Mr. Speaker, thank you very much not only for the opportunity to speak but for the agreement to extend the hours if by chance I should be on my feet longer than 20 minutes.
I begin by congratulating the Speaker and the candidates for speakership. Indeed I congratulate all members who were elected and, as the leader of the New Democratic Party just did, all who had the courage to stand for office in the election of November 27, 2000. I also extend my congratulations to the mover and the seconder of the Address in Reply to the Speech From the Throne.
You will understand, Mr. Speaker, if I extend a particular thanks to the voters of the constituency of Calgary Centre. It is a diverse, dynamic and positive community. It is a community that is committed to the country and is able to play a leading role in shaping the future of Canada. I look forward to working with the constituents of Calgary Centre to ensure that the voice of western Canada is heard in very positive and constructive ways on the floor of the House in shaping national decisions.
The throne speech offers no vision for the future of the country. That is not surprising because through the election campaign the Liberals offered no vision of the future of the country. They drifted through the campaign as they have drifted through the last seven years. They were elected by default.
I say to my colleagues on this side of the House that was as much our fault as it was theirs, but it is important to underline that the government has no positive mandate from the people of Canada. It was elected by accident, elected by default. We on this side of the House will ensure that we hold it to account on the actions that it undertakes.
I believe the greatest danger is that the throne speech is utterly silent on the economic challenges facing the working people of Canada. As industries lay off employees across our country and other nations change their policies to fight an economic slowdown, the government's only initiative is to delay until the fall a budget that should have been brought down in February.
The major initiatives in the throne speech on children and aboriginals are an indication of the guilt this government feels for ignoring these issues for seven years.
There are several issues that need to be addressed in the House. I want to break with tradition in the throne speech debate and focus my remarks exclusively on how we can reform the House of Commons and restore accountability to democracy in Canada.
I believe there is a general willingness in the House, in all five parties, to break a tradition that gives governments too much power and the elected representatives of the people far too little power. The leader of the New Democratic Party has just spoken of that.
Recently the Liberal members for St. Paul's and Winnipeg South wrote an article on this issue. They underlined some of the alarming developments in our country, one being the low voter turnout, which dropped more than 5% in the November 27 election.
The article focused on parliamentary reform, such as broadening the role of individual members, whether by more free votes, more resources to the parliamentary library or more influence on committees. That is an important issue on which I believe a lot of progress can be made if we work together in the Chamber.
The House leader of the Canadian Alliance has put forward some very interesting proposals in that vein. My party and I could support many of those proposals. Indeed, many of them we put forward ourselves in one way or another.
Speaking entirely on a personal basis, I would like to look at changes that give private members from all parties an initiating role in drafting public legislation. I support this and will work actively with my colleagues to achieve more power for individual members of parliament. I call that reform by empowerment. However, the change that would be even more important would be reform by accountability.
I have had the privilege of serving in eight parliaments, in government and in opposition. When it comes to parliamentary reform, I believe there is an even more important and urgent goal. That goal is to restore to the House of Commons the means to effectively control the spending authority of the government, through unrestricted examination and control of estimates.
That is a power the House of Commons used to have and gave away, for reasons that no doubt seemed compelling at the time.
That control of the estimates cannot be brought back in the forms that worked in the past, but the principle can, and should, be restored. The power to deny the government the authority to spend is the best means to hold that government accountable to parliament.
I will come back to some specific proposals that would have that effect, but I want to discuss briefly another way to hold the government accountable; that is, to ensure that the watchdogs established to monitor government behaviour report directly to parliament, not to the cabinet.
The place to start is with the 1993 Liberal Party red book promise to have the ethics counsellor report directly to the House of Commons. That promise should be kept. It should be retroactive to 1993 so that we can examine decisions taken since that time. The terms of reference should be expanded to include representations to crown corporations and other activities where suspicious contacts may occur.
We need to consider what other instruments are required to ensure that government is as transparent as possible, because a conditioned precedent to holding a government to account is to know what it is doing. That means there must be more respect for the work, the reports and the mandate of the privacy commissioner and the information commissioner.
We should also look at innovations in other jurisdictions. Thanks in part to the new member for Vancouver Quadra, British Columbia has a very interesting procedure that we should look at.
It is a procedure that establishes a special prosecutor for cases specifically involving the investigation and prosecution of crimes involving persons of particular influence, including cabinet ministers, senior public officials and police officers or persons in close relationship to them.
There would be other examples in other jurisdictions. We need instruments to hold any government, whatever its partisan stripe, to account. We need to look at ways in which that could be done.
I will come back to accountability. The real dilemma in societies that are both modern and democratic is to combine efficiency in government with real accountability. In the past 30 years most societies have made a choice. We have chosen efficiency over accountability.
We did that in Canada in the 1960s and the 1970s. We changed that for what seemed at the time to be very good reasons. The old system of committee of the whole House and supply made it difficult for governments to plan. It made it difficult for governments to respond to urgent questions. There is no doubt that it was inefficient. We made a change in the name of efficiency.
No one in the House would question that we need governments that are both willing and able to act. That requirement is more dominant now than ever before in the complex and fast changing world of today.
This is a time when the unthinkable happens regularly. Human life can now be cloned. Terrorists with package bombs are mobile and lethal. Traditional farm or industrial emissions can aggregate to poison water, air or streams. Governments have to be able to act.
In a democracy, if democracy means anything at all, governments must also be held to account. We have lost the capacity to hold governments to account in the House of Commons. We are letting the country down. We have an obligation in this House to make changes in the next few years to restore that power to parliament.
Traditionally, the primary role of the House of Commons has been the granting or withholding of supply to the government of the day.
It is more than 30 years now since the House of Commons, in an attempt to improve consideration of supply, changed the rules and began to send the annual spending estimates of government not to a committee of the whole where parliament and the world could see, but to committee with time limits. That experiment has been a complete failure on every count. Year after year effective parliamentary authority over government spending has been allowed to lapse.
I took a look at some of the larger departmental estimates that were considered in committee last year. The Standing Committee on Defence and Veterans Affairs spent a grand total of one hour and 30 minutes on the estimates of the Department of National Defence and one hour and 35 minutes, a little bit longer, on the estimates of veterans affairs. The total time on the estimates of the Department of Finance last year was one hour and 20 minutes. The total time on the Department of Health was less than 90 minutes.
That is a system that does not work. In a parliament that is founded on the idea that we control the government, that is an indication of abject and complete failure. We have an obligation to try to make that change.
Why has the system failed? It has failed because in that old system, when we met in committee of the whole here on the floor of this House—and the Prime Minister and some of the rest of us are old enough to remember that—there was a tension and there was a profile to the examination and the analysis of government estimates.
In committees now there is no profile and no tension, and so there is no attention to holding a government to account. The time limits that exist now and the cycle of questions make it virtually impossible for any member of parliament, in government or in opposition, to sustain questioning over a period of time.
Under the old system, a member of parliament could literally continue asking questions as long as he or she stood on his or her feet in the House of Commons. Indeed, if someone happened to be speaking at the time the House adjourned, he or she would continue speaking in the morning.
Was that subject to abuse? Of course it was. However, it also ensured that the government was held to account. It ensured there was no way simply by resorting to a schedule that a government could get away from that kind of scrutiny.
What happened then? Ministers paid attention to the House of Commons. They also paid attention to their own departments. Ministers now are sort of chairmen of the board of their department. They do not get involved with the difficult details of running a government.
The Minister of Human Resources last year got into terrible difficulty because she did not know her department. Had she been forced to come to committee of the whole and defend the estimates, as ministers before her have been forced to do, she would have known and we would have known. There would have been an opportunity for us to avoid some of the problems and some of the terrible waste that occurred because our system has gone wrong.
Not only would that be good for accountability, it would be good in terms of fiscal responsibility. It would save money. It would mean there would be much less waste. It would also change the relationship between elected members and public servants whom the Prime Minister positively and correctly applauded and encouraged today.
Public servants in that old system knew they had to be ready for tough scrutiny. They had no option but to respect a parliament that could hold up virtually forever their spending plans. That has now gone in this committee system. Nobody takes seriously the fundamental responsibility of the House of Commons to control the spending of the government of the day. That is something we simply have to change.
What do we do about it? One option I believe would be to restore a committee of the whole House for the consideration of a limited number of departments, but for an unlimited period of time. It could take two departments each year and give it to the official opposition decide which two. We could establish a rule that the choice would not be made until the day before the debate began so everybody would have to prepare for coming into the place and asking questions without any kind of fetter. That is one way in which we could restore the capacity of the House of Commons to control the government.
Another option is to take estimates away from the standing committee and put them into a new kind of chamber, a debating chamber, a committee of the whole House acting as a committee of supply that could meet simultaneously with the House as a whole. It would meet in parallel with the House. It should be televised so the questions which are asked and answers that are given are seen by the public at large.
Ministers would answer to the committee in a freewheeling process of question and answer without the artificial time restraints that are now in place. Ministers would have to know about their departments because they would not be able to have officials answer for them.
Those are some options. There may well be others in the imagination of the House and by examples that are available to us in other jurisdictions.
We all recognize that the system as it exists now does not work. We have just come back. We can spend our time trying to breathe life into a system that does not work. We can pretend it is parliamentary reform if we have the opportunity to move more motions or take a more independent role. This is not about the independence or the participation of individual members, important as that is. This is about making any government accountable to parliament. That is why parliament was established. We have let that power be lost and we must regain it.
I consider that issue important enough that instead of dealing with other issues, which I will pursue and my colleagues will pursue in the days to come, I want to focus attention now on our most fundamental responsibility, which is to make this institution viable by changing it. We must ensure that we restore and respect the fundamental purpose for which we were all elected, which was not only to represent our constituents but to ensure that the people of this democracy of Canada would have some means on a day to day, year to year basis to control the government that affects so much of their lives.
