Procedure and House Affairs Committee on June 16th, 2015

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Hospitality suites.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

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

How does a new member learn about somebody who may be on a ballot to be elected or may at least be in a position to be elected committee chair?

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

Mr. Chair, I'm sure the new members would adore hospitality suites, but I'm not sure that would necessarily be a positive thing for the “good governance and greater responsibility” pitch I'm making here.

I would address that, Mr. Lukiwski, in this way. It's one of the reasons I support members of Parliament putting their signatures behind candidates, whether five or ten of them. If not all then effectively all new members of Parliament will know sitting members of Parliament by reputation. You may not know all the members of Parliament by reputation, but if you're politically active in your party, you'll know four or five MPs by reputation.

Before I got elected, I knew who Mr. Gerry Ritz from Saskatchewan was, and I knew who Mr. David Anderson was. I know who they were; I was an activist in the party. If I was a newly elected member and their signature was behind someone's name, that would be an indication to me that the person was a substantive person, particularly for agriculture, for example, because I viewed them as people who were knowledgeable in agriculture and who had a degree of expertise in that.

I would say that probably your most effective campaign tool would be the reputational support that other members of Parliament would be loaning you. I would say you could do whatever you wanted for a campaign. I don't see brochures. I could see emails and personal conversations, and I could see people recruiting four or five of their close colleagues in caucus to do that. That's the way I think it could be done.

I think new members of Parliament could also gather together and try to choose a rookie MP. There was a question about how we do things. If you're a member of the rookie class that's getting together and you have some ambition, which a few politicians have been known to have, you could gather the rookies and say, “Hey, we need one or two rookies to chair committees. Here's my resumé. We, as the rookies, should stick together”.

There are all sorts of ways to go about this. Since Parliament usually takes several weeks to a couple of months to resume, there would be time to organize this.

With regard to the remark that the whips will necessarily know more about who should chair than members of Parliament, I think that's a debate about the principle of this, and not so much about the mechanics, and I would argue that it might not necessarily be true. If five or six MPs with solid reputations are willing to put their name behind you for a committee chair, rather than just one whip who may or may not know you quite as well doing so, I think that's a powerful endorsement. I think that's a matter of opinion and it's not one I necessarily share.

One of the reasons I put this forward is that I think a broad endorsement and a broad number of opinions on someone's reputation and their skills provide for better judgment than does having one individual choosing.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Mr. Richards, you wanted four minutes, and you may have it.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

I may not need it all.

I'm still left a little unclear. You've been asked a couple of times and I know you mentioned in your opening remarks the idea of someone potentially wanting to put their name forward for more than one committee, or that maybe they've chosen one committee as their first preference and maybe want a back-up committee if they aren't elected for the first committee.

You've indicated that your first preference would be for them all to be chosen at once on the same day even if you had some flexibility in your mind as to how that might be done. You were sort of saying that the committee could choose another method of doing it over a series of days, etc.

I'm still a little unclear as to your thoughts on whether someone could run for more than one committee.

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

My first preference would be to say no, but the committee could go with an option whereby all twenty-odd committee chairmanships would be voted on the same day and people could run for multiple committee chairmanships. If they were elected to multiple positions, they could resign from one and then have a byelection to fill the others.

We used to have that in the way we elected members of Parliament, such that members would actually get elected to more than one seat and then they would resign from one and choose the one that they wished to sit for. I think that would be problematic, but it's a possibility that the committee may want to consider.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

You're not contemplating the idea of someone being able to chair more than one committee?

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

I'm not. You could go there, but it doesn't work that way now, and I don't see how it would be practical.

You could do a tiering system such that all the committees that sit at a particular hour on the schedule would go first. You'd have a pre-set committee, so one week you'd have the first six committees elected; the next week, the next six, and so forth. Then people who did not get elected to their first preferences could run in the second or third tier. There are a multitude of—

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

Sorry, but either way you would see this as allowing someone to run for more than one, and that if they were elected to more than one chair, the would have—

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

If the committee wanted to go that way. Again, my preference would be, you take your luck at one position. You don't get to run for MP, MLA, and mayor at the same time. You run for one of the three, and then you go from there.

Having said that—

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

What about the scenario where you split it into a few days—

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

Then you could run for multiple positions. That would be much easier. You could forbid it at that point, but I think that would be the most pragmatic way of doing it.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

Obviously, under the current system, our committee here, I think with the advice of the whips, etc., does choose the membership of the committee. Obviously, I guess in your system you'd be envisioning that somehow being changed because the chair would be chosen prior to the committee list being tabled, so you'd be obviously seeking a change there.

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

Yes, that would be implied by this motion.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

So in that scenario, looking at the fifth and sixth issues you have presented here to us about a chair wanting to switch committees or an election of chair when there's a resignation, etc., I think when you look at those three things and maybe some of the other issues that we've got here as well, do you not see some potential here for some games to be played? This would be an opportunity for someone to shut down the committee process, especially if one of the parties had a majority of seats on the committee, by continual resignations or changing committee lists. Do you see any way we could avoid that? I just see a potential here for a party, if they chose, to almost shut down the committee process.

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

You could also do that now. I don't see any governing party wanting to have their chair polled repeatedly. That just slows up their legislation in committee.

You could do that, but if you have a relatively quick byelection mechanism, you resign on Thursday, the byelection is held on the following Monday or Tuesday, and by a week afterwards you're back in business then—

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

I understand that, but I guess what I'm getting at is that you've got a system here where if someone were to resign and then someone else from another committee, a chair, wanted to run for that chair, what you could get is a whole series of resignations going on. Someone would resign from one committee to run for the next and you would continue to have byelection after byelection after byelection. That's where I see—

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

I suppose that's a theoretical possibility, but as soon as people start to play games, they would have to be able to justify that to the members of the House, and in a secret ballot I could very easily see people playing games and not getting the confidence of their fellow members.

My observation is that members of Parliament tend to be pretty mature. We have our moments, particularly in question period, where things get out of control, but if you're going to run for office and spend energy campaigning for a position, you're not likely to resign to try to get some other position in a deal with another member when you have no guarantee that the House will ratify that. So I would say, based upon the experience of the British Parliament and my knowledge of my fellow MPs here, that's an extreme theoretical. It's so extreme, I doubt if we would see it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you.

I just a couple of questions, Mr. Trost, from the chair's perspective. I rather like the job. I've been able to hang onto it for a fairly long time, and I would rather do it. So at the start of a Parliament, let's suggest the last Parliament after 2011, I wanted to be the chair of the procedure and House affairs committee because I rather like it, but not winning that election I'd like to have been able to run for another seat. You're suggesting that I can't do that, or if we do it over a subsequent number of days, I can. Or even if I really just love the workload—I'd really like to chair this and agriculture, for example—I could or couldn't do it. In Your answer to the question of what problem we are trying to solve here was giving a greater sense of ownership. Well, my sense of ownership is that I'd love to do that.

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

Mr. Chair, as I responded to Mr. Lukiwski, I'm mostly interested in the principle. But the question is about the sense of ownership and who right now essentially appoints committee chairs. Is it the party leadership or is it the House? I think it would be helpful if it were the House. I think, in fact I'm sure, Mr. Chair, that you've had perfect respect from opposition members all the time you've been on this committee, but not all chairs over time have. Part of that is the perception—sometimes real, sometimes imagined—that the chair is completely beholden to his leadership. If the chair is not beholden to his leadership but to the House and the entirety of the caucus, I rather suspect that opposition members would give you, or someone in a similar situation, more leeway on certain matters. I think that would be one benefit, and would in fact enhance the security of the chairmanship of most committees.

Of course, Mr. Chair, you like your position. You've done a very good job of it. But I'm sure there are other members who might like your position, too, and I know that that always frightens someone when there's an election campaign. I like being the member of Parliament in Saskatchewan, but I'm going to have to deal with Liberal, New Democrat, and Green Party candidates trying to take it away from me. I think I've done a good job, and hopefully they'll choose me again, as I'm sure you would have been chosen and elected by your peers had you run for election in this House.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

I have just one more question. It's about convention because the convention has always been that committees are masters of their own destiny. We've heard the Speaker say it many times when there has been a bit of a problem at committee and somebody tries to refer it to the Speaker under a point of order, and he replies that when that committee decides it has an issue and reports back to the House, then he could act because the committees are masters of their own domain, if you will. We've always thought that way too. We'd rather solve it here at the committee table than in the House.

By giving the House the authority to elect the Speaker, are we giving up some of the convention that committees are masters of their own destiny? In the big House you've now chosen the chair for those committees. I think we're giving away a bit of parliamentary tradition and the convention that committees are masters of their own destiny by choosing the chair someplace else.

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

Mr. Chair, let me respond to that.

I don't mean technically, but de facto, who chooses all the members of this committee? It's not the committee itself that chooses all the members. De facto, who chooses the committee chair? I know we go through an election process, but let's be pretty clear that as far as choosing the chairmanship, the vice-chairmanship, and the membership of the committee, the committee is not master of its own destiny, in reality.

Instead of moving something away from the committee to the House, what I'm suggesting is moving something away from the whip's office effectively to the House. So the committee is not losing something, because the committee never had that to lose in the first place.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

But you're in a committee where exactly that took place, where my predecessor was voted out on a confidence motion. I was voted in, whether I wanted the job or not, and the committee made that decision. It was well after the next election before I accepted the position, and we may be sitting in the only committee where that ever happened, so it was master of its own destiny.

Anyway, thank you, Mr. Trost.

Mr. Reid.

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

Do you mind if I ask a question because I want to pursue that very subject?