Procedure and House Affairs Committee on June 3rd, 2014

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Yes, that's it. To me, it's about how we can make our committees more effective. I do appreciate the motion.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

We'll go to our four-minute round.

Mr. Richards, for four minutes, please.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Trost, for being here. I know what it's like to sit there and be in committee and questioned about the ideas you've brought forward in terms of a private member's bill or motion. I appreciate your being here today to do that.

First, looking at this idea, I understand what you were looking to accomplish here, but you must have done a certain amount of research. Are you aware of other jurisdictions anywhere else that are using this kind of a system? What kind of research did you do in terms of those other systems, and what did you find when you were looking at other jurisdictions?

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

What I did first was to have the great researchers at the Library of Parliament give me a brief summary of what is done in Australia, New Zealand, and the British Isles, as in Great Britain and Westminster.

New Zealand and Australia effectively have a system like the one we have here. Committees are formed, the committees meet, and then it's yea or nay for whoever is put on.

The British—and this wasn't the only inspiration; the House of Commons debate on October 31, 2002 which I referred to was also inspiration—but the British, after their parliamentary expense scandal, decided to do a look at everything in the House of Commons. As one said, it was no use wasting a crisis; they may as well use it to put through some reform.

This is one of the suggestions they came up with. It's interesting that they've found it to be very positive and something they're quite happy with. All members and all parties there support it.

I will, however, state that I don't think we should look to the British and slavishly copy them. Their culture and their system are much different. We should look to them for inspiration and maybe some practical aspects on the mechanism.

Those are the primary sources of research I looked at.

Then, of course, I've been here 10 years. You haven't been here quite as long, but we actually have some opinions about how committees should run. That very much factored into this.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

What about the Canadian provinces? You must have looked at those as well.

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

That's a fair question. In fact, I have to admit that we didn't look into that all that much. We probably should have. That's a fair point.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

Okay.

In response to some earlier questions, you were talking about the composition of committees. I understand your proposal to have it looked at in terms of how the chairs would be comprised, but in response to an earlier question, you were sort of talking about the makeup of the committee itself. You were indicating that basically the whips choose the membership of the committee, and therefore you felt that having the committee choose the chair didn't, I guess, allow for the members of the House of Commons to have enough freedom in determining who the chair would be. I think that was the gist of what you were trying to say there.

You were indicating that the whips choose the committee itself. In fact it's actually this committee, of course, that chooses the makeup of the committees. I understand you're suggesting there's some input that comes from other places, maybe the whip or other places. I get that. But you seemed to be alluding to the fact that you felt maybe the committees needed to be appointed differently from how they currently are as well.

Am I correct in that assessment? Or what was your suggestion in terms of how the committees themselves would be made up?

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

What you're talking about doesn't deal specifically with what's in my motion. Part of the reason I left that out was that's more ambitious, and it's a debate on which you may agree with me on this point, but you may not agree with me on that point.

I personally would like to see some changes and different ways of drawing committees and working things out, but as far as what I'm specifically recommending today is concerned, that's immaterial. I think it would be useful to provoke debate, and I hope there is more debate and there are more motions that come forward on that. It goes back to the point I was making with Mr. Lamoureux that committees should be creatures of the House. That gives them more strength; it gives them more flexibility. Frankly, it gives the executive a degree of insulation if the committee does something that the executive isn't thrilled with, because currently when the committee does something, the presumption is that the executive gave the order to do that. Having been here long enough—10 years—I know that may be true, but it isn't always true.

Sometimes the clarity of responsibility is a benefit for all involved.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you very much.

We'll go to Mr. Scott, for four minutes or thereabouts. I was very generous with the last questioners.

[Craig Scott, NDP, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Trost, for bringing this forward.

I want to make a quick comment. Mr. Richards is correct to say that formally PROC appoints the committees, but to say it's with some input from the whips is a little bit of an understatement. I think it's better that we go back to Mr. Lukiwski's opening concession that this is a whip-driven process, and that's the reality—whip-driven, and by definition, of course, leader-driven.

You welcome the idea that this might provoke more robust debate on committees, and I do indeed welcome that. I see this as a motion that gets us thinking. On its own merits, we should deal with it. But then what else could follow, or indeed, what could possibly be part of a recommendation coming from PROC in the context of this motion?

The whole question of the membership of committees has come up in the questions. It's all well and good to say that your system would potentially produce chairs who may be elected to chair positions because of recognized expertise, etc., but there is still the mechanism for the committee itself to remove the chair. You talked about how that might go back to the House. Would it not be a good idea to consider a reform whereby once committee members are appointed to committees, at least for a sitting, if not for a whole Parliament, they're then not removable by the whip, so as to deepen the autonomy that you're seeking to achieve in the committees?

I wonder if you see any link between your proposal and the idea of a more robust committee membership at the same time.

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

I do.

For obvious reasons I don't want to make too strong a link, because every element of a proposal should stand on its own merits, and I think that's a debate that's worth having. On what the specifics would be, how things would be done, I think members would probably disagree, and with good arguments on either side.

I'll note that with what I have here, if you have it work for the chair, and of course, if you extend it to the vice-chairs, those are members who could only be removed with the consent of the entire House of Commons. I suppose the government could kick the member out of caucus and then they'd be ineligible, something that drastic. But you'd then have a system in which a committee chair would be responsible to the entirety of the membership, and even in a majority government—let's say the member has the support of a minority of his caucus and of the other parties—they would have independence at that point to operate on their own, which I think is a good thing.

I see the link you're making. I think it's something that needs to be debated. But I think if we're going to do reforms, we wouldn't want to package too many reforms together, because my observation in this House has been that people will vote against the larger package if there is only one element in the larger package that they dislike. It would probably be prudent, if you want to get some reforms, to have a series of votes rather than to package everything into one vote, whereby someone could say they don't like one particular element and therefore they're opposed to the entirety.

[Craig Scott, NDP, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Great. Thank you for that.

Again I'm not proposing that we tack this on, but that we use this as an opportunity to signal that maybe down the road the second reform could be considered. If the House adopts your reform, do you think it's the case that the role of the chair would be enhanced, or would there be any problems? Would it in any sense be undermined? Would it be enhanced if all of the committee members, once appointed, were not removable for a specified period? Would the committee, including the chair, be able to function more independently?

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

I think that would be useful. I think that's a separate debate we'd want to have on a separate motion. I can think of times when that might be possible, because any member who has sat here for a long enough time knows that committee members do not always agree on everything even if they're from the same party. For parties with only one member, of course that's not going to happen, but for everyone else I've seen instances of that in both your party and our party. I can remember instances when the Liberals had disagreements, and sometimes the whips solved that by substituting people in and out. That would be eliminated if the reform you're proposing were followed through.

[Craig Scott, NDP, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Mr. Trost, I have one last question. Do you have any sense of how the U.K. House of Commons reform has worked in its first three or four years?

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

I don't have the particular citation for the quote, but my researcher brought up to me the other day that someone, in their follow-up report on the reform, said that election of committee chairs was if not the best thing then one of the best things that they did. Now, the British do run things slightly differently than we do, so we shouldn't automatically cut and paste from what they do. Their culture, their history, and the influence of their committees are different, but it's interesting to note that all parties there seem to have viewed this as a positive experience.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you.

If you don't mind, I'll first off declare an absolute conflict on the election of chairs. The chair is going to ask a couple of questions, too, if he could. I don't do this often, but this really has my curiosity.

Mr. Trost, if a person loved being a chair in this House and loved being the chair of a particular committee, how would you structure that from an election point of view? I would love to be the chair of this committee and certainly would put my name down to be in that election. If I were not successful—which I can't believe would be the case—I would then like to chair another committee, but if it were all happening at the same time, how would I do this? Would I put my name down under every committee? Then I might be elected to eight of them. That's a big workload too. Do you have a thought on that mechanism?

I also have one other question.

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

That's one of the mechanism questions. I'm not particularly welded to any one particular position.

My personal preference, which may not encourage you, Mr. Chair, is that all the committee chairs would be elected at the same time. It's just like in Saskatchewan, where you can't run for MLA and member of Parliament at the same time. You pick one or the other. If I lose as the member of Parliament for Saskatoon University as the Conservative candidate and the provincial election is the month following, I can't run as the Conservative equivalent provincially and get elected. That would be my personal preference.

The other way one could do this—but you would lose efficiency—would be that if you elected, based on a system of seniority, one committee chair after another, I think that would be inefficient and very difficult to do. I suspect the members would probably go for the system I'm suggesting. Otherwise we would start off with 50 people running for chair of, let's say, the foreign affairs committee or the international trade committee, which are very popular committees, and then some of the less popular committees at the end would be abandoned.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

As for being able to remove a chair, the committee certainly has that ability now. I've seen it done. I may be the only chair in the House ever elected while saying he didn't want to be the chair. If a chair was removed and the best person to replace him was already a chair of another committee, how would we go about that? You're precluding 21 other chairs from being able to move to a different committee which might be a better one to their minds.

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

I think that contingency should be dealt with in the Standing Orders. Canadian history actually had a situation where people could run for multiple members of Parliament at the same time. Earlier, we noted that this might be inefficient on the first round, but, Mr. Chair, in the unfortunate or rather bizarre circumstance in which, say, you would be replaced, I'm sure other chairs would want the promotion to your position. There's no harm in one of them putting forward their name to be elected if the Standing Orders would permit, and leave them as eligible. They could then resign and we'd have another election.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Mr. Lukiwski, did you have one more question, now that I've taken up all your time?

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

No, you prompted me to think of another scenario, and I just wanted to get Mr. Trost's interpretation.

How would you suggest a committee deal with a situation, which I guess speaks more to what Craig was saying earlier about maybe committee members not being able to be removed? I guess my question is more to Craig than to you, but what would happen if a member crossed the floor?

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

Mr. Lukiwski, I think I can answer that. If you have a vice-chair or a chair, one of the eligibilities to hold that position is that—

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

For a regular member. I'm not talking about vice-chair or chair, but more generally speaking, to speak to what Craig was saying, what would happen if a committee member crossed the floor?

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

We'll be pretty free today but I presume Craig wanted to respond.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

It's an interesting concept.