Mr. Speaker, first I would like to sincerely commend the government House leader and other MPs responsible for these proposed amendments to the standing orders. I would also like to thank the member for Scarborough-Rouge River for reminding us that parliamentary reform ultimately depends on the initiative of individual members rather than on the initiative the government.
The amendments proposed in the motion from our standpoint reflect a significant step forward toward improving the ability of the House to conduct its business. It is our sincere hope that this is just the first step of many in that direction.
The proposed amendments that we find most attractive and most deserving of support are the following: first, the proposal to allow public bills to be sent to committees before second reading rather than after; second, the proposal to allow committees to draft and introduce bills; third, the proposal to allow the Standing Committee on Finance to consider and make reports on proposals regarding the budgetary policy of the government.
The general thrust of all these amendments is to give members of Parliament a greater say in the development of public laws and budgetary policy. This in our judgment is just an excellent first step in the right direction.
If hon. members agree with the spirit and the general direction of these amendments, it is a sincere hope of Reform MPs that the House will also be willing to consider additional steps in the same direction, steps that will take us toward a truly democratic and accountable Parliament for the 21st century.
Three of the most important of these additional steps are the institution of freer votes in the Chamber, the acceptance of direction by this House through referendums and citizens' initiatives and the acceptance and institution of a recall procedure.
Reform members are pleased to see that the concluding paragraph of the motion directs the standing committee to examine procedures which would facilitate the institution of these measures. Because these measures are frequently misunderstood in some quarters and maligned in others, I would like to add to the comments of the member for Lethbridge earlier in the day and just comment briefly on the importance of each.
Let me start with the institution of free votes. If one is a so-called backbencher in the House, in other words if one is not a member of the cabinet, then there is no single reform that I would commend to such members for increasing our influence in this place and our ability to represent our constituents than the institution of freer votes.
The Reform MPs have challenged the Prime Minister and do so again to become the first Prime Minister to truly liberate MPs from excessive party discipline. As I said in my reply to the speech from the throne, this could be accomplished if the Prime Minister were simply to rise in his place and say: "Mr. Speaker, the government will not consider the defeat of a government motion, including a spending measure, to constitute an expression of non-confidence in the government unless it is immediately followed by the passage of a formal non-confidence motion".
If the Prime Minister were to take this simple step, what would be the practical consequences? We would not, as the Prime Minister suggested the other day in response to a question, see the House dissolve into a Parliament of 295 independent members. Under the freer vote convention we proposed we would still have parties. On most issues on which our platforms and commitments were clear and we were elected on the basis of those platforms and commitments we would continue to vote, for the most part, in accordance with those mandates.
However, if from time to time there arose issues on which our constituents clearly wanted us to vote contrary to the party line we should have the freedom in this House to do so without being censured by our colleagues or maligned by the media as dissidents or pressured by party whips or party leaders to vote against our constituents' interests.
If we also relaxed the confidence convention in this House in favour of freer votes on estimates and individual spending measures, we would not be destroying the capacity of the government to carry a budget. We would simply be implementing recommendations by previous committees of this House to which the Auditor General again drew our attention in his latest report.
I want to quote four sections from his report and ask this House to come back to this subject. Paragraph 1.22 states in part:
However, committees are spending less and less time on the estimates. One major reason for this apparent lack of interest lies in the impact of the confidence convention, which, as currently interpreted, makes any motion to change a vote in the estimates a potential test of the House's confidence in the government. Because failure to win a confidence vote leads to the resignation of the government, no changes can be made in the estimates, even though committees have the power-at least in theory-to reduce or reject estimate votes.
Paragraph 1.28 states:
In 1988, the public accounts committee expressed concern about the adequacy of Parliament's scrutiny of the estimates-.The committee recommended to the House that a new "budget committee" be set up to remedy these deficiencies, and that "the government not consider a reduction in the estimates as a matter of non-confidence".
In paragraph 5.114 of the report it is stated:
Opening up the budget process to allow parliamentarians to participate would certainly contribute to a more meaningful dialogue on deficits, debt and the expectations of the public. However there would still remain the stumbling block known in our parliamentary institution as the confidence convention: the notion that the party forming the government must be able to demonstrate that it enjoys the support of a majority of the members of the House of Commons on most pieces of financial legislation. The standing committee on House management noted in its April 1993 report on reforming the House that to change this confidence convention does not require amendments to the standing orders of the House of Commons. Rather it requires a better understanding of the rights and responsibilities of individual members and a recognition that "Canadians want to feel that their members of Parliament have opportunities to vote freely and they expect them to do it more often".
Finally paragraph 1.31 states:
A recommendation in April 1993 by the standing committee on House management dealt with the convention of confidence. It stated that "with few exceptions, motions proposed by the government should be considered as motions of confidence only when clearly identified as such by the government". The committee felt that this, together with deleting some references to confidence in the rules of procedure, could help in opening up the budget process.
If we relaxed the confidence convention in this House in favour of freer votes, a few government measures including spending measures would be defeated. Under the freer vote convention we proposed that would not automatically mean defeat of the government. If a government measure were defeated because a number of government members voted against it, that defeated motion would immediately be followed by a formal confidence motion. In that vote government members would most likely support the government.
However by adopting the free vote convention we proposed, government backbenchers would have acquired for themselves and for this House the right to kill a bill or a portion of a bill without killing the government.
If the House were to support having the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs examine and report on this institution of freer votes, it has also been suggested that the committee should examine how freer votes, freer than the ones we have in this Parliament, came about in the British Parliament, the mother of Parliaments.
I stand to be corrected by members who may have more intimate knowledge of the evolution of this practice in the British House, but my understanding is that the current free vote convention in that Parliament, while not as extensive as the one Reformers propose for here, came about not at the initiative of the cabinet and not at the initiative of the Prime Minister but at the initiative of the backbenchers.
It is my understanding that some backbenchers in the Thatcher government simply decided one day that they would vote against a government motion and they told the cabinet so. They also told the cabinet: "We do not want to defeat the government. We just want to defeat this bill. If when the bill is defeated it is immediately followed by a confidence motion, we will support the government". As one British commentator put it: "After 300 years the backbenchers in the British Parliament finally figured out the importance of one simple mathematical fact: that there were more of them".
In a democratic chamber in which decisions are ultimately made by counting heads that fact ought to count for something. We say let not the rank and file members of this House take 300 years to figure out that there are more of us here than there are members of the executive and aspirants to cabinet positions. Let us make that fact count for something in the 35th Parliament.
I do not want to sound radical like William Lyon Mackenzie, but I say: Backbenchers of the House unite, unite behind the principle of freer votes. You have nothing to lose but the shackles of excessive party discipline.
Time does not permit me to elaborate on the contributions which greater use of referendums and citizens' initiatives could make to enhancing the credibility of Parliament and providing this House with a clearer sense of direction on critical issues at critical times. Suffice it to say that the country needs a full blown referendum law that permits regular consultation of the public by national referendum, the results of which would be binding on the government of the day.
Reformers propose that at each federal election Canadians get two ballots, not just one. On one ballot voters would mark their choice for a member of Parliament; on the other, a national referendum ballot, electors would vote on four or five major issues.
Because Canadians do not trust governments always to frame referendum questions fairly or to permit referendums on issues of greatest concern to the public, citizens should have the right to force a question or to initiate a question on to a referendum ballot if 3 per cent or more of the total electorate were prepared to sign a citizens' initiative petition.
One major reason we support the motion before the House is that its concluding paragraph directs the standing committee to examine ways and means to incorporate the results of referendums and citizens' initiatives into the legislative acts and decisions of the House. Anything which enhances the capacity of the House to respond to public direction will increase the credibility of Parliament and the trust of Canadians in this institution.
Finally I want to touch on the institution of recall. The third step the House needs to take toward a more truly democratic and accountable Parliament for the 21st century is the initiative in proposing a mechanism for the recall of its own members if members completely lose the confidence of those who have sent them here.
Chapter II of the standing orders, in particular Standing Orders 20, 21 and 23, provides for the House to exercise at least some discipline over its members with respect to their conduct, their election, their right to hold a seat and unacceptable behaviour, such as the acceptance of bribes. The spirit of Chapter II would be given some substance if Parliament were to pass a law enabling the electors themselves to discipline their members for unacceptable behaviour or consistent failure to represent constituents' interests.
There have been primitive experiments with recall mechanisms in this country in the past, mostly at the provincial level by at least three different political parties: the old Progressive Party, the Social Credit Party and the CCF, which was of course the predecessor to the NDP. While none of these primitive experiments was successful they provide valuable lessons from which modern parliamentarians could learn in designing an effective recall mechanism.
For example, the recall provisions used by the old Progressive Party and by the CCF were for the most part incorporated into party constitutions and procedures, not into public laws. They were in essence private contracts between a member and a small number of voters, usually the party executive or membership in the member's riding. These recall mechanisms were subject to abuse mainly by ambitious members of the MP's own party and brought the mechanism into disrepute.
The recall mechanism utilized in Alberta in 1936 to which the Prime Minister directed the attention of the House the other day was incorporated into a public law, but it too had its defects. In this case the law was too easily opened to abuse by opposition parties and interest groups. For example it contained no provision prohibiting the purchase of signatures for a recall petition.
Its first use was marred by this abuse when a group of lawyers in Calgary whose politics will remain nameless reportedly offered the good citizens of High River up to $5 a signature to sign a recall petition against the premier.
Incidentally, and I do not think the Prime Minister mentioned this the other day, it may be of interest to members to know that when the Alberta recall bill was repealed by the Alberta legislature it was done by a free vote. The premier at the time, William Aberhart, voted against the repeal as did my father who was a cabinet minister at the time. The repeal was carried by a majority of the backbenchers who considered the bill to be defective.
Any modern recall mechanism to be considered by the standing committee should have three major safeguards based on what can be learned from the lessons of the past.
It should have a high threshold level. In other words a large number of electors would have to sign a recall petition in order to recall a member of Parliament and force a by-election. We have suggested that the threshold level be 50 per cent plus one of the number of electors who voted in the previous general election. In the constituency of Markham-Whitchurch-Stouffville for example, this would mean that almost 37,000 electors would have to sign the recall petition in order to trigger the recall of the member of Parliament who has lost their confidence.
In addition we would propose that except in exceptional circumstances such as where it can be demonstrated that a member of Parliament made fraudulent representations to electors during the general election campaign, recall not be available to electors until 18 months after a general election and that it be available for use only once in a riding during the term of a parliament. This together with the high threshold level would largely prevent the politically motivated harassment of MPs by their political opponents or by well heeled interest groups through abuse of the recall mechanism.
While some members of Parliament may ridicule the concept of recall I would encourage the more objective among us to do one thing. Members should do an informal or formal survey in their own ridings to find out what their constituents think about these direct democracy measures, the use of referendums and citizens' initiatives, freer votes, and the right of recall. I believe hon. members will find there is a great deal of public support for these measures and whether we like it or not the most popular of these three instruments is the right of recall.
I close by again commending the government House leader and others for bringing forward the proposed changes to the standing orders we are discussing today. My only request is that we persevere and go three steps further toward making this Parliament an even more democratic and accountable institution for the 21st century.
Reform members look forward with anticipation to the report of the standing committee called for by the final paragraph of the motion, in particular its recommendations on procedures for achieving freer votes, the institution of recall, and the incorporation of the results of referendums and citizens' initiatives into legislative acts.
