Bill C-32 (40th Parliament, 3rd Session) Committee on Nov. 23rd, 2010

[Dean Del Mastro, Conservative, Peterborough, ON]

This is a different amendment.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gord Brown]

Well, okay.

So we will proceed with this amendment.

[An hon. member]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Conservative, Gord Brown]

I think we can't continue to throw up multiple amendments if there is clearly no interest by the committee to proceed for additional hours. But you are proposing different hours in this one, so we could proceed on this one.

Your amendment to the motion is that we sit from 8:45 to 10:45--in addition to the Monday and Wednesday sittings, from 8:45 to 10:45. Is that correct, Mr. Del Mastro?

[Dean Del Mastro, Conservative, Peterborough, ON]

That's correct.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gord Brown]

Okay. Debate?

Mr. Lake.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

I'd like to hear some thoughts from some of the opposition members on this. We're talking about two hours a day now.

If I had walked into this room today and the opposition had suggested that we meet for eight hours a week, I would have thought that was still ridiculously low, given the urgency of the legislation. Obviously, we're trying to come to some accommodation or reasonable balance here, reaching out to someone over there to hopefully recognize that maybe there's some cooperation we can come to here.

I don't know.... Mr. McTeague isn't really listening. Is anybody listening over there? No?

Yes? Okay. Thanks.

Madame Lavallée is listening, but I don't think she's going to go for it.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

Really, you guys, for two hours a day, four days a week--eight hours a week--surely accommodation can be made here. Then we can address at the industry committee today the possibility of at least tentatively freeing up our industry time to meet as well. But we can kind of cross that bridge down the road. The heritage committee, I assume, can kind of do the same thing when it comes to it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gord Brown]

Ms. Lavallée.

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Mr. Chairman, I would like to reiterate that this is the third amendment and that all three amendments introduced to date have been rejected by members sitting on this side of the table. Clearly, on this side, we have verbally expressed what we would like to see happen. We have made our arguments and will make others. We have clearly expressed why we only wanted to sit two days a week. We wish to have the public part of our meeting held on Monday afternoons and Wednesday afternoons. A legislative committee is not a committee for expediting business, even though that was the impression Mr. Braid was under earlier on.

A legislative committee is struck because when ministers table bills they may choose to have them studied by a legislative committee. Why would the spirit of a bill be referred to a legislative committee? Because the minister in question wants a dedicated committee to study the bill. If the bill were to be sent to the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology, there may be other motions on the table, as you know. The same thing may occur if the bill is sent to the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage.

The idea of creating a legislative committee is not to expedite the work, expedite the procedures, even though, in the past, a number of these committees have worked in this way. In 2006, for C-2, the Accountability Act, it was hell, it made no sense. Members sat six days a week on this committee; in fact I think they sat 40 hours per week. It made no sense, it was not desirable. In any event, we saw later on how the things that had been written into that bill were not consistent with what the government ended up doing. Perhaps government members should have taken more time to read the bill and then to apply its principles.

The Bloc Québécois will be voting against this amendment and hopes there will be no further amendments, so we may vote on the main motion.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gord Brown]

Mr. McTeague.

[Dan McTeague, Liberal, Pickering—Scarborough East, ON]

My hope is that Mr. Lake won't interrupt me this time with a point of order.

But I want to put this on the record again, so that he is in fact listening as opposed to trying to make snide remarks about opposition members and impugn motive. Perhaps he'd like to listen to the following.

His whip has made it abundantly clear that they will not allow the suspension of the industry and heritage committees, for a variety of reasons, while this committee is going on. If this issue is so important to the government, they would certainly have taken the position that this committee takes precedence over the work of the other committees. This is not to slight those committees and the good work they're doing. A bit of preparation on behalf of the government would have been awfully helpful. If this is so urgent, then the government ought to have prepared itself in advance of this, as opposed to waiting for six months.

That being said, if the government or its members want to propose successive times at which we're going to meet “over and above”, I suggest that this would be futile, simply because we have a huge schedule ahead of us. I think we want to take the time to understand and legitimately take the opportunity to look at each and every case and at each and every witness and digest this appropriately. It has been suggested here that our level of preparation is high, while our resources are not what they are on the government side.

But if we want to strike a cooperative note, this is a terrible way to start, Mr. Lake. I would suggest that in order to get around this, we take a bit of time to deal with our respective whips to see whether there could be opportunity down the road for more time by appropriating more time for this committee versus the other two committees, the standing committees on heritage and on industry.

That being said, I believe, notwithstanding anything else here, that we should proceed to the vote. There is opportunity for cooperation, but if you guys are going to keep coming back and trying to make this some kind of spectacle in which you're blaming the opposition for everything under the sun, probably including next the sinking of the Titanic, I'd suggest that we start on a very different pace.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gord Brown]

All right. So we'll move to the--

Mr. Lake?

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

I'm sorry. I have to address that.

Just to be clear, Mr. Chair, what we're studying right now in the industry committee is a private member's bill dealing with Nortel pensioners. We have two more meetings still—today and Thursday—to deal with it. Yes, it's important to the government. It's an NDP private member's bill. And yes, it is important to the government that we finish studying that bill. I'm not sure whether Mr. McTeague has a problem with our continuing and finishing studying that bill, but I'm surprised to hear him suggest that somehow it's not important to him.

What I've made clear to him is that, beyond the study of that bill, in industry committee—and we're about to go over there right after this meeting—we'll be supporting cancelling what's on the agenda or moving forward what's on the agenda so that we can clear our schedule for the following meetings of the industry committee. But again, to be clear, right now we're studying a bill on Nortel pensioners, a private member's bill from the NDP, and we think it's important that we finish that study.

Second, in regard to all the commentary around timelines here, you can say what you want about the parliamentary schedule and the way things happen in the House of Commons. There are all sorts of reasons that things take a little while to work their way through the House of Commons. On some bills, certain parties insist on putting up virtually every member of their party to speak on the bill, and that eats up a significant amount of time. From time to time, a party will move a concurrence motion and eat up three hours in a day. There are all sorts of reasons why things take time to go through the parliamentary schedule. Of course, there is negotiation among the House leaders of the parties to determine what actually goes through.

But let's be clear. We did a consultation in 2009 over the course of the summer, intensive consultation in which we heard from stakeholders on this. The bill was introduced several months ago, obviously, and that has allowed time to have various stakeholders study the bill themselves to come to positions, so that when we get to this point, at committee, we can do a proper study of the legislation. There are more stakeholders on this piece of legislation than any piece of legislation I've seen, and I think we're all aware of that.

So that's where we are in terms of timeframe. I think most Canadians who looked at that timeframe would think it's reasonable. Now it's time to get to work studying the legislation. What we're saying at this point is that four hours a week is not enough. It's plain and simple: four hours a week is not enough. I'll be careful in the way I word this, because there's some sensitivity on the other side, but it's quite clear that the opposition parties had discussions prior to this meeting, because they all came in with the exact same position—four hours a week.

We were surprised by that. Up until 15 minutes before this meeting, I hadn't had a conversation with somebody from the other side who had suggested that to me. We had conversations, but no one had suggested four hours a week until fifteen minutes before the meeting. Yes, it did surprise us, thus the reaction on this side. It sounds like it's a done deal. It was decided long ago by the other three parties. There's apparently not much that we can do about that, and we're going to move forward on it, but I hope that as we move forward we'll have the opportunity to take a look at our schedules within the industry committee and the heritage committee to try to clear up some time.

Certainly it sounds from what Mr. McTeague is saying as though, once we finish hearing from witnesses—hearing from the people affected by the Nortel situation—and get through the study of Bill C-501, there will be some cooperation among parties to clear the schedule. If this committee wishes to take up that time, that would give us four more hours a week, moving forward after this week. Perhaps we can see the same thing happen in the heritage committee.

My hope is that moving forward we'll see some increased level of cooperation among the parties to place a higher priority on this particular issue. Again, I implore the members of the committee, whatever your position is or whatever it is you might want to change about this legislation, hopefully there's a commitment to try to ensure that the legislation passes before we wind up coming to election, whatever it might be that precipitates that election at some point in a minority Parliament. Otherwise, we're just going to be doing this over and over again, and that's not in the interests of any of the stakeholders.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gord Brown]

Thank you, Mr. Lake.

Mr. Del Mastro is next, and then we're going to move to the vote on the amendment.

[Dean Del Mastro, Conservative, Peterborough, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I would support what Mr. Lake just indicated. I did check just briefly with the whip's office. The whip's office is giving us no direction on committees. It's up to the committees to determine if they choose to meet or not.

I would place a higher priority on this than what we are currently undertaking at the heritage committee. I will bring a motion to the heritage committee and I hope to find support to suspend, just while we are reviewing this bill, and apply that time to this committee, which would open up an opportunity for us to meet a little bit more here. It's maybe not as much as we'd like, but it may be better to get part of a pie than the whole pie. I'll take what I can get. We'll try to increase that a little bit and try to demonstrate the priority that should be placed on this committee.

Mr. Chairman, members of the opposition should know that both ministers, from Canadian Heritage and from Industry, are prepared to meet with the committee and to appear before the committee on Thursday. I think the members of the committee should allow that to occur.

I'd like to see support for this amendment that we meet Tuesday and Thursday mornings. It seems like the fix may be in a bit and we're not going to get it, but if members are not going to support that we meet on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, in addition to the 3:30 to 5:30 that they're proposing for Mondays and Wednesdays, I would ask that they allow the ministers to appear this Thursday morning. They are prepared to do that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gord Brown]

Okay. We have to deal with the amendment as presented.

Mr. McTeague.

[Dan McTeague, Liberal, Pickering—Scarborough East, ON]

We're jumping the gun on both fronts.

Mr. Del Mastro, I understand that Mr. Lake has proposed his response to obviously not listening to my interests on the industry committee to make sure we hear witnesses in terms of its ongoing business, but this is stuff that could have taken place well before this day. We're asked to resolve something that should have taken...which demonstrates the government's lack of preparedness in advance of what they consider to be such an important issue. We think it's an important issue, but not to the detriment of all others.

Mr. Del Mastro, this is a request on top of a request.

Can we deal with the motion first, Chair, and then determine what we can do in terms of future accommodation? We're already getting off on the wrong foot here.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gord Brown]

Okay. We're going to proceed to the vote on the amendment, which is to add, in addition to the Monday and Wednesday meetings, Tuesday and Thursday meetings from 8:45 to 10:45. I'm calling the question on that.

We have a request for a recorded vote on that, Madam Clerk.

[An hon. member]

Can you tell us what the motion is?

[The Chair, Conservative, Gord Brown]

We're voting on the amendment, which would add Tuesday and Thursday sittings from 8:45 to 10:45.

(Amendment negatived: nays 6; yeas 5)

The amendment is defeated. We're returning to the main motion, which is to sit from 3:30 to 5:30 Mondays and Wednesdays.

Is there any further discussion on the main motion?

We will proceed to a vote on the main motion.

Monsieur Cardin.

[Serge Cardin, Bloc, Sherbrooke, QC]

That was what I was going to propose, Mr. Chairman. Let us vote on the main motion immediately.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gord Brown]

All right. All in favour of the motion to meet Mondays and Wednesdays from 3:30 to 5:30?

(Motion agreed to)

Mr. Del Mastro.

[Dean Del Mastro, Conservative, Peterborough, ON]

I'd like to seek an accommodation from the opposition to meet this Thursday to hear from the Ministers of Industry and Heritage between the hours of 8:45 and 10:45, Mr. Chairman.