Okay. Be quick.
Evidence of meeting #60 for Procedure and House Affairs in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was leader.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Evidence of meeting #60 for Procedure and House Affairs in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was leader.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Noon
Conservative
Blake Richards Conservative Wild Rose, AB
Mr. Carroll, you had expressed that you felt it would good to enable political parties to be able to make their own decisions in relation to how the candidate is signed off. Obviously, in the original bill it was very prescriptive. In the amendments that Mr. Chong has publicly suggested, they would essentially allow those political parties to make those decisions for themselves as to who they would determine to be the person who would sign off.
Would I take it from that, then, that you'd be supportive of that particular amendment?
Noon
Campaigns Director, Leadnow.ca
Yes. The original bill, I believe, was quite prescriptive in terms of saying it's just the local riding associations. My understanding of the amendment is that it now moves to just being one person who's chosen by the party through a mechanism of their choosing, which presumably would be open to their internal party democratic processes—at convention, for example.
I think potentially there could be some middle ground. I wouldn't like it to be so prescriptive as to say that it can only just be one person from the party who gets to choose. I think if we're trying to create an enabling framework, then it would be beneficial for the party itself to be able to decide. They might say, “Actually, for our party for our democratic values, we think it should just be the local riding associations”, or “For our party in order to balance the interests of the party and the local ridings, we're going to have regional offices and multiple of them.”
So I think it might be interesting to explore that more in terms of creating a more enabling approach.
Noon
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Joe Preston
Thank you very much.
I seldom get to enjoy the part of listening, but this is very intriguing and I'm really happy that we had this today. I really wish we could go on for a couple more hours. We cannot, before anybody starts nodding anywhere.
Thank you very much for your input today. I'm not sure we've cleared anything up, but we've asked ourselves some more questions. We thank you for helping us get those questions into our heads.
We will suspend for a couple of minutes while we go in camera for a couple of other pieces of business. We thank you all for being here today.
[Proceedings continue in camera]