Procedure and House Affairs Committee on June 18th, 2007

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Colleagues, let's bring our meeting to order.

There are a couple of things I want to mention at the start.

The agenda for today lists the meeting as being from eleven o'clock until one o'clock. I just want to bring it to your attention that we do have the room until two o' clock, if we need it. The committee did vote on extending to three hours all the meetings—including today's—that were necessary this week, so a slight error there. I'm just bringing it to your attention, then, that this meeting is scheduled to go until two o'clock, if necessary. As a result of that, of course we do have lunch coming, so not to worry; there will be lunch arriving as needed.

Colleagues, once again, pursuant to the order of reference of May 28, the committee will continue its study on Bill C-54. As decided by the committee last week, we will now commence clause-by-clause. I should remind you that this meeting is being held in public.

To the officials, I thank you for coming out again. We certainly appreciated your visit last week, and will potentially more so today.

I would now ask you each to introduce yourselves and give your position.

[Marc Chénier, Counsel, Legislation and House Planning, Privy Council Office]

My name is Marc Chénier and I am a legal counsel in the democratic reform group at the Privy Council Office.

[Dan McDougall, Director of Operations, Legislation and House Planning, Privy Council Office]

I'm Dan McDougall, director of operations with legislation and House planning at the Privy Council Office.

[Randall Koops, Senior Policy Advisor, Legislation and House Planning, Privy Council Office]

I'm Randall Koops, senior policy advisor with legislation and House planning, also at the Privy Council Office.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Thank you very much.

Members, I want to thank you all again for your diligence in getting to us by the deadline any amendment changes. If you had an opportunity to look through the package of material distributed last Friday, you will have noted that there was in fact one additional amendment. It is in your package on page 2.1, indicated as a new amendment. It was not in the original package you received at the beginning of last week.

So you now have, hopefully, the updated copy of the amendments. If you do not have that, we have extra copies. You'll know you have the new one when you see page 2.1 in the package.

I will also tell you, as I did before, that I have found all of the amendments, including the new one, in order. So we are ready to move on with our clause-by-clause. I'll just remind members that we will simply put the clause on the table. If there is an amendment to the clause, we'll ask the particular representative of the party that made to amendment to introduce it. The amendment will be moved and we can have debate on it. We have our experts here to help us if we need their help. Then we will vote on it and proceed to the next clause.

If there is no amendment to a particular clause, there is an opportunity to discuss the clause. However, I think we could probably put the question to those clauses as we move through. As we come upon them, we can put the question if there's nothing to do.

Again, I would remind members about the amendments as they come in. There are two ways in which we organize our amendments. One, obviously, is in the order in which they appear in the bill. In the cases of multiple amendments to the same line in the bill, then we time them very specifically as to when they were received. Whoever got their amendment in first is obviously dealt with first, in that case.

Did you want to bring something up, Mr. Owen?

[Stephen Owen, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Yes, just a question on process. A number of the amendments from different parties tend to be consequential. Will they be grouped so that we can try to deal with them more quickly?

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Yes. In the case of consequential amendments, there are a couple of amendments where, when we make one change, changes are then necessary to other clauses. We have our legislative clerks here as well. They're going to help us pin those things together. We can move through this fairly quickly.

I think members have probably noticed with this bill that there are repetitive clauses. Ultimately the bill has been written for registered associations, for example, and registered parties, and leadership candidates, and so on. Clauses tend to repeat themselves as we change which individual we're talking about. So I think once we get the first five or six out of the way, we'll start to see the repetition.

Without further delay, I think we should start with our clause-by-clause.

Colleagues, just let me take a moment to make sure we're on track here....

Please, Mr. Reid.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Just further to Mr. Owen's point, may I assume that if there are any situations in which the adoption of one amendment would have the consequence of making it impossible to adopt the second one, that will be pointed out to us?

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

It will be. In fact, just to warn everybody, what you're concerned with actually affects most of the amendments. So you'll see that we do have a conflict, and I'll explain that to everybody as we hit that clause.

Colleagues, I should remind everybody of just one more thing before we get going. Bill C-31, which this committee took great pains to review and question witnesses on, is actually up for debate in the House at 12 o'clock today. It's a bit of a time conflict, since most of the experts on that bill are right here at this table. So I just wanted to let you know. It's not a push to get this done in any way, but let's see if we can get this done, and the members should know that we're debating all the good work that we did up in the House at noon today.

(Clauses 1 and 2 agreed to)

(On clause 3)

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

There are two amendments to clause 3. There is NDP-1, which you will find on page 1, and CPC-1 on page 2. The NDP amendment was in first, and I would ask the member from the NDP to introduce and move that amendment.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

The reason for the amendment is simply—and I'm sure it's similar to other amendments—that it's making a certainty for the bill and clarification on firmness of rates and getting some predictability. The intent of this is to simply give that to the bill and to firm it up a bit, and I guess there are other amendments similar to this.

I would rewind on that, Chair. It's the deletion of lines 14 to 21 on page 1 and replacing lines 22 to 26 and lines 1 to 3 on page 2 with the following:

Act are repealed

Elections Canada had suggested this change due to duplication, so it's a simple suggestion that had been brought forward by Elections Canada and it speaks to any concerns around duplication.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Colleagues, I want to point out that we do have a line conflict between this NDP-1 and CPC-1 on page 2 of your package. Obviously if we adopt NDP-1 we will not be proceeding with CPC-1.

I'll give members a few minutes to let that sink in.

Mr. Guimond, please.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

We will be voting against the amendment suggested by our NDP colleague. However, we will be voting in favour of the amendment proposed by the Conservatives. We feel that the NDP amendment removes an association's obligation to declare in its financial report the loans, securities and related transactions in the association's name, as well as the loans taken out for the campaign. For those reasons, we cannot support an amendment that would clearly have such an effect.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Thank you, Mr. Guimond.

Mr. Owen, you had your hand up, and then Mr. Preston.

[Stephen Owen, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Thank you.

I make the same point as Monsieur Guimond makes, but with the opposite conclusion. I think that one of the concerns with this—and I'm not sure whether this is what the NDP has in mind, but it comes up at other times in their proposed amendments—is the difficulty, which we heard some evidence on last Thursday, of riding associations in rural areas that do not have access to chartered accountants and financial agents. With onerous reporting requirements, they simply may not be able to keep up or find someone capable of keeping track of all of these things. I think perhaps that was one of the concerns the NDP had on it. There are vastly different financial—not monetary but financial—expertise resources available in different ridings across the country.

I just throw that out for discussion. It doesn't determine it in my mind one way or the other. I do think we have to have accurate accounting for these issues, but there was a sense of realism raised by witnesses from the parties on Thursday.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

That's a good point.

Could we have Mr. Preston and then Mr. Lukiwski?

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

The true question here was obviously that if we do one, we can't do something else, so I'm going to stand against the NDP amendment so that the CPC amendment can go through.

I'd like to ask the witnesses a question, if possible. The reason for the NDP amendment had to do with some comment from Elections Canada on duplication problems or something. Is that really true?

[Marc Chénier]

Mr. Chair, I'd just like to point out to the committee that proposed section 405.6 just sets out what must be included in the report on loans, and the various clauses that are listed provide for the actual return that must be provided by each entity. If you look at proposed subsection 405.6(2), it says that the report on loans has to be submitted with a return that's provided by each political entity, so that there is in fact no duplication. It's the same return we are talking about. Proposed section 405.6 just specifies what must be in the return.

The second comment is just maybe a caution to the committee that if you adopt the motion as is at paragraph 405.5(1)(b), that would have the effect of removing all reporting requirements on unpaid claims by the various entities. They would just cease to exist, so Elections Canada would not be able to see what claims remained unpaid.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Mr. Lukiwski, do you have a comment?

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Mr. Chair, based on comments just made, I'd be happy to withdraw the amendment and move on to the next one.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

We need unanimous consent from the committee. Is there unanimous consent to withdraw that motion?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Staying with clause 3, can we now deal with amendment CPC-1, on page 2, please?

Who would be the spokesperson from the Conservative Party?

Mr. Preston.

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

I'll quickly do it.

It was something we talked about with other witnesses. The amendment allows for your contribution limit to return to you in that year if a loan is paid off. This is one of the amendments that help us get that thing started. That is truly all we're trying to accomplish with this one.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Is there anybody else who would like to speak to that, or are we ready for the question?

Mr. Dewar, please, and then Mr. Proulx.