Evidence of meeting #86 for Finance in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was committees.
A video is available from Parliament.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative James Rajotte
No, I would ask a member. For instance, if a member of the official opposition moved an amendment in another committee, and the amendment is here, then I would ask a member of the official opposition to move that particular amendment.
It shall be deemed to be proposed, yes.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative James Rajotte
And then, obviously, I would ask the party that proposed it to lead off the debate.
Now we have Mr. Brison.
Liberal
Scott Brison Liberal Kings—Hants, NS
Ms. Glover, are you suggesting there would be a period of time before an amendment, a period of notification? How long should that be?
Conservative
Shelly Glover Conservative Saint Boniface, MB
In the motion, you'll see that sections (c), (d), and (e) deal with amendments put forward and give exact and precise timelines for each of those.
I'll allow the committee members to read the motion. As I say, I think the committee has already said that we're unanimous in discussing this further later, so if you have some time while we're listening to the—
Liberal
Scott Brison Liberal Kings—Hants, NS
But just for clarification, Ms. Glover, to ensure that we all understand this, how long a period would this be, in terms of what is reasonable notice for amendments?
Conservative
Liberal
Scott Brison Liberal Kings—Hants, NS
I'm just asking if you could explain your motion, because I want to understand what a reasonable period of time is, according to this.
Conservative
Conservative
Liberal
Scott Brison Liberal Kings—Hants, NS
So that gives how many days from proposing amendments to when they're actually voted on? What sort of period are we looking at?
Conservative
The Chair Conservative James Rajotte
Yes, we'd proceed. Section (d) says, “the Committee shall proceed to clause-by-clause consideration of Bill C-45 no later than Wednesday, November 21, 2012...”.
Liberal
Scott Brison Liberal Kings—Hants, NS
So amendments would have to be in one day before that.
Ms. Glover, you're saying that for our amendments to be considered, it's important to provide one-day notice and to actually provide the wording of our amendments. I would just say that we should apply that to your motion. If, in fact, it's only reasonable that the government be given 24-hour notice of our amendments, opposition members should be given the same period of time for, for instance, this motion that we're being presented with.
We're not being dilatory, to Mr. Hoback's point. In fact, we could have prevented wasting all of this time if we had simply been provided with this motion in advance. Then we would have had an opportunity to go through it constructively and to have arrived at this meeting ready to discuss it in detail.
Conservative
NDP
Peggy Nash NDP Parkdale—High Park, ON
We have agreed that we'll actually vote on this motion later in the meeting.
On the notion of sending the bill to various committees for study, we obviously don't have any problem with that. We think that's a good thing to do. Obviously we would like to see the bill split and then have control of the piece of the bill rather than have everything come back here, but nevertheless, we support the notion of sending the bill to these different committees. We understand and support the idea about recommendations coming back to this committee.
I'm trying to think through sections (d), (e), and (f), which deal with clause-by-clause debate and the timing of that. That seems to me to be something I'd like us to think through a little more. I don't know whether today we could adopt that first part of it, but it's the end piece that I really want us to think through carefully because, first of all, we'd agreed on a schedule at our subcommittee, and this would amend that schedule without our even having met to discuss it at the subcommittee. We're not doing that until tomorrow morning.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative James Rajotte
You're saying you're okay with (a) through (c). You just have questions about (d) through (f). Is that fair?
Conservative
Conservative
Shelly Glover Conservative Saint Boniface, MB
Just for clarification for the other members of the committee, I did include notification in my speech in the House a week ago that there would be a motion coming to finance. This is the first opportunity we've had, because the vote only happened last night, and furthermore, the paragraphs referred to by Ms. Nash are exactly the same as what was adopted in the BIA 1, so there is no real change in procedure.
Finally, when we discussed our calendar in subcommittee, it was made perfectly clear that BIA was coming and that we should allow some booking of time in there, and then come and revisit. That is exactly what the government side is proposing to do now: follow what was intended to be done to begin with.