Procedure and House Affairs Committee on May 13th, 2010

[Christiane Gagnon, Bloc, Québec, QC]

I do not really have a question so much as an observation. There are consequences to proroguing the House, of course. In a situation such as yours, you must have felt powerless.

I do not think that the public initially understood what prorogation entailed. But there were many people who wanted to educate the public on the consequences of prorogation. There was a snowball effect. A Web site was set up by a young man, who appeared before us. A university professor appealed to his peers. Then there was a sense that people had a better understanding of the impact of proroguing the House and the reasons why it was used. We now see that the public feels it was inappropriate to prorogue the House in that way.

In response to an earlier question, you recommended shortening the period of time in question, but do you have other recommendations, for example, that certain committees continue to sit? Do you see that as a possible solution? I know that in some provinces, committees continue to meet during prorogation. When committees do not meet and certain pieces of legislation are not dealt with, it jeopardizes the public.

[Donald Sproule]

Yes, that very definitely would have been of benefit to us, if the committee could have continued during prorogation. I agree.

[Christiane Gagnon, Bloc, Québec, QC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Mr. Christopherson.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thanks very much, Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Sproule, for your attendance today.

I can't imagine anything that would be more terrifying to someone, especially as they get to their late forties and into their fifties, to find out that the pension they were counting on is gone, jeopardized, slashed. The thing about pensions is that it's one of the areas where once you reach a certain age, you can't go back and fix it. You can't go back and start working somewhere else and develop a new 30 years of seniority. Once you reach 55, 56, and are getting close to 60, it's over, and either the money is there and you're going to live a dignified retirement or you're on the borderline of poverty, and it's terrifying. I have an awful lot of constituents who are living in that world right now and I don't have an answer for them.

I want to compliment you on behalf of the people you represent. Though it's not going to change their world that you're here, it's going to make them feel good that you're taking every opportunity you possibly can to bring this issue before the public and to keep reminding people and keep reminding parliamentarians that this issue is there. To that degree, I compliment you for doing this for your colleagues. You found a hook in there, one little piece of this, so be it. This issue is big enough, and I compliment you for your leadership in making sure that you're out there every chance you get —and this is one of those chances.

You were here earlier and heard Mr. Topp talking about penalties as one of the things we're looking at, or disincentives. There are so many different ways to go that we've made no decisions yet, but what are your thoughts about those? They wouldn't have changed the world, but would they have helped? Having felt that you got “screwed”, to use layperson's language, by your own parliament, or at least by the government of the day, would it have helped at all if there were some penalties to be paid? Or was the damage done, and you really don't care?

[Donald Sproule]

Penalties in terms of parliamentarians or the government?

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Penalties on the government. In other words, if the government did the same thing in the future, there would be penalties. They wouldn't be able to introduce bills, they wouldn't be able to advance their legislation. There would be internal parliamentary disciplines that they'd face.

[Donald Sproule]

I'm really not an expert or at liberty to say, but—

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

But would it make you feel better to know that those were happening, or would that really not matter to you?

[Donald Sproule]

I think the key thing for me is to know that government is still functioning. I come back to the committees; that was the one thing that we wanted. We understand that it's a complex issue. We wanted to make sure the proper debate happened in the public domain, and that's why the continued working of the committees would have been of real benefit to us.

Coming back to what we're trying to do in putting this on a national agenda, we understand that it may be too late for us, for the Nortels of this world. But you know what? There are the next poor suckers who are going to come along and be in our situation. We've been told that it's going to be too late for Nortel; but there is never a convenient time to make these changes, and that's why we want to make sure that this is on the national agenda and that the momentum continues.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Absolutely.

[Donald Sproule]

Prorogation did not help.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

No, and I think this is great; you found something to say about prorogation, you got yourself in front of a committee, and you're fighting for those people you represent. God bless you; that's what you're supposed to be doing.

My last question is this. Would it make a difference, in your mind—again, maybe it would affect the outcome, or maybe not—for a question like that to be put to Parliament and everyone to get a vote on it? Or do you think the question should remain with the government and let them take the political heat for the decision, through accountability? Would you have felt better if every parliamentarian had had a chance to have a say and a vote on whether prorogation should happen?

[Donald Sproule]

Being the head of an organization with 17,500 pensioners, I'm now entering the political realm myself, and I think one of the key things is to understand what the people want. I would, then, support the idea of this going in front of Parliament and getting the wishes of Parliament tabled rather than it being a government decision.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Very good. Thank you, sir.

Thank you, Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Are there questions from anyone else?

Seeing none, we'll go to our committee business.

Mr. Sproule, thank you for coming here today. I think the committee understands your plight.

[Donald Sproule]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

We're looking for solutions to prorogation too, at the same time. So thank you for giving us two things to work on.

[Donald Sproule]

All right.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you.

Just quickly, should I move in camera to do committee business, or is it okay if we simply have a discussion? I don't find anything about it that's.... It's scheduling issues that I'm going to talk about today.

First off, the Chief Electoral Officer has asked us to visit Elections Canada. This committee did that last year to see the running of the elections office. This year it's something to do with electronic voting, and some other stuff they'd like us to see. June 17 is the date they have picked for us to tour Elections Canada. When this committee did it the last time, we simply met there at 11 o'clock in our committee time and used a couple of hours to do so.

If I have the permission of the committee, I will go ahead and set that meeting up. It would be on June 17, so it would be the second to last meeting before we are out for the summer, if we follow the schedule as it stands.

Seeing no opposition, I'll move on to the next item.

You recognize that we're about to go on a constituency break week. As we mentioned at the last meeting, when we come back, we have the main estimates with the Speaker and the clerk and with the Chief Electoral Officer at our first meeting. At our second meeting the week we are back, our crackerjack staff will have a report ready for us on the use of electronics in the House, and we'll have to discuss that report and accept it or not, or whatever we need to do with it. That's a full two hours. We'll just call it committee business. That's on May 27. That's the week we're back.

We then have one more witness who has responded to us on prorogation, Professor Heard, from Simon Fraser University, who is one of the other experts. We have him scheduled for the first hour on June 1.

We're leaving the second hour of June 1 as a wrap-up hour for us to discuss direction to the analysts to start working on the report. They're already, of course--we know--mostly done; they just like to think they have lots of work left.

If we were to get a response back from any other witness, we would fill that half hour and then move that committee work off.

We're also expecting, of course, some legislation to come back soon to this committee, filling our other meetings between June 3 and June 17. If not, we will return to our study on the referendum act.

Are there questions on committee business?

Seeing none, I'll take that as approval for where we're headed.

We'll see you all in about 10 days.

Thank you very much. It was a great meeting today.

The meeting is adjourned.