You're quite right, Garnett, absolutely right. In parliamentary history, for the vast majority of the years since 1867, in fact, right up until the early 2000s, every member of Parliament had a right to submit substantive or deleterious amendments at report stage.
In 1999, the Reform Party objected to the Nisga'a treaty and brought forward over 700 amendments. You may actually recall this. They were in the guise of substantive, in that they weren't mere deletions, but they were essentially, mostly frivolous and vexatious, changing a semicolon here, changing a word here or there. It tied up report stage on the Nisga'a treaty in a significant way.
At the time, the Liberal majority went to change the rules. They actually changed the rules. They didn't do these motions committee by committee, which I regard as removing, by stealth, the rights of MPs. In the past, the larger party did change those rules, and said, “Look, you had a chance, Reform Party, in committee to provide any amendments you wanted to the Nisga'a treaty. This is an attempt to misuse...”, etc. I think there would have been other ways to handle this, such as by saying it isn't a substantive amendment if it isn't substantially different in a context or content sense.
Instead, what they did, the parliamentary process of the larger parties, was to say that this is how it's going to work from now on. If you, as an individual, had access to make changes as a party, which I think is also offensive.... In this place we're all equal, in theory, and the fact that we surrender identity to party status isn't required by Westminster parliamentary democracy or our Constitution. It's a problem of parties having too much power.
They decided to say that if you, as an MP, had access through your party to make amendments at committee, you can't get two kicks at the can, and come back and make them at report stage. By inference, that meant that members in smaller parties such as the Green Party, or the Bloc, or any independents, or for that matter, the NDP once, when they were down to nine members.... Those members not having access to sit on committees as permanent members had the right—and I still do under the rules—to bring forward amendments at report stage.
This motion was invented, as I mentioned, in the previous Parliament, in order to prevent members of Parliament in smaller parties from bringing forward amendments at report stage.
I would agree with you entirely. There is no reason in principle that, in the practice of passing legislation in this place, we should deprive any member of their right to present amendments at report stage. That's been done, and done in the rules themselves. Without changing our rules as they appear in our parliamentary rules of procedures, of Standing Orders, and so on, this is an attempt, committee by committee, under the fiction that committees are the masters of their own process, for the Prime Minister's Office or the government House leader to insist on a change to deprive smaller party members of Parliament of their rights.