvon Godin, NDP, Acadie—Bathurst, NB]

I thought you were starting to finish where you were at.

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Yes. The true answer here is this House can be a very collegial place, and as I was mentioning during the votes on private members' business, there are times when it's at completely cross-partisan purposes. We all know the person whose bill it is, and we all would like to see it happen. As I said, in a lot of cases, it's a piece of legislation they've worked very hard at, whether it's back in their own riding or here too, but certainly going door to door in some of the offices and trying to get those votes.

I guess the true answer here is that we get to the point where we have to lose some of how hard we work at each other, how hard it is or how overheated we get from time to time in that House, and look at these things as true gifts given to us by the job. The gift is we're able to bring forward a piece of legislation that can in fact impact something you're very interested in, or something that would do a great deal of good for your riding or a great deal of good for the country, that your colleagues can certainly help you do it, and how you've behaved and what you've done in the past certainly may help them make their decision.

Mr. Chair, I think I'm getting near the end, and I think I'd like to summarize a bit, but I'd like to ask you—

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Excuse me, but you've already said you would summarize. If you could—

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

I believe in each case I said I was near summarizing or starting my summary.