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.
