Thank you. I appreciate the time to speak to this. Most people around this table—all the people around this table—are friends of mine, and this is both a parliamentary matter of principle and it's also intensely personal. This series of motions that are just being passed, I've been considering whether it will have an immediate effect on my health or merely take years off my life later, and I'm not saying this facetiously. I'm saying in all honesty that this is terrifying for me personally.
What we're facing here is a couple of fictions. The first fiction is that my friend Mark Gerretsen says this is his motion. I know he didn't write it. It was written under the PMO in the previous government. The second fiction is that parliamentary committees are the masters of their own proceedings. It stretches credulity to imagine that parliamentary committees, all of a sudden in the fall of 2013, all automatically adopted the same motion and that it has sprung into the mind of all parliamentary committees simultaneously in the spring of 2016 to do it again.
This is changing the way in which legislation goes through Parliament, changing parliamentary procedures without going through the trouble and the steps it takes to change Standing Orders and change rules. This is the last step required, if every parliamentary committee does this after every election in every session of Parliament. This is essentially taking report stage and making it an anachronistic redundancy, as opposed to being what it was historically, an opportunity for parliamentarians as a whole, not merely members of committees, to suggest amendments.
The brief history of this is that up until the year 2002, members of Parliament of all parties had the right to put forward amendments at report stage. As a result of a 1999 effort by the Alliance party at that time, more than 700 amendments to the Nisga'a treaty were put forward in an attempt to derail it at report stage. The party in power at that time, the former Liberal government of Jean Chrétien—Don Boudria as House leader—retreated to a long process. It took them a couple of years to actually change the parliamentary rules such that a member of Parliament who had an opportunity through their party to put forward amendments to a bill in committee had no such right to put forward further substantive amendments at report stage.
That created the unintended reality that the only members of Parliament with an opportunity to put forward substantive amendments at report stage were those who, again through an irregular process creating two tiers of members of Parliament, were in parties smaller than 12 or sitting as independents. We were the only ones who did have rights to put forward amendments at report stage.
The only remnant of what report stage has been historically, going back through Westminster parliamentary democratic history, was the ironic reality that only members in parties with fewer than 12 had rights to put forward amendments at report stage, because we'd had no opportunity in committee; hence the creation of a fake opportunity of running from committee to committee to put forward amendments, but having no right to move them—as you see in this motion, they're “deemed to have been moved”—having no right to vote on them, and having no right to do anything other than pursue a brief opportunity to make a representation in support of them.
The reality for me personally is that many times committees will be doing clause-by-clause consideration at the same time. I raced to the environment committee in the 41st Parliament with amendments to keep seismic testing out of Sable Island National Park and got there too late. My amendments had all been defeated because I was tied up in a different committee trying to put forward amendments on a different bill.
This creates a virtual impossibility for me personally. Now, I'm very well aware that you've all been told this has to be passed and has to be passed today. Earlier today, the national defence committee was told they had to pass it and had to pass it without giving me an opportunity to speak, because, to make my point, I was tied up with BillC-14, where I'd been summoned to the justice committee to do my amendments there.
