Procedure and House Affairs Committee on Nov. 20th, 2013

[Peter Milliken]

Yes.

[Dave MacKenzie, Conservative, Oxford, ON]

—and if the claims were then somehow made public, does that fit the transparency model that you would expect?

[Peter Milliken]

Yes, because the amount that members paid out for travel and all of that stuff was made public.

[Dave MacKenzie, Conservative, Oxford, ON]

Yes.

[Peter Milliken]

It still is, as I understand it. There's no question about that.

[Dave MacKenzie, Conservative, Oxford, ON]

My other question would be, when you headed up the BOIE, did you find that MPs were less partisan during in camera meetings than they are in televised meetings like today's?

[Peter Milliken]

Absolutely. That's why I think it's important to keep that work in camera; otherwise we'd have very partisan divisions in the board that would be seriously counterproductive.

[Dave MacKenzie, Conservative, Oxford, ON]

Thank you.

Do I have any more time?

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

You have about a minute and a half.

[Dave MacKenzie, Conservative, Oxford, ON]

Speaker Fraser, I wonder if you would answer the same question.

[John Fraser]

You started off, and I was very taken with this, saying that maybe the proposed solution isn't there because there isn't really a problem. Again, I haven't been around there recently; Speaker Milliken has, and we have a new Speaker as well. But I come back to what I said a few minutes ago, and that is that if you're going to change things, you had better know what the problem is that you're going to change.

You also asked whether members were less partisan in private meetings of the Board of Internal Economy. I can't refer to specific meetings, but over a number of years I am convinced that most of the members, most of the time, when they knew they were not in the public eye, treated each other in a courteous and often helpful way. I certainly do not remember any narrow partisan exchanges in all the years I was there. I think I would have, because as Speaker you're sitting in the middle of it.

What would happen if, for instance, tomorrow the media came in to all of the Board of Internal Economy meetings? I think it's inevitable that somebody, sooner or later, would choose to take the opportunity to make some points, and somebody else would take them on, and you'd have a partisan dispute going on. I think that is much less likely in a closed meeting.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker.

We'll move to Mr. Christopherson for four minutes.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Speakers, for your attendance today. This is all very helpful.

Let me say, just by way of a little assistance, that IPSA, the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, the British system that has been set up—this is from our library analyst—in a nutshell has three main roles:

...it regulates the system of costs and expenses, sets MPs’ pay and pensions, and administers and pays MPs’ salaries, business costs, staff salaries and expenses. IPSA is fully independent from Parliament but does respond to written questions from MPs, and publishes all Freedom of Information requests.

As some of us would see it, that's the ideal, the gold standard, and the question is whether we feel we're going to go there or not.

I might just also say that, like some others here, I have sat on a Board of Internal Economy—at Queen's Park, but as you know, the rules there are very consistent with ours and it is similar in the way it functions—so I am very familiar with not only what goes on outside but what happens inside BOIE.

Speaker Milliken, I jotted down that you said the BOIE for the most part did a wonderful job, that it functioned really well, that there were no partisan fights, and that it worked very effectively—things such as that. I certainly wouldn't disagree; I think it has served us well.

But that's the whole point: one of the Speaker's most important roles is to protect the rights of members of Parliament. This is about the issues of the rights of the public, and I would contend that we don't have to prove that the BOIE is broken to justify going to a better system.

Yesterday, the Auditor General told us:

In my opinion, governance can be strengthened by having an independent body that would either advise the Board of Internal Economy or be given the responsibility for all matters related to Members' expenses and entitlements. Regardless of the role of such a body, it is important that Canadians are confident that its membership is independent and that the members have been chosen in a non-partisan manner.

And of course our guests from Britain advised us as to the system they had set up and how it works.

Here is my issue. Every party talks about transparency and accountability, but you can't just talk the talk; you have to walk the walk. That's the difficulty with staying where we are right now. The public views this, and rightly so, as part of—to use an expression—“the old boy network”, and you can't blame them for feeling that, when it is us deciding on things about us and for us.

That doesn't necessarily mean that there has been anything wrong. For a long time, the notion was that we'd just have a few good chaps go in and do a good, competent job. Well, good chaps sometimes turn out to be not so good, and competency often is not so competent. Yet there is no accountability, because it's all us; it's all in-house.

The issue I would put to Speaker Milliken, because I quoted you, but certainly to Speaker Fraser, if you wish to comment, is....

And Speaker Fraser, you said that you could be convinced. I would put the question to you: do you really think we need to prove that the BOIE is not working and not functioning and is effectively a failed body, in order to justify going to a better system? If we can show that there's a better system that meets the public needs, and we have something to draw from—a standard, which is Britain's, in the Westminster mother ship.... They went through horrible scandals and came up with this model. We're in the process of changing everything, and we have a motion on the floor that says we should look at that model. I'm just asking, do we really have to prove that BOIE is broken before we can justify going to something that meets the current, modern era and public needs of accountability and transparency?

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you, Mr. Christopherson. Your time has now expired.

Mr. Richards, you have four minutes.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

Thanks, Mr. Chair.

I sympathize, because that happened to me the other day, so I know how it feels. But unfortunately, it's my opportunity now, and I appreciate that.

I want to go back to Speaker Milliken and some of the comments you were making earlier. You were talking about there having been a number of cases—and I can't remember the number you said, but it wasn't a large number—in which you had to look at a member's expense claim when they were questioning the decision that had been made about their expenses.

How often did that occur? Would it be something that—

[Peter Milliken]

I couldn't tell you. I don't remember. It happened from time to time—

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

Yes, but—

[Peter Milliken]

—but how often, I couldn't—

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

A few times a year or—

[Peter Milliken]

Yes, a couple of times a year.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

Something in that neighbourhood? Maybe a few times a year.

Maybe I'll ask Mr. Fraser if he recalls during his time as well. Can you give us some examples, obviously without giving personal information or people's names, of what type of thing that would have been? Would it generally have been something where they just weren't able to provide documentation, or was it something where there was a rule that was in place and maybe in an instance where the rule itself just didn't make common sense in the situation?

I know I can think of one, and I don't think it went to the Board of Internal Economy for me, where there was a snowstorm. I think it's 100 kilometres to be able to claim a hotel room in your riding and I was 88 kilometres from home and in a terrible snowstorm. I would have been leaving there at 10 p.m. and having to be back there at 7 a.m. the next day in the same community, so I was able to have an exception made. It was actually a cheaper thing to do, the hotel room, than the mileage anyway.

Was it more something like that, where common sense kind of dictated that the rule needed to be bent in that case, or was it lack of documentation? What would it have been?

[Peter Milliken]

I suspect it was things like that. I'm sorry, I just don't remember. It was usually something where there was some excessive expenditure or something had been incurred that wasn't allowed under the existing rules and they had been disallowed and they appealed.

Usually we backed the decision that was made by the employee of the board who had reviewed the thing for the reasons that were given in that, but occasionally there might have been an exception. I'm sorry, I just don't remember the cases.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

Sure.

Speaker Fraser, basically the same two questions: how often did you see those kinds of things come forward, and can you give us any examples, or maybe just even a broad generalization of what types of things they may have been that would have come before you in terms of members looking at their expenses and questioning the decision that was made by the staff of the board?

[John Fraser]

It's getting to be a long time ago, but I don't remember that being a big issue at all.

I just wanted to say something to Mr. Christopherson. When I said that there's an old saying that you don't look for a new solution unless you've seen the problem, I don't want him or any of you to think that I don't think there's any room for improvement. I think there could be.

What I've raised is how are you going to do it, and to what degree are you going to change the responsibility of the Speaker and of those members who would have been on the Board of Internal Economy? For instance, if you had an independent committee to check all expenditures of members of Parliament, and that is what they did and nothing else, that might work. But when you get into the whole question of whether or not you think the Board of Internal Economy ought to support the plans of the public service department in its renditions of new buildings or in accommodation adjustment and that sort of thing, you don't need an independent committee to do that.

So there may be some things that an independent commission could do that would meet the very things that Mr. Christopherson was talking about, and that is that the public gets more upset about the misuse of public money than about many other things. If that would solve it, then perhaps the committee on which you're all working could come up with a solution.

My point is that you don't start coming up with a whole new commission to take over everything that has already been done unless you can point at the problem. In fairness to Mr. Christopherson, he did point out a specific problem. I think that might be something that could be done.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Speaker Fraser.

I have two more people, at least; I'd like to get three. That would finish a round, but let's do it as quickly as we can.

Mr. Bellavance, four minutes, please.