Procedure and House Affairs Committee on May 17th, 2007

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

“The little guy”. Yes. I meant that in a figurative sense, not a literal sense.

[Jay Hill, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River, BC]

Stephen thought you were talking about him, for a minute there.

[Stephen Owen, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Joe and I are substantially the same—

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Well, we are substantially the same.

[An hon. member]

It's like looking in the mirror.

[Stephen Owen, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

That's a whole other debate.

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Okay, I have material to go on now, but I could—

[Karen Redman, Liberal, Kitchener Centre, ON]

On a point of order—

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Please.

[Karen Redman, Liberal, Kitchener Centre, ON]

In case Mr. Preston runs out of material, I did have my office bring down a dictionary so we no longer had to worry. It's actually the ninth edition, but if there are any other definitions he would care to bring forward in his scintillating commentary, I'd be happy to share it.

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Oh, excellent.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Madam Redman, that is incredibly kind of you and very cooperative. I'm not sure we need to encourage the member, but I appreciate your involvement in the discussion. It's not a point of order.

Mr. Preston.

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

However, Chair, I point back now to the piece I was speaking of not that long ago—it seems not that long ago, anyway—about rules and regulations in this place. This is in fact what we talked about.

Although Madam Redman had exactly, I thought, a very relevant piece of information for me there, that she now has her dictionary here and we can look up other things, you in fact ruled her out of order. You in fact find that this point of order is—I think a point of reference, a point of education. There are all of these things that it could truly be, but these are the rules, and you're forced by the goodness of you being the chair to follow these rules and to point them out to people as they bring them forward. If the wisdom of the members around this table were added together, I'm not sure what sum we could come to, but even you, Chair, must, from time to time, tell us we are erring; we are in the wrong; we have done things that are not correct.

Well, that in fact is what your subcommittee has also tried to do, not in a vindictive way, and certainly not in a partisan way. As I've stated in reference to the subcommittee, whether it's Mr. Benoit from Vegreville—Wainwright, a good Conservative, or Mr. Silva, from Davenport, this is not about partisanship. This is not about where you came from. It's not even about the source of your material or why you're using it. It has nothing to do with any of those. It has to do with the rules and regulations the subcommittee must work under, and the subcommittee sat there and followed its own rules and its own regulations and said, on the votability of this piece of legislation, it is non-votable because it is substantially similar to another piece of legislation that we've already voted on in this House.

Mr. Lukiwski yesterday, or Tuesday, or whenever we last talked for great periods of time, mentioned that that's not the end of it. It isn't. It's not over for this piece of legislation. We haven't rang its death bell. It's not there. This bill could come back. “How?” you say. I know you're looking for information as to how, in the next session of Parliament, when there hasn't been one that's substantially similar to it that has been voted on, it could be put forward by another member of Parliament, thinking passionately that this is the type of legislation that he or she would like to see in the country of Canada. He or she could bring this forward again, for the tenth, eleventh, or twelfth time, whichever one it seems to be. It could be brought forward. In that time, between now and then, changes could even be made to it. It could be made a better piece of legislation between now and then, as could have Mr. Benoit's. When we ruled his bill non-votable, he could have gone home, and maybe he has, and is rewriting it so that next time it meets the criterion that wasn't met in the one that he looked at. He could in fact bring it back again, or should Mr. Benoit's number not be drawn early, he could convince one of his colleagues from the House, whether it's his party or another, to bring that bill forward again on his behalf, and at that point, make it votable—hopefully he has looked at the criteria we used that made it non-votable—and move it forward.

As I mentioned, even Mr. Dion, who brought forward a piece of legislation in this last one, could clearly look at the piece he was looking at. Obviously the passion wasn't in his heart to bring it forward beyond this or he could have brought it to the House for debate, but he chose to just let it go. He agreed. He said, “You know what, subcommittee? You've done good work.” He didn't say those words out loud to me, but I'm sure he must have thought them. “You've done good work. You've made this piece of legislation non-votable because it was voted on in the House.” And so he agreed with the subcommittee's great work that it was non-votable. Therefore, being non-votable, he did not have the passion to bring it forward and discuss it in the House, because it couldn't be voted on at the end of the day.

Well, Mr. Silva is saying the same.

Mr. Silva, we're offering you the same opportunity. Mr. Silva, we're saying to you, you have the rights of any member of this House that your bill has been deemed non-votable. Please, please, if you're still passionate about it, bring it forward to be discussed as a non-votable item. Please, please, if the passion is there for legislation, then discover something else.

I know Mr. Silva to be a nice man. I've travelled with him. I know he has interests that he could also come up with for other pieces of legislation that could probably fit the bill for him and he could be almost equally as passionate.

I know this was his first choice, but if he could come up with a second choice that was almost as good, he could move forward and, through remedy, come up with another piece of legislation.

This is how easy we've made private members' business in this House. We have talked about how hard it was in the past, and about what would have occurred with Ms. Bell's and Mr. Nadeau's pieces in past houses. The priority of private members' business was such that one of them simply would have been dropped. We would not have tried to come up with a remedy for them. And what a shame that something that high up in the order of precedence would have been dropped. We simply would not have had the ability to passionately bring it through.

I believe Ms. Bell recovered nicely. She brought forward another great piece of legislation and is passionately moving it through the House now.

[Libby Davies]

Yes, and you're voting against that too.

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

But you know, that's democracy.

Passionately she's moving it forward. She has the desire to bring this piece of legislation forward. I will say that it's a shame she continues to bring forward things that I disagree with. But it's not because I disagree with them that the subcommittee has ruled this way. We're bound by our own rules, whether it be, as we found in the past, a piece of legislation from our Conservative member or, in this case, Ms. Bell, a member of the New Democratic Party, or now Mr. Silva, a member of the Liberal Party.

It seems we're being very non-partisan on what we're ruling non-votable. I guess we best watch for some Bloc bills. We'll have to even this out now.

So this is what this is about. This is not about the partisan piece of this House. I recognize that from day to day this place becomes very partisan—

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

No, no, I'm not mentioning the members in this room. I know the collegial aspect we have here at this committee and how well we get along.

[Libby Davies]

We know you're not partisan—Inaudible--Editor].

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Great. Thank you.

I'm glad Ms. Davies has recognized that I'm not in that group. Certainly there are people who may be that way, but I try to be as gentle as I can and stand for my convictions. But standing for your convictions cannot be standing against the rules and regulations of this place. We must work together in order to make it work.

That was a good line. I hope somebody is recording some of this.

[Ken Epp, Conservative, Edmonton—Sherwood Park, AB]

Somebody will.

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Great.

If we don't follow the rules and regulations, it's anarchy. We're going to end up with an even more partisan situation, as I've said.

Since we seem to have been able to find some equality, even in ruling bills non-votable, from a partisan point of view, from a party point of view, I think we've kind of struck a balance. We need to look at it from that point.

Perhaps I will move on to the other point, and that's the role of this committee in this action. I need to speak to this committee as a whole.

We do things from time to time, and we certainly do have pieces of business here, that may have a partisan edge to them, but we establish working groups within this committee. I know that this committee has other subcommittees besides the committee on private members' business. It has a subcommittee that's currently looking at ethics and the forms that we all need to fill out. It has a subcommittee that even looks at the steering of this committee, what items will and will not come up next. I know that for a while we even had a subcommittee on security.

So we've had many subcommittees before, and at all times there were members from all parties sitting on these subcommittees. It's how we get the work done. It's how we divide the work among this group of very busy people. We take it down to four or five people representing all of the parties on this committee. The subcommittee is charged with being able to move forward and get that work done.

In this case, the work is private members' business, but as I say, in other cases, it's other work. Whether in fact it's just the steering of this committee or private members' business or in fact ethics, those people have been charged by the people at this table to go ahead and go forward and discover, to go ahead and go forward and determine, to go ahead and go forward and rewrite, to go ahead and look at the areas they've been charged to look at.

Those people have been charged, not by the four people who are sitting at the subcommittee, not by the four people and the chair who are sitting at the subcommittee, but by this committee as a whole.

I challenge this committee as a whole. You have given us the ability to move off. We move off as four or five. We follow a criterion. We take great advice from clerks and from researchers as we do this. But we represent this whole committee. We represent this committee as a whole. We represent each and every member, and I could name you all but I will not. We represent you all when we sit at subcommittee.

When we come back with a report from subcommittee, there's some thought process by which this committee would say, “We charged them with their duty. They went off and diligently did it. We should accept what they say; that's what we've asked them for.” When a group of us, a smaller group — and I don't mean that in size, I mean in number — moves off and looks at a piece of information — I dare say that at some point the other subcommittees will report back, whether it be on ethics or other points. In this case, the subcommittee on private members' business has reported back—

[Yvon Godin, NDP, Acadie—Bathurst, NB]

On a point of order, Mr. Chair, it's really starting to get repetitious. If they want to filibuster, they should tell us a new story.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Thank you very much.

We don't need a second point of order. We're not going to debate—

[Michel Guimond, Bloc, Montmorency—Charlevoix—Haute-Côte-Nord, QC]

On the same point.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Do you want to put something forward, Mr. Guimond? I'm not offering you the floor, though. We'll listen to a point of order.