Bill C-14 (Historical)

An Act to amend the Criminal Code and to make related amendments to other Acts (medical assistance in dying)

This enactment amends the Criminal Code to, among other things,
(a) create exemptions from the offences of culpable homicide, of aiding suicide and of administering a noxious thing, in order to permit medical practitioners and nurse practitioners to provide medical assistance in dying and to permit pharmacists and other persons to assist in the process;
(b) specify the eligibility criteria and the safeguards that must be respected before medical assistance in dying may be provided to a person;
(c) require that medical practitioners and nurse practitioners who receive requests for, and pharmacists who dispense substances in connection with the provision of, medical assist­ance in dying provide information for the purpose of permitting the monitoring of medical assistance in dying, and authorize the Minister of Health to make regulations respecting that information; and
(d) create new offences for failing to comply with the safeguards, for forging or destroying documents related to medical assistance in dying, for failing to provide the required information and for contravening the regulations.
This enactment also makes related amendments to other Acts to ensure that recourse to medical assistance in dying does not result in the loss of a pension under the Pension Act or benefits under the Canadian Forces Members and Veterans Re-establishment and Compensation Act. It amends the Corrections and Conditional Release Act to ensure that no investigation need be conducted under section 19 of that Act in the case of an inmate who receives medical assistance in dying.
This enactment provides for one or more independent reviews relating to requests by mature minors for medical assistance in dying, to advance requests and to requests where mental illness is the sole underlying medical condition.
Lastly, this enactment provides for a parliamentary review of its provisions and of the state of palliative care in Canada to commence at the start of the fifth year following the day on which it receives royal assent.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

Thank you, Minister, for coming to the committee.

I was recently watching a panel discussion in which you and the Minister of Health were discussing the proposed marijuana legislation. I forget who the host was. Of particular interest to me was a comment you made, that you had not ever been a cannabis user, nor did you expect to be after this legislation was passed.

I have two questions for you.

First, why is it not a good thing for you, but it's okay for others—even for the youth of our society—to have access to cannabis as a recreational drug? I commend you for your personal position.

Second, I'm looking at the legislation your government has presented so far in the last year and a half, which you say you're very proud of. Bill C-14, the medical assistance in dying legislation, now allows Canadians to legally have their lives terminated with the assistance of a physician. Bill C-16 addresses what I think is an imaginary gap in both our Canadian Human Rights Act and our Criminal Code. Bill C-32 repeals section 159 of the Criminal Code, which addresses anal sex. Bill C-37, which repeals the Respect for Communities Act, will now make it easier for safe injection sites to be located in different communities across Canada. The most recent one, Bill C-45, is of course on the legalization of marijuana.

My question on all those issues is, I think, quite simple. These pieces of legislation seem to have a particular theme to them. I'm wondering what it is that motivates your government to, in my opinion, be so bent on and recklessly determined to destroy our social and moral fabric?

Framework on Palliative Care in Canada Act

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, when it comes to the assisted dying legislation, the important thing to note is that the committee that studied the Carter decision said that without good palliative care, we do not have a real choice. For many Canadians who are in places where they have nothing, they are suffering horribly in pain, and they really do not have a choice.

We want people to have a choice. We have heard many examples and testimonies. I have heard stories that would make us cry, of people who went into palliative care and were able, in a pain-free way, to enjoy their last moments with their families, living much longer than many had anticipated and much better than many had anticipated.

Although Bill C-14 was more to address the Criminal Code with respect to assisted dying legislation, I think this bill brings the framework for palliative care and starts to build on the various aspects of that.

I appreciate the minister working with the provinces, because that will be key. We know that the provinces implement the work and the government funds the work, so there is an opportunity to partner with them to get a really great result for Canadians.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Right. Exactly.

There are times when we will not be able to agree. I think the government should have the right occasionally, not always.... My worry with this document is that it will become an “always”.

With regard to programming, as it is explained here, I'll get to the reason it's a bad idea. The examples used do not translate well to our House of Commons. I'm worried that it will become a permanent feature of this House and a permanent feature at the committee level. We already see it during committee of the whole: we don't actually debate directly the amendments; everything is on division, as much of the work the committee of the whole used to do is now done at the committee level.

Is it an anachronism? You could have an entire study on whether committee of the whole still serves a relevant purpose, but it should not be done within the context of this, rushed by June 2.

As Mr. Christopherson said when he was here—and I see that Mr. Donnelly has joined us—I simply don't see what the rush is to do it by June 2, with such a massive change to the way the House, Parliament, gets through its business.

To get back to the point, it's not the government's business, it's Parliament's business. They come to us for approval and we grant our approval when we so wish. The government represents the crown, after all. They're acting on behalf of the crown. We shouldn't be automatically accepting of everything they propose, even those members of the government caucus.

I had discussions with certain members on Bill C-14, and I'm sure they were kind enough to pass on my comments to the justice minister, because I saw some of what I had mentioned in private appear in the bill. I still appreciate very much that it was done.

Those types of opportunities will vanish, because we will have been programmed. Why would we then come to talk to government caucus members in the hopes of having influence over government legislation? The process is predetermined. The fate of the government bill is assured. When it gets to the Senate, who knows? They have a different way of doing things. They are more independent now—autonomous maybe. Our Senate is now turning into something more like the U.S. Senate.

For all those individuals who complain about the gridlock in the American system, just be careful: 10 or 15 years from now, Canada might have exactly the same type of problems, with senators holding up appointments, senators holding up bills, senators filibustering in the Senate for excessive amounts of time or passing huge amounts of legislation in Senate bills and them sending them to us to deal with during private members time. We will simply not have rules in place to deal with the volume, just as has happened in the U.S. system when they don't have a House leader to lead these issues through on behalf of the government because they're all independent thinkers.

I'll mention, because I have a few examples I want to use, how they changed their rules and the regrets many of them have after they change sides. Someday the government caucus will be on this side, as the opposition caucus, not as a government caucus. I don't think you just switch sides like that. But you'll be on our side.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. It's good that you're being recognized. Part of this is about preserving your ability, as a private member, to bring back at some point that excellent bill on FASD. Hopefully, we'll get that passed.

I would like to thank the interpreters. It must make their job especially tough when I speak French.

I was speaking about the balance between the House and the Senate. I don't think any member here would disagree in principle that the democratically elected House should, in a certain sense, be the primary decision-making House. The purpose of the Senate is to provide that review and sober second thought, propose amendments, and send those amendments back to the House for consideration.

If we found ourselves in a situation where a person who was deciding if they would rather be a member of the elected House or a member of the Senate, and they thought, I would prefer the Senate because then I'll have more influence on policy, that would be a very unfortunate situation. It would have the potential to create all kinds of other perverse incentives, where members of the House of Commons would be, through their behaviour in the House of Commons, seeking appointment to the Senate. Yet we find ourselves in such a situation already, because of the desire of the Prime Minister to create a non-partisan Senate, and effectively, through these Standing Orders changes imposed unilaterally, a more partisan House of Commons. So then the role of the member in the House of Commons is weakened and more likely to be subsumed into the role of the party, while the role of the senator is strengthened.

I've described a case example, Bill C-14, in which effectively the same amendment became law because it passed in the Senate, even though it was rejected in the House of Commons. There are other examples. We had a change made in the Senate, I would argue a positive change, but nonetheless a change that happened in the Senate. I believe it was Bill C-4, which was the government's legislation with respect to unions. The amendment in the Senate was designed to protect the right of workers to have a secret ballot. Of course, in the House of Commons the opposition took that position, but it wasn't passed. Yet it passed in the Senate even though Conservatives don't have a majority in the Senate. That was a good amendment that passed in the Senate.

While we're seeing this trend towards a more non-partisan Senate, let's make sure we are strengthening and not weakening the roles of members of Parliament. Unfortunately we see, through all of the changes proposed to the Standing Orders, an effort to relatively weaken the role of members of Parliament and to strengthen the role of the government.

If we proceed under a framework established by the amendment, or under a different model, because, as our House leader has discussed, there's a range of different ways in which we could have this discussion that ensure there is a consensus of parties.... It could happen at this committee, in the form of the motion with the amendment. It could happen in a different forum set up specifically for that purpose. It is important that we ensure the protection of the role of private members. There are all kinds of ideas that are not at all touched on in this discussion paper, which I think, actually—

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

If she believed in answering questions, that's something she could implement herself unilaterally, and we wouldn't mind in that particular case. The issue is that, again, we see this discussion paper focusing on issues that are, in some cases, not even best adjudicated in the context of the Standing Orders. Certainly, however, these are questions that we would expect to be raised by somebody who is focused on the interests of the government in the context of that discussion, in the context of that interaction.

I think this is the reality coming out of our experience with two “Prime Minister's question times” that have unfolded before our eyes. Actually, the fact that this has happened clearly makes the opposition's point—namely, that the Prime Minister can do this without changes to the Standing Orders. According to our conventions, the Standing Orders don't police who does and does not answer questions in general. Clearly, the principal concern of opposition members is the quality of the responses.

If I were asking a question, a substantive policy question, and the Prime Minister was simply going to throw out the kinds of non-answers we got today, I would probably say I'd rather hear from the parliamentary secretary on that issue, assuming the parliamentary secretary knows the file and can answer the question. The Prime Minister should know these files and should be able to answer these questions.

There was a justice issue, and I believe it had to do with Wynn's law, although I could be wrong. There was a justice issue that the Prime Minister was asked about in a town hall. He basically said he didn't know the position himself, but he trusted the justice minister. Well, what's the point of having Prime Minister's question times if the Prime Minister is going to say that? He hasn't said it in the House, but he said it in a town hall. He said he didn't really know why he took that position, but he trusted his minister in the matter. It's all well and good for the Prime Minister to trust his ministers, but he should be able to give a reasonable public account of the positions that his government has taken on issues, especially if they're positions that have, presumably, gone through some kind of a cabinet discussion process. Yet this was a very important issue that was sloughed off on the basis of his trust in his minister

We have to be legitimately concerned about the quality of responses. My perception so far, not that I was overly enamoured by the quality of responses we were receiving initially, is that the quality of responses we received in these Prime Minister's question times were actually much lower. It's much more narrowed to a small set of talking points. We have the flagrant refusal to answer questions, for example, in the case of the ethics issues raised.

I'm not naive enough to think that these are problems we could solve through the Standing Orders. We cannot fully prescribe in the Standing Orders the degree of substantiveness we would like to see from ministers in responses to questions. Ultimately, it's up to the people of Canada to consider and evaluate the quality of the responses given by the government and to take that information into consideration when they decide whom to support in the next election.

If we're talking about changes to the Standing Orders, the kinds of changes, the direction of changes we're talking about, is striking. That brings me back to the point I was making before Mr. MacGregor jumped in, and that is this issue of modernization. What does “modernization” mean? If it means fewer answers, then I'm against it. If it means more power to the government and less power, or no power, for the opposition to hold them accountable, I'm against it. If modernization means the opposition doesn't have the ability to be involved in decisions about changes to the Standing Orders, then I'm against modernization.

I'm for modernization, however, if it means passing this amendment and having a constructive conversation, a conversation based on established ground rules, a conversation among members of Parliament to come to a conclusion we can all get behind, a conclusion that moves the Standing Orders in ways we all agree on. I guess I'm using some of that progressivist language with a view to moving this forward, but I'm doing so in the interest of making improvements to the Standing Orders.

That's the kind of modernization that I'm in favour of, modernization that empowers individual members of Parliament, modernization that gives us a greater ability to bring forward private members' bills and see them debated and voted on. Right now it's a relatively small number of members of Parliament, even in a four-year Parliament, who actually have a chance to bring a private member's bill to a vote. If we're talking about changes that make it possible for more members of Parliament to do that, then that is the kind of modernization that I'm in favour of. But I don't think anybody here on either side of these questions could say, just based on the word, if they are for or against modernization.

As we try to come to constructive conclusions here, we should rightly be suspicious of the kind of wording that's used if it doesn't actually mean anything. We should use words that are clearly defined that mean something in the context of our discourse. That is a pretty fundamental thing for us to ask for when we're hearing proposals from the government House leader.

One other thing that I don't think has been discussed thus far by anyone at this committee is the relationship between Standing Orders' changes in the House of Commons. and the way in which those are done, and the Senate, and the relative power and influence of the House of Commons and the Senate. It is interesting in the present time we're seeing proposals for very dramatic changes to the way the House of Commons works and to the way the Senate works, both in the name of modernization. What's striking to me, though, is how those changes actually move in opposite directions.

I don't know that anybody has dug into this or commented on this, but it was something that was obvious to me right away as a member of Parliament because I was very involved in the debates around Bill C-14, the government's euthanasia legislation. Right from the start, that process involved both the House of Commons and the Senate; and given the government's desire to move this forward quite quickly, the work with the Senate was quite important. A joint committee of the House and the Senate did an initial study on the question of euthanasia and reported back to both Houses in a report. There was a dissenting report. Then following on that there was legislation brought forward.

The process was that legislation was brought forward in the House of Commons. It was debated. Eventually the government invoked time allocation. Then there was a vote on time allocation, a vote on the motion. It went to committee. There was a whole host of amendments proposed at committee. I proposed 13 amendments, three of which passed, the rest of which were rejected. The changes that were accepted were fairly minor and didn't save the bill, not by a long shot from my perspective.

I was able to propose four report stage amendments in the House and they were all defeated. In and of itself, that was relatively rare. The Standing Orders provide for report stage amendments only in very rare cases, but because of the exceptional importance of this issue, the sensitivity of it as well as the differences of opinion within different parties, I made a case to the Speaker. Other members made a case to the Speaker, and he ruled yes, you could have report stage amendments.

There were report stage amendments. There was a vote on those, and I was up all night sending emails to other members, trying to encourage them to vote in favour of my amendments. A few members of the government did vote in favour of my amendments, but at most there were five or six votes on the government side for any of the amendment proposals that I put forward. All of the opposition amendments on the floor of the House were defeated.

The amendments were passed. Bill C-14 was then passed at third reading, and this is the important point of contrast. Then Bill C-14 was sent to the Senate, and there were a substantial number of amendments to Bill C-14 that were passed in the Senate, one of which was very similar to an amendment that I had moved at report stage in the House that was defeated. The amendment dealt with people receiving information about palliative care options as part of the process leading up to their receiving euthanasia.

The bill went through the House of Commons. There were a number of amendments, one of which was very substantial and would have very dramatically liberalized the eligibility criteria. Although I felt the eligibility criteria were quite ambiguous in any event, and it wasn't clear that there was actually that much substantive difference from the liberalization advocated by the Senate and the original version, nonetheless the perception was, and certainly linguistically, there was a significant liberalization of that process. Then this went back to the House. There was a motion in the House to support some of the Senate amendments but not others.

What was striking right at that point was the government did not want to bring in some of those Senate amendments, in particular that dramatic, more liberalizing one, but they agreed to support some of the Senate amendments including, in particular, the one that I had moved. It wasn't the same but it was a similar one to the one I had moved and it had been voted against at report stage. The government understood that they wanted to get this legislation through the Senate and it wouldn't have been that strategic for them to just reject all the Senate amendments. They wanted to reject some, but not all.

This came back to the House. The government proposed this motion to support some of the Senate amendments, not others, and then send the bill back, in a somewhat amended form, to the Senate. That all happened on one day. I think it was a Thursday, right before the session was ending in June. That motion passed.

At the time, if I remember right, all of the government members, perhaps with the exception of a small handful, voted in favour of that government motion to support some of those Senate amendments, even though those same members had voted against one of those amendments when it came from me at report stage. Then the revised version of Bill C-14 went back to the Senate, and there was a proposal to re-amend it. That proposal was defeated, and then the bill was passed as it was, as it had been received from the House. Bill C-14 was passed and it went for royal assent, and it became law. That's what happened.

What is striking about that process is the fact that I, as an elected member of Parliament, had effectively much less leverage in that legislative process than a senator who moved that same amendment. I think it's very clear, given that the government would not accept the amendment when it came from a member in the House but did accept it, ultimately, when it came through the Senate, that government members, generally speaking, within the House vote together. There is an effort, further even from where we were at the time of the Bill C-14 debate—and it's represented in this discussion paper—to strengthen the centralization of the structure in the House of Commons to make it that much easier for the government to push through legislation without having the opportunity for extended interventions at committee. It will allow the government to do programming, and so on and so forth.

You have all these things that the government is doing, which have a centralizing effect in the context of the House of Commons. At the same time, the discussion in the context of the Senate is the opposite. The government doesn't even have a government leader in the Senate. They have a government representative who, to be fair, is for all intents and purposes likely the same thing. I'm not an expert on the Senate, but it's clear that the emphasis with the Senate is on empowering individual senators to act more independently, in a non-partisan manner, and to be able to deviate from what would be the direction of their party. You have all these different groups in the Senate. We still have a Conservative caucus in the Senate, but then you have these Senate Liberals, who are supposedly independent—depends on the day— and then you have the independent Independents group. Then you have people who are independent of the Senate, independent Senate Liberals and the independent Independent caucus.

It's confusing, obviously, but it is the kind of environment in which individual members, in a House of 100 members, can actually exert a lot of leverage. If a member can, on an individual basis, persuade their colleagues to support something, then it can pass in the Senate. Then it puts a lot of pressure on the government to adopt all or some of those changes, as we saw happen with Bill C-14. But if an individual member of the House of Commons puts forward an idea, an amendment to legislation, very likely the way things operate is that members will vote along party lines and that proposal will be shut down.

We should be concerned about the roles of individual members of Parliament, but I think we should be particularly concerned if by these two forces of reform or modernization, which are actually opposite forces—the empowering of individuals within the Senate and the strengthening of efficiency of the centre in the House of Commons—we're actually increasing that disparity in power and influence over the legislative process between members of the Senate and members of the House of Commons.

I think the Senate is important. The Senate has an important job to do. It was striking to me as a new member of Parliament, right away being involved in that Bill C-14 debate and finding that appointed senators—people who were put there by a prime minister, who did not have to win an election and in many cases had never sought election—actually had more influence over what kind of legislation ultimately became law. That was clear in the instances of the amendments we dealt with on Bill C-14. There was a greater influence there from the Senate members than from the House of Commons.

When we look at Standing Orders changes, how we make those changes, and who's involved in making those changes, we have to be particularly sensitive to the kinds of changes that are happening in the Senate if we want to ensure that we have an environment in which the elected House of Commons is the most important House. In principle, we would all accept the idea that the House of Commons—the elected House, and not just the House as a whole over the Senate but individual members of the House—should have more of an influence than individual members of the Senate.

Of course, some members have advocated the abolition of the Senate; others might favour moving to an elected Senate. Those are larger debates that require changes to the Constitution. What we do in the Standing Orders has an impact on the relative influence of the House and the Senate, and we need to be cognizant of that in the discussion here.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Collectively, we know there has to be a government legislative agenda. The opposition's job is always to react to what the government is doing. You set the agenda. You, in a sense, are the executive—not you as individual members—because you are members of the government caucus. It's about ensuring balance, and about understanding which bills are considered controversial, which ones need more debate, which ones could use less debate, and how we can afford additional debate. What are the mechanisms by which both the government and the opposition can let it be known that they choose to have more debate on a particular issue, or want to have that debate? If you introduce the kind of programming that this proposal has in it without sufficient review, without sufficient study, and I believe without sufficient witnesses coming in, then I'm afraid you will not strike that right balance and you will lose as parliamentarians, not as members of the government caucus. It may not be in this Parliament, but in the Parliament after this one, and the one after that.

There are bills that are not controversial. We have seen our ability in the House to quickly pass bills, such as the Marrakesh treaty bill, because we were in agreement. We agreed with the contents and the principles. When we do that, we move it forward. Likewise, debate has collapsed at times on particular pieces of legislation, such as Bill C-6 in the House of Commons, because no member chose to rise and speak to it or debate it further. It simply proceeded to the next stage in the House.

We don't have to be geniuses to realize that a single member can cause a lot of havoc for any government or opposition on any bill. What we do need, though, is a sense of co-operation. We can build that co-operation at the committee level especially. That's why we didn't simply vote against the motion. We proposed a reasonable amendment that would improve the original motion, one that we could move forward with in terms of its contents. I still believe it's reasonable. The contents of our amendment are pretty reasonable.

We saw with Bill C-14 that the government used time allocation several times. On that particular bill, I disagreed with time allocation being used, because it was an issue of conscience for many of us. Our constituents, or many of them, thought it was an issue of conscience. That bill in itself was a response to a Supreme Court decision, so we as parliamentarians were being asked by the government to respond to it. That was their proposal, to implement what they thought would be a means of abiding by the strictures of the Supreme Court decision. We were free, then, to deliberate to the fullest extent possible on behalf of our constituents. I think it was an error to use time allocation in that situation. Again, that was the government's call to make.

There was some debate, and in my opinion not enough debate. At the committee stage, I'll give great credit to Mr. Housefather, the chair of the committee at the time. He made it possible for every member there to have their amendments considered. I know that he gave me consideration for my amendments that I proposed at committee. To his credit, he allowed me that opportunity.

I don't know what the outcome will be of this report, nor should I know. There should be a study of some of these ideas here. Our ideas on the changes to the Standing Orders have been debated before, but I would caution you about changing the way in which committees work too readily, too quickly, and surrendering your rights as parliamentarians to be heard at committee. We moved it from the House of Commons in 1969 into the committees to have freewheeling debates, to move from generalists to specialists on specific issues. If you allow the types of rules that exist in the House of Commons to be moved into committee, you will lose on that. You will lose the ability to differ with your party when you need to, to be independent thinkers in general, because potentially there could be limits on the type of debate you could have. There could be limits on the types of motions you could put forward. They could program the committee so that it works a certain way, so that when every member has spoken, it simply moves on to the next stage. I don't think we win when we do that.

All of us were elected within a political party. There are no true independents in this House. Even Mr. Tootoo was elected as a member of the Liberal Party of Canada, although now he is free to pursue whatever objectives he has as a parliamentarian. That is his right.

I don't think it suits us to so readily and so quickly change the way these committees work without getting unanimous agreement among ourselves.

I see that Mr. Garrison is here for the New Democrats. I know they would agree with me that we fight hard at committee for the other members of our caucuses who may not be able to sit through the committee because of scheduling reasons. We do this on their behalf, not just for our constituents. There are also our fellow caucus members who may have an interest in a particular issue. We need mandates from our caucuses, because when we speak there, we don't speak just for ourselves and our constituencies. We also speak on behalf of our fellow caucus members.

Again, from the Debates, at one point, one of the members said, “Trust me, if a debate collapses on a particular bill, it might be because there is no one who wants to talk about it.” That is very true.

When we are allotted our 10 minutes in the House of Commons, you don't need to use the full 10 minutes. I've seen members use less than that. They rise, make an excellent point, sit down, and then do a Q and A with a member who chooses to pursue a line of questioning or make a commentary. If we policed ourselves more often, we could find opportunities like that to be faster and more efficient, but you won't achieve that by changing the rules just because sometimes people don't police themselves.

Here's what we should do. Let's try to get some substantial rule changes in our Standing Orders without resorting to forcing it past the opposition. We are opposed to making changes without being sufficiently consulted and without being able to say to not do A, B or C, because it will constrain us as an opposition from being able to fulfill our constitutional obligation to loyally oppose.

As I mentioned before—and will now, maybe for the benefit of some of the members who have joined us this afternoon—you are not my adversaries. You are not my enemies. You are fellow parliamentarians. I am not here to win political points at your expense. I am here to debate you and to deliberate with you. You will disagree with me and I will disagree with you. At the end of the day, in terms of your political affiliation, you will likely vote with your caucus. I accept that, but we can have that deliberation between us. Don't take away all the tools I have to make a point on behalf of my constituency, or on my behalf if I have an issue of conscience I need to raise, or on behalf of my caucus members who may not be able to sit around the table.

There are proposals in here to add members of other parties as ex officio members so they could question witnesses. Right now, we have two hours. Typically, most committees meet over a two-hour period. I've actually asked why the meetings are two hours. I don't know if anybody has ever wondered why we have two-hour committee meetings. Why are they scheduled in two-hour blocks? Is there something about three hours or two and a half hours that doesn't work? In the business world, a two-hour meeting would be called a two-hour waste of time, typically. It would have to be pretty substantial business to have a two-hour meeting with multiple presenters. Engineering companies may do it if there's a complicated project with drawings on the table.

What I have been told—maybe this is apocryphal—is that the two-hour scheduling was done before we gained the buildings that were added to the precinct, and the two-hour windows allowed for every single committee to be scheduled during the day. They would schedule them all in a row. There weren't as many committee rooms as there are now, so they scheduled them one after another and the two-hour blocks made it all work.

Do we need two-hour committee meetings all the time? I know that at times the chairs have finished meetings early. Chairs obviously have longer meetings at times. Small changes to the rules like that are worthy of consideration, but we should come to them by unanimous agreement.

Making this place more functional doesn't require us to surrender our ability as parliamentarians to keep the government accountable, which you want to do also. I've been told by many experienced members, veteran members, and even members of the government and previous governments, that sometimes when considering the main estimates, and even during debates on supplementary estimates, they have discovered things in the documents that they didn't even realize were contradictions or errors.

I remember doing estimates at the provincial legislature in Alberta. Sometimes there would be inaccuracies. There would be typos that would have to be explained. Sometimes the civil servants had not removed a certain thing that they had specifically been asked to remove because it was no longer part of the agenda of the government, and it was only realized through considering the main estimates. The committees are the opportunities to review those estimates. If we program the committees to limit how much we can speak, we'll lose that opportunity. We really do very little of it in the House.

There is a provision that the estimates are automatically passed at a certain point, debated or not and considered or not. There, we have already surrendered part of the core job of a parliamentarian, which is to review how the government spends money.

The President of the Treasury Board is proposing changes to when and how the estimates are considered, so I know that it's already being considered by the government in its proposals to Parliament. This is something that parliamentarians have talked about in the past. The main estimates are done on a cash accounting basis. The government does accrual accounting. The fiscal years don't match.

I remember being at the chamber of commerce when we invited the deputy parliamentary budget officer to come to Calgary and explain this problem to us. He made a fantastic presentation to our tax and economic affairs committee and really convinced the people who were there, business people, about the errors and mistakes that could occur and the difficulty in tracking how government spends money.

Earlier, I mentioned the second chamber. I am moving on to page 5571 of the Debates. I won't go through all of them, because I'd like to move on to a few more articles and the debates from 1991, when there was an attempt to force through changes to the Standing Orders without unanimous agreement, and go through how adversarial it became at that time between members of the government and members of the opposition.

There are two last points I'll make on the debates. This concept of a second chamber, like they have in the United Kingdom, I think is unnecessary. What we need to do is fill the chamber with the members we already have. The best debates I have seen have happened when there were more members in the chamber who got engaged because there was an engaging speaker making a point that perhaps someone hadn't made, who was perhaps doing it in a tongue-in-cheek way, or who perhaps grabbed the attention of another group of parliamentarians. Then there is an easygoing back-and-forth, a flow of conversation and debate.

I don't believe that we need a second chamber. I know that it was mentioned by some members in the debate on October 6, and I know that part of this original motion is to consider what members have mentioned.

Here's what I signed up for. No one forced me to run. I wasn't forced into this by my wife—definitely not my wife—and I wasn't forced into this by constituents or by the local Conservative association. We've all signed up for a job that involves gruelling travel. We have all heard people talk of working 15-hour days and working on weekends. For some of us, it's a very long trip back home. We all campaigned for 78 days in the last election for people to grant us this: to earn the privilege to sit here as parliamentarians and serve in the House. I try to keep my complaining about the work-life balance to a minimum.

I campaigned vigorously against New Democratic and Liberal opponents in my riding who wanted to do exactly the same thing. They were signing up for exactly the same type of job. What I don't want members of the cabinet to say is that to save our work-life balance they're going to reduce our sitting time by 20% and reapportion the hours to another time. I don't think that would help this place work. I don't think it would improve debate. I don't think it would improve work-life balance. How about they let parliamentarians decide about their work-life balance?

If I remember correctly, it was this committee that did not pursue recommending doing away with Friday sittings, but it reappears here for consideration. I know that Mr. Simms has offered a different perspective, which is to do a full normal day on Friday. I've offered my perspective that perhaps what we could do is bring back committees of the House to take their debates to the House for a day. They would be automatically pre-scheduled so that everybody would know that the foreign affairs committee would come in for three hours and the members of the committee would be expected to be there, perhaps on a motion to debate a report or an issue.

It's an option, but I haven't studied it enough. I haven't considered it enough to understand the ramifications of doing that. I don't think you have enough time to complete a report by June 2 and get consensus at this table without passing our amendment to the motion. You will need that done in order to get that across.

There are many people who work in different occupations, such as the military, or who work in Fort McMurray, who travel quite a bit, are away from their families, and don't get a say in their work-life balance. It's imposed upon them by their employers. Our employers are our constituents, the taxpayers of Canada. In a group, they pay us to be here to work on their behalf as parliamentarians first, not members of our caucuses first.

I defend the interests of my constituents because nobody else here exists to do that. As I've mentioned, I have the second largest riding in Canada. Nobody else is going to represent it here but me. That's the best I can do on their behalf. Within five years—and likely within four years, because that's the law—there will be an election, and I will be held to account for my performance in the House. A great thing about our democracy is that individual voters can use whatever metric they want to rate us. They can ask us if we have missed a lot of votes, if we have been present in the House, or if we have spoken enough. I hope they will feel that I have spoken enough.

[Todd Doherty, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

The 21st century.

That's what Mr. de Burgh Graham said. Actually, I wish I'd been here to hear his intervention last week.

It's interesting when we see the suggestion about making electronic voting. I think it's important that we have members of Parliament in the House. We're doing it right around the clock and we're having votes. I think Ms. Sahota said that it was a good thing she didn't bring her family, because it would have interfered with her family time.

I understand what it's like to have your family nearby and get a vote called or whatever. But this is what we signed up for. I never want to take away somebody's family time. I think you heard earlier how passionate I am about my kids. I did things differently in my previous role. This job has allowed me, has afforded me, to be a better father, as a matter of fact. Regardless of whether I'm away from home or whatever, I think we know what we're getting ourselves into when we're doing it.

Getting back to the votes, electronic voting may be a way to modernize it, but there has to be a different way. I think you have to stand to be counted. I think members of Parliament have to be able to stand, on the record, whether they are for something or against it. That's what the electors want us to do.

One thing that my electors asked me on the doorstep was this: “If something's against your party policy, but we in Cariboo—Prince George feel very strongly for it, how will you vote?” You have to vote your conscience. You have to vote your electors. Ultimately, it's not me.

I want to bring you back to Bill C-14, which dealt with physician-assisted death. We spent a lot of time debating other things, considering the amount of time we spent on a piece of legislation that I feel is probably one of the most important pieces of legislation our Parliament would see. Do you want to know why? It was because closure was invoked on it, which I think is sad.

People asked me how I was going to vote. Regardless of my personal beliefs, I listened to my constituents.

I consulted a good friend of mine who is a minister, and I said that I didn't think there was enough time for me as an elected official, that I didn't think there was anything to prepare somebody to be able to really understand the magnitude of voting on something such as that. I was struggling with it, so I went to my minister and asked for guidance.

I heard from our constituents loud and clear, and it varied, but overwhelmingly I heard that.... When we're talking about invoking closure on important debates, I think it's important.... I don't know how many days we debated the question of changing the words to our national anthem. I think we debated that longer than physician-assisted death. To me, for fundamental pieces of legislation such as that, invoking closure on something because you don't like the way the conversation is going.... We heard on the other side that they were indeed twisted in how they were going to vote as well. We've seen that a number of times.

Mr. Chair, I can't talk about what we did as government, but we have seen that over the course of the last 18 or 16 months this government has invoked closure a lot of times because they didn't like the message they were hearing. They didn't like the fact they were getting, perhaps, even some opposing views within their own caucus. I think that is shameful.

We need to make sure that the voices of our electors are never silenced, that we have the ability to bring those forth. Whether we like the answer or not, I think that is important to do. There are things I may not always agree with on the other side, or even within our own caucus, but I listen and respect those views, recognizing that they are the constituents' views of the members. I do my very best to try to educate myself on why somebody feels that way, and I think that's important.

I read Ms. May's paper. As I said, I try to understand all points of view. I can honestly say that, while I may not always agree with Ms. May, there are some things that she says in here that really resonate with me. On electronic voting, she states, “For my part, as the leader of an unrecognized, but nationally engaged parliamentary party, I find the current voting system valuable in many ways.” I agree with this. It is important that members be physically present. Voting from our offices or our home ridings is not an acceptable option, and it is a dereliction of duty. I truly believe that. It opens it up for manipulation.

This is my saying this. I think what we need to do is to make sure that members of Parliament can't absolve themselves of the responsibility of voting. We must not make it easier for them to say, “I wasn't there, I didn't vote on it”, or “somebody else pressed the button”. Instead, stand and be counted. If you are truly there to represent your electors and your riding, find a way to get yourself to the Hill and vote, and be on the record for how you feel.

I want to go back to some of the comments that we've heard regarding the opposition. Again, I don't know the history, but has there ever been a time when the Conservatives and the NDP have co-authored a paper and signed it, and the leaders have stood together on something and had a unified voice? Probably not in the last 10 years, anyway.

This is what the government of the day has done. It's managed to actually unite, for the most part, the full opposition. We've got a letter here from last week written by the Honourable Candice Bergen, our opposition House leader, and Murray Rankin, the NDP House leader, talking about modernizing the House. It brought forth a 2001 motion to create the Special Committee on the Modernization and Improvement of the Procedures of the House of Commons. I'm not going to go into this because I think it's been read to death. But what I'm going to say is that I think it's interesting that I see a lot of kind of grumpy people, angry at what the opposition is doing. They say, “Can you imagine the gall of the opposition to do all these different moves and manoeuvres, and shame on them”. Well, who started this, Mr. Chair? All you've done is galvanized us on this, which is great because for once the guns are pointed squarely across the way and not askew a little bit, because I see that sometimes too. I think it's important that it this on the record as well.

Mr. Chair, it's interesting when we go down the path that we've gotten to at this point. I'm sure every member of the government or the Liberal Party.... And it's all backbench; we don't see any ministers here. Of course, they're busy doing whatever they're doing. Far be it from them to come to talk about their ways, what they think would change or modernize the House. I know they're busy doing things. I'm being facetious. It has been the backbench folks, the newbies who have really been holding up the end for the government—and you, of course, Mr. Chair, who have been doing a great job. I think it is very commendable.

I would love to be a fly on the wall in your conversations behind closed doors. I really would. I'm sure it's not all roses, bouquets, rainbows, and unicorns, because I know that you've got some very strong, well-meaning, very smart, very capable members of Parliament who perhaps don't get a chance to say as much as they would like, or don't get a chance to be the voice of their ridings as much as they'd like. As a matter of fact, just before Christmas, there was a member of Parliament who stood up—and forgive me, because I don't know his name; I should know his name—and was heckling me, and I was looking across the way. It was the first words I think he had said in the House in the 14 months after being elected. I thought, “Is that the best you've got after being elected for 14 months?” It was the first time he was able to stand in the House and be on record. That's the point that we've said. I've stood up a number of times in the House to say—and I'm saying it over and over again here—that the 338 members of Parliament, incredible, strong, well meaning, capable, elected from all walks of life, bring differing points of view and perspectives to this House.

I'll use the Prime Minister's words against him here, that “Canadians know our country is made stronger because of our diversity, not in spite of it.” Does that ring true, that everyone around the table has a say because we come at it from different vantage points? We've probably got people who have been CEOs of major corporations. We've got scientists and microbiologists or marine biologists, and we've got people from all walks of life. We've got ministers. We've got an astronaut, for heaven sakes. So we've got people around the table who are from all walks of life, who bring us different points of view. Can't we come to some form of consensus or be trusted to sit around the table and come up with something or find ways of making things different and better?

It's interesting, too, Mr. Chair—

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Mr. Graham really wants me to cross the floor. I suppose I could then join the large number of Liberal members voting against the government. That's not going to happen, just to put all my cards on the table.

Speaking of all my cards being on the table, I would like to continue where we left off last night, or rather earlier this morning, with the important issues that we're dealing with. Our discussion was in the context of a notice of motion that came forward from Mr. Simms, and I should say that the motion came forward in a way that I don't think is respectful of the tone and of the way in which we typically operate within this place.

We had the release of a discussion paper that, as I think others have reflected, isn't so much about discussion as it is about dictating. It's just supposedly to raise some issues and some questions and some matters for consideration, but then, very immediately, it was followed during a constituency work week by a notice of motion. On the day before the budget, the government wanted to move forward with this motion that would have involved a study of the issues in this so-called discussion paper about the so-called modernization of the Standing Orders. They thought that somehow the boundaries of that study had to be determined the day before the budget.

Of course, we know that Canadians are legitimately weighing out. They are looking at the budget, looking at how much this government will increase their tax bill by and at how much debt will be left to the next generation. In the midst of that, we have something happening that I think was designed to slide in under that discussion and prevent us from really giving it the scrutiny it deserved.

What did we on this side of the House do? Not just our party but all on this side of the House, including our good colleagues in the New Democratic Party, stood up and said “no”. We said it was not right for the elected government of the day to do this. They do enjoy a certain mandate to implement aspects of their policy agenda, but it is not right for them to try to unilaterally change the way in which our parliamentary institutions function.

That has been the pattern with this government. It has met with strong opposition in every case. Initially the government thought they could unilaterally change the way in which elections occur, the process by which they take place, in a way that would work to their advantage. The opposition stood up and said “no”. We were eventually unified in saying that you cannot, as one party, change the rules of the game. You have to engage with others in the process.

This is exactly what our amendment speaks to. This is a continuation, another step in what we've already seen so far from this government. First of all, they wanted to change the way in which elections occur without meaningfully engaging Canadians or meaningfully engaging their representatives, except for those who were part of their party. Even then, we sometimes have good reason to doubt how meaningful the engagement is, even within the government caucus, given the responses we see in terms of things that happen in the House as a result of that.

Now that they've backed away from that, we see them effectively doing something very similar. They're trying to change the rules of our parliamentary processes, again unilaterally, again proceeding in a way that is not set up to be respectful of individual members of Parliament and those other voices who need to be represented in that discussion as well.

It is interesting that there is a clear similarity, a clear parallel, in terms of the kinds of arguments that are being used by members of this government in this context. My colleague Mr. Reid, on the electoral reform file, would ask repeatedly of Minister Monsef in the House of Commons, “Why won't you commit to a referendum? Why won't you commit to the wider public engagement that we would expect to take place?” Those were the questions that he asked, and the response—to the extent that the questions were answered at all—was always something in the form of “Let's put aside these questions of process and let's talk about the substance.”

We ought not jump to a discussion of substance without really prefacing that with a meaningful discussion of how the discussion will proceed, the process by which it will unfold. Yes, I am as eager as members on the other side are to have a discussion about how we move forward with respect to our Standing Orders, but that has to be done in the context established by the amendment. You can see a parallel to that in the call for a referendum that came from the opposition before. It was us—not just us as the Conservative caucus, but the united perspective of the opposition—saying, “You cannot change the rules of the game on your own.” That is not what Canadians elect governments to do.

Canadians elect governments, or members of Parliament, to be precise, and members of Parliament then coalesce to define who the government is. Through that process of selection, Canadians identify a government that they expect to make policy decisions and to propose laws for debate and discussion. At the same time, though, I think Canadians expect governments of the day to leave intact the basic framework that allows for ongoing, fair, democratic competition. To the extent that changes are necessary in that interaction—either changes to the way in which people are elected or changes to the processes of the parliamentary activities that we're a part of—any time there are proposals for change, it is not good enough that one player in the game decides that they want to make those changes.

I don't want to reduce what we do here to a sports analogy, because what we do here is much more important and consequential, but I think members would clearly understand that if one combatant in a sporting event were to set the rules of the game, the other side might have some real, significant, and legitimate concerns about that. The way in which democracy is supposed to work is that there is a set of ground rules that are identified, independent of the particular interests—and certainly independent of the narrow, immediate interests—of one particular party. Those ground rules are established with a wide degree of social consensus.

In the context of electoral reform, we said it was important that it occur through a referendum. In the context of changes that are proposed to the Standing Orders, it is important that the discussion occur through the meaningful engagement of members of Parliament. That means members of Parliament of all parties, including all members of the government and all members of the opposition.

What we have sought is an amendment that reflects the expectation that Canadians have of fairness in our democratic processes, where the framework, the ground rules, and the context in which we operate are not simply established or pronounced upon in a definitive way by one player in the game.

There have to be meaningful mechanisms for the opposition to advance their concerns, to bring them forward and discuss them. It's not surprising to me that we see, unfortunately, this repeated pattern from the government of seeking to make changes not just to policy, not just to decisions of the government, but also to that underlying substructure of democracy. Moreover, they want to to do so in a way that does not reflect our normal processes and traditions, that doesn't reflect our normal expectations of fairness. We see this in the approach they took on electoral reform, which they immediately pulled back from once they realized they had lost the public debate.

I'll say something to members of the government on this discussion of the Standing Orders. You did not win the issue of electoral reform in the way that many in the government wanted to, because Canadians rose up and objected. They spoke out clearly about the problems and the concerns they had with the things that were going on.

The public response on that issue was overwhelming. This is a new issue. This is something that the government started trying to push forward at committee yesterday. Looking at the comments people are making and at the level of engagement we are seeing on social media, I perceive this issue, and specifically the issue of the amendments we are bringing forward, to be one that is garnering very substantial public concern and consideration.

There is a reasonable expectation from the public as people discuss these issues. There is an increasing level of engagement from the public on this issue, and members probably are noticing it as they check their emails. I know we were here late last night, into the wee hours of this morning, and many of us had caucuses to attend, but I would encourage members while they are here to ask their staffers if we are hearing from people on this issue from within our own ridings. Already there has been a very strong response to this issue. People who didn't even know I was here last night have been writing to me about things they've heard from other people and are saying they hope I am engaged in this process.

This is the kind of issue Canadians want to get engaged in, because Canadians take our parliamentary institutions very seriously. They also have an intuitive sense of procedural fairness and the importance of people being engaged, of all parties being engaged, not just because there are different individual perspectives that are important, but also because we are speaking in a way that is reflective of the people who represent us, and the people who represent us—not just those from Liberal ridings who may not be heard in this process, but all Canadians—deserve to have some say over the way our democracy works.

In the government's opposition to the amendment, we see their desire to limit the ability of the opposition to have a meaningful say on the kinds of changes to the Standing Orders that would come forward. We also see in the specific proposals for change that are coming from the government a desire to remove all of those meaningful tools that the opposition has for challenging the government. There is nothing in this proposed so-called modernization that takes away the ability of a member to speak maybe once, if they can get a slot, for a limited amount of time, but in every case they remove those provisions that allow members of the opposition the strong and meaningful opportunity, on issues of vital concern to their constituents and to the nation, to stand up in a more pronounced and fundamental way and say no.

It removes the ability, for example, of members of Parliament to talk for more than a very limited period of time in the context of committees. That's obviously a problem, because the committee can be the one place where members of Parliament, generally those who sit on particular committees, will have a particular interest or degree of expertise in specific areas. This discussion paper proposes to limit the ability of not just members of the opposition but also members of the government to stand up—I guess we normally speak sitting down at committees, but to metaphorically stand up—and object in a way that is clear, effective, and pronounced.

As I look at the text of this discussion paper, and I've read through it a number of times, I see some real dissonance between the tone of the discussion, the stated objectives, and the way in which this government is proceeding vis-à-vis the amendment and the changes they are proposing to bring about. For example, as I said earlier, this discussion paper refers to modernization without clarity or definition, but it also refers to some words that are, in and of themselves, good words: “greater accountability, transparency and relevance”. How in the world, though, does removing the ability of the opposition to have a say, either with respect to the ground rules or with respect to the actual ongoing deliberations of the House, promote greater accountability? How does removing one question period every week, even if the time is reapportioned—because you are still removing the opportunity for accountability five days a week—provide what is stated as an objective, greater accountability?

It states:

Parliament must adapt to a changing and evolving...landscape and should respond to demands of greater accountability, transparency and relevance.

Greater accountability, transparency, and relevance: these are all important things, yet the way in which the government is proceeding—today, this morning, yesterday—is fundamentally at odds with the objectives we discussed here.

It was in fact our party that pushed to have these discussions in public. It was our advocacy that said Canadians have to see, in a clear way, what's going on and what the government is trying to do, which is to remove the ability of the opposition to be an effective force, and to do it in a way that doesn't give the opportunity for the opposition to be meaningfully and effectively engaged in this discussion.

Incidentally, to further support my point about public engagement on this issue, I'll just say that members saw me doing a Facebook Live about 20 minutes ago, before this committee. I had some technical difficulties because I had my camera facing the wrong way initially. That often happens with me. You might be able to tell my ability with technology by my comments about the concept of modernization, but I have figured out Facebook Live, and in 20 minutes we've already had 19 shares. That's a little less than a share per minute. I don't normally get that much traffic on the videos I post, not even on something as contentious as motion number 103, so we are seeing a high level of engagement from the public on this issue.

I think members of the government would do well to note that, and to realize that when they talk about things like greater accountability, transparency, and relevance, Canadians are already scrutinizing what we are doing here. When it comes to the government's desire to limit the conversation by not supporting the amendment, by not allowing the opposition to be meaningfully engaged in that discussion, we see that the public, who are much more able to be engaged because of social media, whether members of the government like it or not, are already reacting to that and being very clear about the kinds of concerns they have as that happens.

There is something in the introduction to the discussion paper that I neglected to draw attention to last night. The introduction talks about the recalibration of the minority and majority, and yet the process envisioned by the government is one in which that recalibration is undertaken unilaterally, where you have one member of the process doing that recalibration.

The discussion paper also says, “This balance is in need of constant attention and periodic adjustment to reflect the will of the House and of the people it serves.” Isn't that exactly what we in the opposition are talking about and are seeking to do through this amendment? This is to ensure that any recalibration or balance that takes place reflects “the will of the House and the people it serves”.

Let's be very clear about what that needs to mean. As the government was keen to talk about, at least until recently, we have a majority government that was not elected with a majority of the popular vote. That's fair. That's how our system works. That doesn't in any way take away from their legitimacy to govern, but it does speak to the fact that we need to have a little bit more of a multipartisan approach if we are to meaningfully talk about the will of the people that the House is supposed to serve, especially when we make changes that shift the underlying substructure of our democratic discussions.

It is striking to me how in this discussion paper you have the nominal recognition of the need for periodic adjustment to reflect the will of the House and the people that it serves, and yet you have a motion that seeks to allow the government House leader's vision to be unilaterally imposed on the House and on the opposition.

When we speak about the will of the House, some members might suggest that could be just a majority of the House. After all, the House can vote, and the government has a majority, so they can carry the vote on the basis of their majority. Doesn't that reflect the will of the House?

Well, I would say that the will of the House should be expressed in different ways that are appropriate to the kind of situation that is being adjudicated.

If we were to have a public whipped standing vote on the selection of the Speaker, I would consider that inappropriate. I would consider that an inappropriate expression of the will of the House in the context of that institution. It is important for the Speaker both to be neutral and to be seen to be neutral. Although formally the process of a whipped standing vote right at the beginning of Parliament would mean that the Speaker would be chosen by a majority, I think it would undermine the principle of the will of the House.

This is recognized in the Standing Orders, which for different kinds of things prescribe different kinds of numbers for the will of the House. Obviously, for the passage of legislation, there is a requirement that there be a majority of those voting who support it. On certain other matters there are different metrics or requirements. There are certain things that the House can only do through unanimous consent. There are certain things the House can do through a majority, but which need to have a proper notice given in advance.

There are certain things that can occur in the House that require a certain threshold to be passed. I am thinking of Standing Order 53 and Standing Order 56.1, standing orders that allow motions to be put forward that are deemed adopted if a certain number of members do not stand to object. In the case of Standing Order 56.1, the government can put forward a motion, and if the opposition fails to stand 25—well, it wouldn't have to be the opposition, of course—if 25 members of Parliament fail to stand, then the motion is deemed adopted. That is to deal with changes to the normal procedural mechanisms of the House.

Standing Order 53, which we had use of on Bill C-14 last spring, allows the government to seek to suspend the normal notice process that takes place for the discussion of a bill. Certainly we would not want the normal notice process to be suspended with a simple majority of the House, but I think it is sensible and right that we're willing to accept that even if there are a couple of members who object—and for the purposes of Standing Order 53, it's not 25 members but 10 members—the government can proceed with something for which there hasn't been the normal notice given, if the will of the House is for that to be done in the way that I have described.

This is the central point. The will of the House is a concept that I think requires a certain degree of proper collaboration in response to the specific events that we are dealing with. Yes, there has to be periodic adjustment, but there has to be an acceptance of the way in which that periodic adjustment takes place that meaningfully reflects the will of the House.

I think the amendment that we in the opposition have put forward reflects an appropriate concept of the will of the House in the context of this type of decision. We accept, as is well established in Standing Orders 56.1 and 53, and elsewhere in the Standing Orders, the use of unanimous consent motions in general, which would be another example of certain situations, especially procedural things, wherein a simple majority is not enough, because if we are shifting the procedural ground of the House, and the government can do that simply with a majority vote, then that puts at risk all of the subsequent discussion that should be occurring on substantive legislation.

It's not just out of sort of parliamentary nerdiness and navel-gazing that we are concerned about questions around the Standing Orders and process. It is, rather, because those things provide the substructure for discussion of substantive issues that matter to Canadians and that inform their lives in a real and practical way.

It's a reality that government legislation may have unintended consequences. It may contain mistakes, and that's why the process of parliamentary scrutiny is so important. That's why the role of all members of the government caucus, not just the cabinet, and the role of the opposition are so important: it's because our ability to engage in a meaningful way in the discussion is a bulwark against the kinds of mistakes or unintended consequences that can occur in legislation.

We need to protect that substructure and we actually, I believe, for the most part, need to have a higher standard of support for making changes to that substructure—yes, to protect it, but also to protect the meaningful policy decisions and outcomes that stand upon that framework. That's something that is particularly important.

Further, there are certain things, certain further acknowledgements in the discussion paper that while ultimately recommending changes that would be injurious to our institutions and, indeed, to a proper understanding of the role of the opposition and of all members of Parliament in that institution, that I think should point in the direction of support for the amendment that we are defending today.

I draw the attention of members to a sentence on page two, partway down the first paragraph, when it's discussing some of the issues of the deliberative function of the House. It acknowledges, “Every issue is unique and requires an amount of debate that is commensurate to the significance of the matter before the House.” This is very true. There are some issues that require less discussion; there are some issues that require more discussion. What has been striking to me in witnessing the way in which this Parliament has operated is that we've often seen efforts to curtail debate on some of those most substantive and sensitive areas where surely we can recognize the need, or we should recognize the need, for very extensive discussion.

The first time that this government proposed time allocation or closure was with respect to Bill C-14, the government's euthanasia legislation. Although, as I'm told, previous governments have used time allocation from time to time, this was a unique case on an issue of fundamental values and conscience. There were significant differences of opinion within every party, and certainly within the two largest parties, and the government moved forward with time allocation on that issue.

This speaks to some of the problems around that whole area of discussion. It also should remind us, when we're properly calibrating the discussion in the House, to recognize the differences between different kinds of legislation and recognize that different kinds of legislation require different amounts of debate, especially on legislation on which there may be broad agreement among the parties that it's something that's okay to move faster on. However, the significance of the matter, the relative time that is required for discussion in the House, is also something that we can't speak of as having a certain ontological objectivity. It is not, strictly speaking, an objective point with regard to how much discussion is required on certain items of legislation. Members of different parties will disagree based on what they're hearing from their constituents.

A recent example of this, to compare what the Conservatives and the NDP were saying, was the discussion around the government's pre-clearance legislation. I can't recall exactly the number of that bill. Our view was that this was legislation that was good, which we could support. It was a government bill. Our caucus was supportive of the government's approach with respect to pre-clearance. The NDP was not. The NDP had some grave concerns. The NDP wanted in particular to ensure that they were able to be fully engaged in the discussion. Notably, when time allocation came up on that bill, our Conservative caucus joined with the NDP in opposing the imposition of time allocation on that point. We recognized that from the perspective of the NDP, the time commensurate to the significance of the discussion of the issue had not been given. What you see today, and what you've seen on matters like this around the management of the time of the House, is some real agreement among parties with obviously very different broader philosophies.

As we think about this issue of the way in which time is allocated, this speaks to very important rules about how the House operates. Yes, individual parties, but also individual members, have an opportunity to meaningfully put forward and discuss the concerns they have. The absence of an ability to do that, the absence of the ability for the opposition to have a role, as envisioned by the study in the absence of the amendment, can obviously create some real problems with respect to the way that balance is set up.

The normal process for making changes to the Standing Orders, as well as for figuring out the time that is allocated to different things, is for discussions to occur among House leaders. There is provision in the Standing Orders—and I think there should be provision in the Standing Orders—for the government to move motions around the allocation of time when they feel there is urgency in moving a measure forward, but the important point is that those motions create an avenue, an opportunity, for public debate and discussion around the use of that procedure and create some accountability and scrutiny of that process.

The way in which the government is proceeding here really seeks to limit or minimize the debate that would normally occur around that.

Later on in the introduction to the discussion paper, the government House leader lays out some proposed reasons for these changes. As we discuss how to do the study and the level of engagement we would expect from members with respect to unanimity or not, we need to take on board and consider the reasons that have been put forward.

The discussion paper speaks about the need to ensure members have a better balance, and to encourage under-represented segments of society to seek elected office.

We should be quite aware and critical of the fact that very often this government uses references to minority and other under-represented segments of society to impose its own interests. We saw this with electoral reform, where they objected to the idea of a referendum. It seemed to be on the basis that we have to ensure that the full range of diverse voices be heard, but we never got an answer as to why a referendum would exclude a full diversity of voices.

Referendums, in fact, would generally make it easier for people to engage who may otherwise be unable to participate in the kinds of consultations that don't involve the simplicity of being able to cast a direct ballot. A red flag should go off in our minds when the government uses this reference to under-represented segments of society, if it is in the context of a broader plan to simply impose its own agenda and, perversely, weaken the ability of the full range of voices to be heard in the process.

The first point of justification that the government House leader puts forward for wanting to proceed in this direction is the comment, “to ensure Members have a better balance”. I'm not entirely sure what “a better balance” means—especially when we have a normative word like “better”—when what is envisioned by the approach the government has taken is that we're going to have a balance that is entirely conceived of and determined by the government on the ways in which Standing Orders operate and debate proceeds. The system that is envisioned is one in which the government decides before the fact how much debate is going to be allowed or not allowed on any given provision, so it's not at all clear to me what is meant there by “balance”.

On the other hand, perhaps better balance isn't speaking so much in this context of the calibration between the role of government and opposition. Rather, it's speaking about the kind of balance that members might want to have between their duties, their families, and other things in their private life. As we think about the Standing Orders in that context, there are a lot of options that we could identify that could enhance the effectiveness of representation while facilitating an optimal balance, but the engagement of those changes shouldn't be something that the government House leader does unilaterally. Of course, the government House leader is in practice a bit removed from the practical life of other members of Parliament, because the government House leader has far more staff. They have certain resources at their disposal, a driver, and so forth, that other members of Parliament don't have.

I'm not objecting to that. I'm simply saying that if you want to have a discussion about the kind of balance that can be achieved in practice for members of Parliament, you'd better make sure that you're actually engaging the full range of voices of members of Parliament.

Now, the kind of balance that is necessary in the life of a member of Parliament will be different for the government and for the opposition members, because government and opposition members have different kinds of responsibilities. In the government, of course, members have access to a greater spectrum of staff support. There are larger budgets on the government side for those kinds of things. Opposition has to spend that much more time on the kind of research and analysis that's happening within our own offices. That impacts the kind of balance we can have.

On the other hand, there are different responsibilities that may be particular to the life of a government member of Parliament, who is probably more involved in making announcements. Committee chairs, not always but generally, are members of the government. Parliamentary secretaries have another set of associated responsibilities that are different from those of other members of Parliament. This issue of balance for members of Parliament is different depending not just on whether you sit in government or opposition but also on which party you are in and what kinds of responsibilities you have within your party. Perhaps there's an issue between recognized parties and unrecognized groups. Then, of course, there's the issue of independents.

In a discussion of what constitutes a better balance, I think it should be obvious that we would want to engage the full and broad range of voices in that discussion. That's exactly the opportunity that is established in the context of this amendment. If the amendment were to pass, it would ensure that we would hear from the different kinds of perspectives that are raised by all members of Parliament as we discuss this important question of balance.

These issues of what constitutes balance will vary within parties, but they will also vary across regions. I mean “region” in the sense of the part of the country you're from or the kind of riding you have, whether you represent an urban or a rural riding. I think the kinds of expectations and the kinds of work we do for our constituents vary widely, depending on the kind of constituency we have. Some of us have to spend much more time travelling. Some of us may have a relatively greater volume of immigration casework to do. Any discussion of balance shouldn't reflect just one political party, not just because it shouldn't reflect only one party's political interests but also because it shouldn't reflect just one regional type of perspective. It should be a conversation that is inclusive.

Sometimes when we see the policy decisions of this government, it strikes us that there isn't really an appreciation of the dynamics happening in more rural parts of Canada, and that's across the board. That's something that needs to be taken into consideration when we think about the kinds of balance and the kinds of activities involved in representation for all members of Parliament. That's why it's important for us to ensure that as we undertake discussions of what balance looks like, we have a greater level of that full engagement.

Mr. Chair, I don't want to put members on the spot here, but I notice that there's a declining number of members at the table. I'm open to a brief suspension, if that is what members want.

I'm happy to continue with my remarks, but we have a pretty small number of members at the table right now.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

One of my worries is that you could “initiate” something within six months or a year, but then you don't finish it or you don't do anything else, whereas “convene” means that you'd actually get everybody together and do something to develop the framework. The way I see it, “initiate” may be a start, but it may not give us anything as far as a final conclusion of it is concerned.

Would we be able to add a friendly amendment so that we initiate the consultations within six months but we have a full meeting within the year? Or could we put some type of timeline in there so that the minister knows that we are taking this seriously?

One of the challenges or push-backs we had when we did Bill C-14 was that a lot of people expected a palliative care type of framework to be initiated at the same time. I'm just worried that “initiate” gives a kind of open end to it.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

I'd be very interested in that. It would provide us with some context for understanding what can actually be done.

The other point I'd make is that like a lot of things, you can say that the rules aren't perfect and that they provide for what some people might consider an abuse. But any time someone stretches the rules, there's a public debate about it. When a government uses time allocation, as they are allowed to do according to the rules, there is a public conversation about that. When the government brings in omnibus legislation, it's ultimately up to the public to evaluate, on the basis of what they're hearing about the bill, whether it is a proper use of the legislative process.

We can look for ways in which people within this place, committees, the Speaker, and perhaps other bodies make and enforce rules. There is some political accountability there as well. This speaks to some of the complexity around omnibus bills.

Here is the argument the government House leader uses for the approach in the discussion paper. She says:

This approach would allow for the divided bills to be debated together at second reading, report stage and third reading but would be subject to separate votes at each stage. In addition, the divided bills could be sent to separate committees if the subject matter of the bills warranted such action.

I'm a little bit confused about what the intention is, because this document speaks of dividing bills, but then it says “this approach would allow for the divided bills to be debated together at second reading, report stage and third reading”. I don't quite know what that means. If you have separate bills, then you have separate bills, which means that they are debated on different days. They're not only voted separately but are debated at separate times. Perhaps something else is meant by this, that the divided bills would be debated relatively close to each other. That's one thing, but it makes me wonder, looking at the text in this discussion paper, if what's actually envisioned by the government House leader is not a full separation of bills but something in between, a sort of semi-separation. There would be separate votes but not actually the separation of them.

I will say that there's a very simple solution to the feeling that you need to vote for a bill that contains elements you like and don't like. That is simply the question of report stage amendments. The process we follow, generally speaking, is to have fewer and fewer report stage amendments. There was a time when report stage amendments could be brought forward fairly easily, but then the change was to say that report stage amendments could be moved in the House only if they couldn't have been moved in committee or in certain exceptional circumstances.

Changes have been made to now allow members of non-recognized parties and independents to move amendments at committee. It's interesting that some people, Ms. May in particular, have objected to this on the basis that the only effect of allowing them to move amendments in committee is that it prevents them from moving amendments in the House at report stage. I argued when we discussed this at committee that really, this is a question of what privileges members have in relation to each other, because if members of non-recognized parties can move amendments at report stage and members of recognized parties cannot, that introduces a certain advantage for members of non-recognized parties.

The process, over time, has been to tighten allowing the movement of amendments at report stage. It isn't clear whether what the House leader is concerned about is dividing the bills in terms of debate or dividing them in terms of having separate votes. You could just reverse that trend and have greater latitude for the moving of report stage amendments.

The interesting thing is that it's up to the Speaker already in those exceptional circumstances. As I talked about in the context of Bill C-14, there are provisions in the Standing Orders that allow the Speaker, in exceptional circumstances, to allow the consideration of report stage amendments, even if they've already been considered at committee, but only in exceptional circumstances dealing with issues of a certain importance.

Yes, one might say that it's difficult to ask the Speaker to evaluate the relative importance of bills that come before the House and decide that these are important enough to have report stage amendments and those are not. Certainly, in the case of the euthanasia legislation, Bill C-14, I think it was quite obvious that this was an issue of grave importance for the House and for all Canadians, so the Speaker allowed report stage amendments to be made, even report stage amendments that had already been moved at committee, so we had report stage votes.

Of course, when you have report stage votes, that takes a bit more time. There's a potential interaction between this and the provisions on electronic voting. I'm not ready to take a definitive position one way or the other on electronic voting, but part of the concern about report stage amendments and having a whole host of report stage amendments is the amount of time they would take in the House. When people can constantly move forward a whole bunch of report stage amendments, then on all legislation you could have a massive amount of time spent voting at report stage. That would make the business of the House very difficult in terms of proceeding in an effective way. If you had procedures for electronic voting, perhaps it would be easier to introduce more report stage amendments, which would also address some of these concerns about omnibus legislation, because at least you would have separate votes taking place.

On the other hand, there are still some fundamental problems, legitimate questions, at least, with electronic voting. In the same podcast I referenced earlier in my remarks, Kady O'Malley talked about the fact that she was opposed to electronic voting, because she felt that the kind of democratic accountability exercise associated with members standing and voting was important.

If you had a whole list of report stage amendments, and you were voting on them electronically, and it happened every time, I would worry that it would, in a sense, increase the amount of effective control political parties had over members, because it would be impractical for every member to know all the details of every report stage amendment in the event that there was a very large volume of report stage amendments coming forward.

The solutions to this are not easy, but it is possible that more votes at report stage would go some way to addressing some of these concerns.

The theme I keep coming back to when I talk about changes to the Standing Orders is that there is an inclination by some to say that we have to, not quite burn the whole House down and rebuild it, but fundamentally re-engineer this place to make improvements. I don't think we need to fundamentally re-engineer this place to make improvements. I think we can make certain improvements that leverage the existing strengths we have. Rather than creating a completely new process for the adjudication of omnibus bills, using report stage amendments more would use a procedure we already have to greater effect.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

I think that's a point worth remembering. The parties have compromised in the past on different issues. Maybe we all didn't get what we wanted.

I remember the debate on Bill C-14. I have very strict views on that Bill C-14 debate, on how it proceeded and how time allocation was used. I deeply disagreed with it, so I took every opportunity to debate. That is probably the issue I got the most emails and phone calls on.

I happen to live in a riding—I think the only riding in Canada—with two large mega-churches in it, with thousands of members there every single weekend. They're a faith-based community—there are different ones they belong to—and they were coming to me on a regular basis with very specific views. I think I'm one of only five backbench members of Parliament who proposed amendments at committee. When this process is done, if another piece of legislation like Bill C-14 comes down.... I don't know what you will decide by June 2, but it might be that in the next Parliament or in a future Parliament I won't be able to have that opportunity. I don't know. It's not clear to me. You don't build trust with a lack of clarity, and you also don't build compromise, because then we don't know what you actually want to achieve and we don't know where you want to go.

That's our issue here. This amendment, if you choose to pass it, will begin to build trust again. It will get us to the point where we can have some form of consensus. We can co-operate again. Then we can get to the moment of compromise.

Perhaps you won't get everything you want in terms of all the changes to the Standing Orders. Different members have different ideas about the changes to the Standing Orders. I told Mr. Genuis, to his shock, that there are ideas he has about how the Standing Orders orders should be changed that I disagree with. I have other considerations, especially around private members' business. I think there should be more of it. I think it's important for every member, when they're elected to Parliament, to get at least one chance—one chance—to have their motion or private member's bill heard and debated in the House.

Now, whether or not the debate gets to the final end is secondary to me, or at this point it is. I could be persuaded, but I think it should still come to at least a first vote or a first debate. I think that's really important for members of Parliament.

I drew the short straw. I probably will not have my private member's bill heard until much later in this Parliament. Perhaps I won't.

I see Mr. Chan pointing to himself. Do you have a worse number than I do, or a better one?

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

This is interesting.

The way in which Mr. Graham has described this proposal would be to render the House of Commons even more like a television studio than it already is. The idea would be that there are red dots and you look at this camera or that camera. Of course, that's not really the tradition or the convention. You would normally be looking at other members and engaging them in conversation, or looking at the person to whom you're speaking.

The introduction of cameras was about showing the public what was going on in the House. One of the things people didn't necessarily expect was how much the presence of cameras would change the way in which debates unfolded. It was this deliberative body which was open to the public. The written records were obviously published. Journalists would attend the sessions and write about them. Members of the general public would attend as well. With the introduction of cameras, it has become one in which members are sensitive to always being on camera, and there is a greater emphasis on look, presentation, and form as opposed to substance.

This is a good example of how, when you talk about modernization and change, the kinds of things you might think are just part of the modern world, they actually can have distorting effects on the way in which that institution works. To quote Kevin Lamoureux, “distortative effects” result from those changes.

Mr. Graham's proposal is interesting, but I worry about the impact of this additional initiative that would further change the way in which the House of Commons works in terms of the extent to which it's a television studio versus effectively a deliberative body. I don't think it's realistic or desirable to go back and remove the cameras, but I think we should be sensitive to changes that may have an effect and may not be the ones we are going for. It speaks to the need for that wider engagement of members of Parliament from all parties in the discussion. There may be things that are not even of a partisan or strategic nature, which members of the opposition, members who are more experienced, perhaps, or not, may be aware of which may not necessarily reflect the concerns of members of the government.

One of the problems with having decisions made unilaterally, especially by a new government of predominantly brand new MPs, is that you don't draw into that experience that comes from a larger number of veteran members in other parties. I think it's still the case that the longest serving current member of Parliament is a member of an unrecognized party, a member of the Bloc. It is generally going to be the case that there will be more veterans on the opposition benches than on the government benches. If you have a party that was recently in power and then has gone to the opposition, you are going to have some new members, but you're likely to have a lot of returning members. Whereas, when a party substantially grows its caucus, as has happened with this government—this government was in a third party position, and it went from being the third party to being government—a vast majority of members of Parliament on the government side, and I think the vast majority of ministers, certainly the government House leader, are new members of Parliament.

Part of the importance of engaging the opposition, and you see it in the example of cameras and what their effect would be, is actually tapping into the experience and institutional knowledge that exist in this place. If the House leader were effectively allowed to make these changes unilaterally, it would be the government but with the ability of the leadership team to add and remove members to and from the committee at will. That process, as we see with this discussion paper, would be highly directed by the House leader. Effectively, you have someone who has, to this point, been a member of Parliament for less than two years, who wants to fundamentally dictate the terms of the so-called modernization, the changes, perhaps the revolution, that they wish to see to the Standing Orders. That's quite a striking point that we would see that level, that type, and that magnitude of change undertaken without engaging the experience that exists in all parts of the House.

I don't mean to suggest that new members can't have valid points about the Standing Orders. I'm a new member myself, obviously. I've been a member for as long as the government House leader has been. New members may see things from a different perspective and be willing to put forward ideas for certain kinds of changes that maybe those who have been here for a very long time are less likely to see as necessary.

There is a balance that needs to be struck between hearing the voices of new members and hearing the voices of members who have been here for a longer period of time and who have a level of context and experience that informs the approach that they take. It's that balance that is achieved by this amendment. It is an amendment that speaks to the question of balance between government and opposition, but I would argue to a range of different kinds of balances that need to exist in the deliberative process that's unfolding. It's a balance between government and opposition, between major parties and minor parties, between recognized and unrecognized parties, between those on the front bench and those who are not part of the front bench, whether in government or in general throughout the House. This would be a balance between newer members and experienced members, members who have different kinds of experience.

Of course, some of the members here look at the Standing Orders from the experience of having been former political staff. I was a political staffer at one time, and you do see the Standing Orders in a bit of a different way when you are navigating them. In my case, I was involved in a number of different positions with different aspects of the Standing Orders. In one case it was question period preparation, and in another case it was working with parliamentary committees.

There are obviously things about the mechanisms of this House that staff experience which may be less part of the reality of members of Parliament. This is because we often rely on our staff to support us when we have specific questions to ask, or when there are specific kinds of motions that might need to be brought forward in that context.

It's about the multiplicity of voices that we can ensure are engaged if we have the widest number of voices included with different kinds of experience. We have members who have been former political staffers. We have members who look at this place with a relatively fresh set of eyes. You might have people who look at the Standing Orders from the perspective of operating procedures that they've seen in private sector work places, in terms of processes that we follow, hours, sitting processes, and balance of work, how this place squares with the way things operate in the private sector.

We have members, and Mr. Christopherson is one of them, who came to this place from other legislatures, and who have experience at the provincial level. In some cases we have people who have been involved at the municipal level. The kind of perspective they bring to a discussion of the Standing Orders is going to be different still. It's going to be informed by the experience they had as part of a different legislature. It's all these different perspectives, these variations and experience, that inform the way members think about the kinds of questions that are in front of us. It's important that we listen and engage those voices.

I don't know if we have any members of Parliament who were former senators. We have senators who were former members of Parliament. I know we've had people who have stepped back from the Senate to run to be members of Parliament, but I don't know if we've ever had someone who has gone that way. That's another set of experiences that you draw on when you have the full range of voices involved.

The kind of study we could do at this committee on the basis of the amendment would be one in which we are assured that not only are all of these different voices heard formally, that we have lots of people who are able to speak, but then the discussion that members of Parliament have after that is one that incorporates those voices in a substantive way. If you have members from different parties who are part of that discussion and are represented in it, you necessarily will achieve a better outcome given the diversity that would come to the fore.

One issue the discussion paper addresses and one which I mentioned before but in a different context, because this was before the government's introduction of the budget implementation bill, is the issue of omnibus bills. I have a hard time understanding what the government's position is on omnibus bills. The Prime Minister in question period yesterday was trying to carve out this distinction between good omnibus bills and bad omnibus bills. A good omnibus bill, it seems, in the eyes of the Prime Minister, is one proposed by a Liberal government; a bad one is one proposed by a Conservative government. We would understand that he would have that perspective, of course. We all tend to prefer legislation proposed by our own side, but the question of the degree of “omnibus-ness”—I don't know if that is a word—is not dependent on the party that brings it forward. To me, some of the discussion in the discussion paper suggests that there is a binary.... It's either an omnibus bill or it's not an omnibus bill.

The reality is we see many different kinds of bills that come before the House that deal with different kinds of provisions that do not necessarily have to be included in the same bill but have some common thread to them. Those are bills that maybe move a step in the direction of being an omnibus bill but don't go all the way.

One bill we dealt with was on the response to the opioid crisis in Canada. This wasn't an issue on which we agreed with the NDP, but in the Conservative caucus we felt that this bill combined certain kinds of provisions that shouldn't have been combined. There were many provisions in that bill that we were very supportive of, that dealt with things like more effective enforcement, addressing pill presses. These kinds of things we thought were not only good measures but needed to be expedited. However, the legislation also included provisions that dealt with the community consultation process around putting in place what we call supervised injection sites, and what the government increasingly likes to call safe consumption sites, which is a little misleading as far as the terminology goes.

In any event, the legislation, in addition to those positive things we all agreed on, dealt with the government's proposal to remove most of the requirements around engaging with communities before constructing a supervised injection site. We looked at the bill and said there were some things in it that were not only worth supporting but were important and required the fastest possible movement through the House, but there was another part of the bill that we were totally opposed to.

The government House leader in her discussion paper talks about an omnibus bill being one where members might want to vote for a part of it but not for another part of it. That's the reality of almost all legislation that comes before the House. Someone somewhere is going to agree with part of it but not another part of it. Unless you only have legislation that has one provision in it, that makes one specific change in one clause, which would be pretty unrealistic in terms of the efficiency of the House, any time you have legislation that makes multiple policy changes, you're going to have members who will like some parts of it and not other parts of it.

Yesterday I talked about the debate around Bill C-14, the government's euthanasia legislation. Aside from the fact that there were a whole host of different provisions in this legislation, there were two very distinct issues that needed to be adjudicated. Unfortunately, they were often mixed up in the public conversation. There was a question of the eligibility criteria, who was eligible to seek euthanasia, and there was a question on the safeguards, the administrative requirements that had to be met before someone could seek euthanasia. The point is these were two different questions. Someone could conceivably believe in more open eligibility criteria and fewer safeguards, but someone could also believe, let's say, in a more open, more liberal eligibility criteria while also having more safeguards in place. You have these different kinds of philosophical questions and different kinds of provisions that are wrapped up in the same piece of legislation.

Of course, in a formal sense, no one would say that Bill C-14 was an omnibus bill. It was a bill that set the terms for the legalization of euthanasia and assisted suicide. In that sense, we could accept, relatively speaking, that it was on one thing, but it was a step in the omnibus direction, at least according to the way in which omnibus bills are defined by the government's discussion paper. The government's discussion paper suggests that an omnibus bill is one in which some members might like some provisions and not others.

What happened with the legislation around the opioid crisis—I can't remember the number of the bill offhand—was that a point of order was raised seeking unanimous consent to split the bill. This was proposed by the Conservative caucus, I think by Mr. Colin Carrie, our health critic. It would have created two separate bills. One of those bills would have dealt with the provisions we all agreed on, and that bill would have moved along immediately. It may well have moved along to the end of third reading right at that point. Certainly, it would have gone all the way to committee. It would have separated off the controversial provisions.

The benefit of that approach, actually, is that it would not have slowed anything down, but would have sped up the process. It would have allowed for the immediate passage of the provisions on which we all agreed. Those provisions could have started doing their work and having a positive impact, whereas the controversial provisions could have continued to be debated.

This is particularly sensible when you consider the way in which the House and the Senate interact. If you have two separate bills that both go to the Senate, and the Senate amends one of them and not the other, then only the bill that was amended has to come back to the House, while the other, if it passes in the Senate in the same form it did in the House, goes on from there to receive royal assent. If all of those provisions are wrapped up in the same bill, then all of those provisions have to come back to the House again.

In cases where the opposition is prepared to expedite certain provisions...and as we saw with this particular bill there was a substantial public interest in the government supporting the splitting of that bill, yet they didn't. Unanimous consent was denied for that proposal.

This is telling of the government's actual views on bills that, although they may not be omnibus bills in the full sense, have a component of “omnibus-ness” to them. The government, in a reasonable case like that, was not willing to allow the splitting of a bill in a way that would have very much reflected the public interest with the timeline the public wanted to see. That did not happen because of a refusal of the request for unanimous consent. That refusal, of course, came from the government side. This is telling about the approach being taken for omnibus bills already.

I think we now have examples from this government of actual full-blown omnibus legislation. You would be very hard-pressed to identify a single, credible, philosophical distinction in terms of the degree of “omnibus-ness”, let's say, between the kinds of omnibus bills that the previous government brought in and the kinds of omnibus bills that this government is bringing in.

We have a budget implementation bill—I have my notes here on it—that changes over 20 statutes and runs to over 300 pages. The Prime Minister's defence of that is identical to what was said, I think quite correctly, about the budget implementation bills that were brought forward by the previous government. When you have a whole bunch of measures that are related to the budget, the implementation of the government's fiscal plan, then there is a common thread. These are not entirely unrelated elements. They deal with the economic plan of the government.

That's fair enough, but of course almost anything in terms of government policy has some relationship to the economy. It likely relates to questions of social values as well, but almost anything has some relationship to the economy. Immigration has an impact on the economy. Social policy, drug policy, criminal justice, all of these things have some impact on the economy, or at the very least they involve questions of government expenditure.

That is true of every policy area. The government said in the election that they were opposed to omnibus bills, and now they are redefining their opposition to say that the omnibus bills they are opposed to are only those that have provisions that have absolutely no plausible relationship to each other. That is a pretty substantial stretch in terms of what we were actually talking about with omnibus bills.

We should, in good faith, look for ways to divide bills when we can, especially if there is a willingness of the opposition to expedite certain aspects of the bill that they agree with, but it's never going to be—and I think the government realizes this by now, if they didn't already—an exact science in terms of what does or does not constitute an omnibus bill. This is what raises some questions in terms of the proposal in the discussion paper for the Speaker to split the bill, because if you ask the Speaker to do something, the Speaker being a non-partisan person within the House in the context of that function, you have to give them some criteria. On what basis would they decide to split a bill or not to split a bill? If we can't even arrive, through discussion here, at clarity about what is a bad kind or an acceptable kind of omnibus bill, then we are effectively putting the Speaker in an almost impossible position.

What is clear with respect to omnibus legislation is that the government is breaking a promise here. The government said that they would get rid of omnibus legislation, but they are moving forward with something that is clearly quite similar, not in substance, of course, but in form, to what we saw from successive governments over our recent history.

It's an important question how we should handle the issue of budgets and budget implementation bills, because they are always going to deal with a variety of measures. They're going to have to. If we want the government to bring forward a budget every year, and it should, then there will be lots of different policy areas covered in that budget. You couldn't have a budget that talked only about some things and not others. It would have to cover all the things that are within the ambit of the activities of the federal government.

When it comes to omnibus legislation and questions of reform, we can look at other kinds of potential reforms that would provide the kind of scrutiny of those documents that the public and many members want to see, without being unrealistic about what a budget has to be. It's interesting that the only substantive kind of legislation on which a number of days is prescribed for debate in the Standing Orders is the budget itself. It's either four or five days for the budget to be debated, and after that it's the end of the budget debate. That is automatically put in place.

If you think about the breadth of measures that are covered in a budget, and the number of statutes the government is going to change over the course of a year, it's likely, it seems, with the projector that we have in place here.... Sorry, I lost my train of thought.

With the number of days we have, and with the record of this government with respect to the Standing Orders and how they've unfolded, we are likely to see more changes to statutes made through the omnibus budget implementation bill than changes to statutes in all the rest of the bills that the government brings forward. It's interesting to think just how important that process is, and yet we limit it to a relatively small number of days—I can't remember exactly whether it's four or five days—and we are discussing changes to statutes that outweigh all the changes to statutes that may well happen for the rest of the year.

Maybe one change to the Standing Orders we need to look at is allocating more days to the discussion of the budget. Maybe that would address some of the concerns that members have around ensuring that there is proper scrutiny relative to the relatively long budget documents that we're seeing. That would be one possible change.

Another change we might want to consider, and one which I think would be worthwhile for all members from all parties to deliberate and pronounce on, would be a process by which all committees, or at least a larger number of committees, studied the budget. Right now, the process is that the finance committee does pre-budget consultations. The finance committee looks at the budget implementation bill. We don't have a provision for the same bill being referred to multiple committees. What if we had all of the committees of the House, or at least most of the committees, do some degree of study—

Motions in amendment

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it is my honour to rise today to speak to Bill C-22. I had not thought that we would see government amendments at report stage that undo a lot of the good work that has been done by the committee.

I approach this issue by first saying I support the creation of a national security committee of parliamentarians. I learned a great deal about the intelligence business, the security business, and where Canada stands within our Five Eyes partners, in the efforts to fight Bill C-51 in the last Parliament. I still hope that the review that is being undertaken right now by the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness and the Minister of Justice will lead to massive changes in the five different bills, and others, that were amended through that omnibus bill known as Bill C-51, which set up CSIS, for the first time since its creation, as a body that can “disrupt” thoughts, act as having a kinetic function, as the experts call it.

There is nothing right now within our security agencies that ensures that there is any oversight, unlike our other Five Eyes partners, as the hon. government House leader mentioned. We do not have any oversight for a number of the bodies at all. We have no oversight for CSIS. There had been oversight of CSIS up until the moment of omnibus Bill C-38 in the spring of 2012, which eliminated an adviser to the Minister of Public Safety to warn him or her if CSIS was going amok. That position was eliminated, so there is no oversight of CSIS; rather, there is review of CSIS. There is no oversight of the RCMP; rather, there is review of the RCMP. There is neither oversight nor review of the Canada Border Services Agency. For the Communications Security Establishment Canada, which is a very strange body that collects and downloads massive amounts of metadata, there is neither oversight nor review.

We have all of these different intelligence agencies, therefore, it is of critical importance that we do two things. We must rein in and undo the damage and the potential chaos created for security agencies by Bill C-51. I say this parenthetically. I want to get to Bill C-22. However, I need to say that my opposition to what was done in the 41st Parliament in what was known as Bill C-51 was not exclusively with respect to concerns about civil liberties. Those are concerns, but I have heard from security experts in the course of a review of that bill. It is clear to me that, failing to ensure coordination between and among all of these agencies, while giving CSIS the right to be active in kinetic operations, to be able to have CSIS offer people they are surveilling basically a get-out-of-jail-free card, a prospective guarantee that they will never be arrested or put into the judicial system, without any alert to the RCMP that this has happened, the one hand will not know what the other is doing. The creation of the national security committee of parliamentarians will not address that threat, although we will have to address this concern. It has been one that has been well known since the inquiry into the Air India disaster where if there had been coordination enforced between the different security agencies, that disaster, the single largest terrorist act on Canadian soil ever, could have been avoided. That was certainly the opinion of the Air India inquiry.

Coming back to Bill C-22, I support the creation of a committee of parliamentarians. However, I am baffled by the changes that have just taken place. I turn to the leading Canadian experts in this, Kent Roach and Craig Forcese, professors of law, both of whom played a role in the Air India inquiry. They are the authoritative experts to whom I turn. Certainly, Professor Craig Forcese is baffled by the limitation on what parliamentarians will be allowed to know. I mentioned in my question earlier to the government House leader that these restrictions do not apply to the people who serve on the Security Intelligence Review Committee, SIRC, to which civilian non-elected people are appointed. For the purpose of pointing out that the appointment process can have gaps with respect to security, let us not forget that former Prime Minister Stephen Harper appointed the now late committed fraudster Arthur Porter as the chair of SIRC. Arthur Porter did not have the restrictions that Bill C-22 would now put on parliamentarians, who are elected, who take an oath, and who have an understanding of their responsibilities.

My amendment to the bill is to delete section 12, which is the section that limits the MPs' access to parliamentary privilege. It is what Craig Forcese has called the triple lock on what MPs and senators are allowed to know.

Parliamentarians sitting on this committee have already sworn allegiance to Canada. They will go through security checks. The way the bill is currently written, it is not as though there is no check on their access to information or risk of their revealing information. The Canada Evidence Act would apply, section 38. Even as these government amendments are rolling forward, Professor Forcese has noted that it would be probably better to rely on court and the Canada Evidence Act than on these very restrictive moves in terms of what parliamentarians can know, an overly generous discretion on the point of what ministers can withhold, as well as getting rid of what was a very good amendment achieved in committee of giving the committee subpoena powers.

I have to say that it is just simply baffling that the government has taken such a restrictive view on what parliamentarians can be allowed to know. I will just note that this is from an article by Professor Forcese titled, “Stronger Bill C-22 Goes Back to the House”. This was before the government amendments came forward. He noted that, “C-22 committee members will be surrendering parliamentary privileges and will be permanently bound by secrecy under the Security of Information Act (and therefore subject to criminal sanction for violating secrecy rules).”

I think the government, with all due respect, has overreacted to very good amendments that were passed by the committee, and this is a larger point as well. We are often told in this place that we should rush legislation through second reading so that it can go to committee where the committee will do the good work. We now have a fair litany of times where the Liberal government, with its majority, has decided to ignore the good work of committees.

The first was, of course, the committee that dealt with medically assisted death. That advice was completely overlooked in the drafting of Bill C-14. We have the committee work, on the committee on which I served, the Special Parliamentary Committee on Electoral Reform, and that is a very sad story because we need to get back to that, but very good work was done.

For the first time since 1867, when the British North America Act said Canada will use the voting system from Westminster until such time as its Parliament chooses its own voting system, we had Parliament recommend a voting system and a way forward, and that was rejected. Now this committee's work has been rejected and, I think, hastily.

There is a way forward here. There is an appropriate balance. I do believe that the parliamentary committee struck that balance, and it is really important to remember that what the committee is looking at is already protected in many ways.

The U.K. parliamentary committee has never had a problem with breaching secrecy. One of the experts who testified in Bill C-51, Joe Fogarty from U.K. MI5, testified that there just simply were not problems. Parliamentarians instructed with the duty to maintain confidentiality have done so.

I also point out the precedent that the New Zealand Parliament has a very similar committee, and the New Zealand members of Parliament who serve on that committee do not have to surrender parliamentary privilege. It is explicitly preserved under the New Zealand model.

It leaves one wondering why the government has chosen to undo the good work of committee, further undermining the proper role of legislated deliberation in committee coming back to this place at report stage, doing serious damage to the work that was done by the committee, leaving, I fear, greater uncertainty as to how the committee will function and still wondering why is it that in taking measures to restrict the information that parliamentarians have, the independent expert national security review bodies, SIRC and the CSE commissioner, are not given the same set of handcuffs.

I do not think it makes sense. I urge the government to reconsider and accept my amendment.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

Mr. Webber said I could ask one really quick question, so I know I don't have a lot of time.

First, Dr. Pereira, I want to thank you for your compassion and commitment, because this is something Canadians are going to be dealing with. I think we're at a crossroads here, so it's a very timely bill and it's very timely for you to be here.

I know Bill C-14 concerned a lot of Canadians, and my colleague brought up the question about choice. Just so that moving forward we're doing the right thing, could you outline some of the current barriers to accessing palliative care services that Canadians face?

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Thank you very much.

Bill C-14 came into effect in June. Of course, it allows for medical assistance in dying, but it doesn't protect a person's choice of palliative care when only 15% to 30% of Canadians have access. Can you comment on how this bill will take care of people's right to choose?