I understand the government's approach to this. It's not the only committee that this has cropped up at, so it's not as if it's something that's specific to here. In fact, I would argue that it's non-specific to here because it actually hasn't happened to us at report stage. Really what we're talking about is the independents' ability to make amendments at report stage, at third reading, in the House of Commons. Consequently, we have long votes because a certain member, or members, are entitled to do that as independents—and there are now more independents than there were before.
The idea that they could come here and make an amendment, on the surface, might seem to be fair, except they don't get to vote on it. When they make their amendment in the House, they get to vote on it. We would, on one hand, say to them, here, bring your amendment and you can speak to it, and on the other hand take away their right to actually vote on their own amendment because we would vote as committee members, because they're not committee members under the Standing Orders and cannot be because they're not deemed to be a party; they're deemed to be independents. They would no longer have the right to vote.
I guess more troubling, and I'll read the O'Brien and Bosc piece, is that clearly we are changing inside standing committees the rules of the House, of how the House itself sees how things should be done. Let me quote O'Brien and Bosc:
It is the House, and the House alone, that appoints the members and associate members of its committees, as well as the Members who will represent it on joint committees. The Speaker has ruled that this is a fundamental right of the House. The committees themselves have no powers at all in this regard.
This is on page 1019 of O'Brien and Bosc.
Furthermore:
The Standing Orders specifically exclude a non-member from voting, moving motions or being counted for purposes of a quorum.
That's on page 1018 of O'Brien and Bosc.
Basically, we're asking the House to make a procedural change through individual committees, rather than simply saying to the House, at the end of the day, “Why doesn't the House itself say this is how you should do it?”
I don't like voting all night long either—to be truthful, I don't think it serves some purposes sometimes, and I think it simply gums up the works—but it is the independents' right under the rules to make amendments at third stage, because they cannot... They can come and sit, and I used to do it. For those who were in the last Parliament, when Alex was here and I showed up, I was allowed to sit at the end of the table and look at the proceedings, and sometimes in this committee, at least, which was very gracious, actually, there were many times when Alex would allow me to have a few minutes, and I would get unanimous consent without having to do the paper swap back and forth. The committee worked quite well that way.
The problem is we can't do that with an independent. The chair has no right to allow the independent, if they were to show up, if they actually wanted to be involved in, say, a piece of legislation that we were dealing with that had a witness, to actually ask questions of a witness. The only right they would have would be to make an amendment, and one that they actually couldn't vote on, as I said earlier. I find it peculiar, to be honest, that you can move a motion, say a few words about it, and then have to sit and watch whether people like it or not, and not have an ability to vote on your own amendment, versus, as I said earlier, the House actually giving them that right to make the amendment and then they can stand in their place and vote for the amendment they've made.
I'm always worried when we do things at a moment in time that may affect other moments in time later on. It wasn't that long ago when we weren't necessarily seen as a registered party. It wasn't that long ago when your predecessors, the Progressive Conservatives, weren't a party either. So albeit there may be a sense that, well, things don't seem to work well and don't flow well at the moment through third stage, at report stage, at third reading in the House, because a lot of things seem to come, I actually think the Speaker has done an admirable job in putting together a series of amendments and bringing them together as groupings, rather than a whole series where we literally might have hundreds. He's been able to group them into large groupings and then have a vote as a block, which is obviously his right to do, and correctly so, albeit some of the independents may not like it. They've certainly been able to have their ability to get a say and to put them forward and then vote.
I'd be disappointed if we were to go ahead and push this through. I know my friends on the other side would like to do this, but I would prefer that they go back and think about it first. I recognize that if they bring it back to us again, so be it. If they definitely want it, they're going to do it, and they might even do it in camera next time, because we're not in camera now. Ultimately, I just don't think this is a good path to follow. As I said, it probably really isn't going to affect us. The likelihood of our having legislation in front of us between now and the next election seems remote, unless the government has something it hasn't told us yet. We're probably going to get on to some studies of some description and get back into the norm we've been in before, which is doing studies. We've just come through a good part of a year where, basically, we were studying the value chain.
I would ask my friends across the way.... For us it doesn't matter, in a sense; it won't have an impact on us if we don't do this. And I think it lets the folks over there—the Speaker specifically—make a decision about whether this is how we want to change things for independents. Who knows when one might be one? If I had suggested to you that the number of independents—including ours, by the way, as we've had folks leave us, so it's not one-sided here—would grow from the 2011 election date to now, I would have thought that, at better than even odds, it wouldn't have been the case. But it has been the case.
I think we're now dealing with a group of independents to whom we might be denying a right—and ourselves, because who knows one day if one might choose to be an independent, or think independently in a way that one no longer can sit on a committee? I just find it a little troubling that we want to make the rules of the committee, albeit we have a right. I know my friend across the way, the parliamentary secretary, will talk to me about committees being the master of their own domain, if you will. But this infringes on the rights of those who can't come and defend them. Here we are talking about making decisions about them—independents, that is—and yet they're not here, so they can't actually come in and defend themselves and say, “I don't like this because of X.” They actually need someone else to do it for them. That's troubling in itself. We'll make a decision for other members of Parliament, whether they like it or not, and yet not invite them to come and defend themselves at the same time—I mean at least one of them. If you let them all come in, they might have different ideas, and maybe we should let them all come in, I don't know.
It seems we're deciding we'll have them do things in a certain way without any input from them. It loses the balance, to me, Mr. Chair.
Let me end with that. I'm sure my colleague across the way will help me understand why this is a needed piece inside our Standing Orders.
