Procedure and House Affairs Committee on Feb. 25th, 2016

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Blake Richards]

Okay.

I would entertain speakers to this motion.

I see Mr. Christopherson, and then Mr. Chan.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Is Mr. Reid going to speak to his motion?

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

I kind of did, I think, in the course of editorializing during Monsieur Jutras' presentation.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Okay.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Blake Richards]

Yes. That was my understanding, that he had. Obviously he has the right to speak again, if he chooses.

Mr. Christopherson, you are first on my list, followed by Mr. Chan.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

I appreciate that. I don't intend to take too long, but you know what the Senate does to me.

I have to tell you that I didn't have the same problem in the first meeting that I had in this one. At the first meeting I asked, I believe, similar questions. I deliberately structured them in a way that I believed would get past the censorship of the government and pass muster with the Chair. That held the last time, so I can't see that my thinking was that far off. The chair of the advisory board, who has a lot more to be worried about than any of the members, answered quite quickly and openly. It's not necessarily what I wanted to hear, but she didn't make any attempt to not answer the question.

I don't want to cast aspersions against the previous witness; he sounds like an amazing academic and has made a wonderful contribution, but I have to tell you, it almost sounds like he was coached. Either that or he spends as much time keeping an eye on politics as he does on academia, because those were political moves. Most people don't normally have those at their fingertips.

Anyway, that's just an observation, not an accusation. I'll leave that there.

In terms of the substance of it, it is very frustrating and drives some of us insane that there are lawmakers chosen by the Prime Minister rather than the Canadian people. We forever have senators pointing to their good deeds and the good reports they have. The response is that we can have all the good deed, blue-ribbon committees that we want, but what you don't do is make them lawmakers. That's the point.

In fact, I would remind colleagues that the vote of a senator is worth more than ours, because there are fewer of them. It takes fewer votes to win the second chamber than it does our chamber. Therefore, anything that involves appointing them deserves a lot of serious scrutiny.

I didn't attempt to play any games. I don't think I left the impression that I was playing any games. With the last witness we had, it was very straightforward. I did my thing, and when the time was up, I shut up and we moved on. This time I had a witness on an issue very close to my heart, who is only one of a handful of people who replace all 35 million Canadians in deciding who our lawmakers are, and the witness wouldn't give me a straight answer.

At least answer the questions. I'm surprised that he, as a lawyer, made a bigger deal out of why he didn't want to answer it rather than providing a good lawyerly answer that didn't give me an answer. Goodness knows, we watch question period; professionals do it every day. I'm as guilty. I did it in my time when I was a minister. The better you are at not answering questions without it looking like that, the more successful you are in question period.

I'm fully prepared to accept that as a way to deal with the question, but to start playing games on a question of was it right or wrong what the Senate did to Jack Layton's bill.... Whether you like Jack Layton or the bill or not, it came from the House of Commons and the Senate rejected it without even a debate. I think it's fair for me to ask somebody who's going to be doing the hiring of senators—not the electing, the hiring—what they would think of a witness in response to that question. Do they think it's acceptable? Would they be looking for a candidate, an applicant, who says, “Oh, I think it's fine. Constitutionally, they have that right and there's no problem,” or would they be looking for somebody to say, “You know what? I think that really crosses the line between, yes it's our legal mandate, but there is a deference to the House in recognition that it has the legitimacy of a mandate from the Canadian people”?

As flawed as that is, it's the best we've got. They don't have that. They do not have the legitimacy of being elected. We could be the worst MPs in the world but we have legitimacy, and I remind you that Canadians can fire us at the end of four years. We have a small group of people who are hiring senators that we have to live with for decades, because they can't be fired.

I will end where I began. I had no interest in playing games with this. Ask Mel. You'll know when I'm playing games with something. It's as obvious as hell and I say so right up, or at least I try to. I wasn't playing games and it wasn't my intent. I am incredibly disappointed that we got answers of avoidance from somebody who's going to play such a critical role in our beloved democracy.

That's why I'm going to support this motion. I want an opportunity to see if they're all going to do that. The chair didn't. If anybody was going to play games, it would have been the chair setting the precedent, “I'm not letting any questions come near here. We're going to stay this narrow.” No, she was very open-minded. She understood where I was coming from. She didn't give me the answers I was hoping to hear, but she attempted to answer my question in what I thought was as fulsome a way as she could, recognizing where she was coming from.

I stand to be corrected but I don't believe I went after that witness in any kind of redirect in a serious way, maybe for clarification, but not the way I did today. I was very disappointed and borderline angry that someone who has the role they've been given to play in our society.... Whether they like me or my politics or not doesn't matter; as long as my question gets through the chair, it's a legitimate question on behalf of Canadians and deserves to be answered as best as possible, not to have someone use their scholarly skills to try to avoid answering the questions. That's what we do. They're doing our job when they do that. We play those kinds of games. There shouldn't be those kinds of games there.

I'll end it there. I'm not going to turn this into a filibuster, but I am going to underscore how things shifted for me today and I am now 100% behind the Conservatives in wanting to pull in as many people as possible and to look in every corner. With the way the government is playing this, I know in their heart of hearts they know this is bull. They have to do what they have to do, but I'm telling you that when we have witnesses on a subject like this who come in and start answering questions like that from someone who is trying to be fair-minded, then we're going to have trouble. My way of helping with that trouble is to support this motion.

Thank you, Chair.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Blake Richards]

Thank you, Mr. Christopherson.

Before we move to our next speaker, Mr. Chan, I will just read the motion. There have been a couple of requests for that. We have it finalized here. I'll read it very slowly.

That the federal members of the Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments be invited to appear before the Committee before the end of March 2016, to answer all questions relating to their mandate and responsibilities.

Mr. Chan, the floor is yours.

[Arnold Chan, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

Mr. Chair, I'm going to start with the comments from Mr. Christopherson. I'm going to put it on the record that to some degree, I regret giving you and the members of the opposition as much discretion as you had on the line of questioning with respect to Madam Labelle. As I said, I could have objected, and I chose not to at the time.

The point I want to make, Mr. Christopherson, is that at the end of the day, we are prescribed by the current Standing Orders with respect to the conduct of this committee in respect to examining the qualifications and competency of a prospective appointee. These are not Standing Orders that I made up. These are Standing Orders that are the current rules of procedure that govern what this committee can do.

I simply want to put that on the record. If we stay within the confines of the Standing Orders that all of us inherit.... If you don't like it, Mr. Christopherson, you have a right to subsequently propose to make the appropriate changes as we go through our processes of reviewing our Standing Orders, but my point is that at the present time we are simply conducting the business we are prescribed to do under the current Standing Orders.

With respect to the substantive motion that has been put forth by Mr. Reid, my personal view at the end of the day is that the questions you are ultimately concerned about, the government is more than transparent in granting you the opportunity to have the minister and his officials appear before this committee on March 10 to answer those particular questions.

As a result, from my perspective we will not be supporting—at least I certainly will not be supporting—this particular motion. You can ask the minister and her officials any questions you wish with respect to your concerns about the process, but at this time, we are charged solely with dealing with competency and qualifications. That is our mandate, and as a result we will not—at least I certainly will not—be supporting the motion.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Blake Richards]

We'll hear from Mr. Reid, and then Mr. Christopherson, you'll be next.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to respond to Mr. Chan's comment. In his last point he said that looking at the qualifications is our mandate. That is our mandate, he said. Under the terms of Standing Order 111(2), which governs our meeting today, that is correct. The preamble is not part of the formal motion, but I read it out to you and the point was, of course, that governed us and that restricted us today. But given the fact that these are germane and important questions, another meeting at which we deal with these questions would be a time at which we could deal with those things. So, we are not, by the nature of this committee, by the nature of our mandate.... And there are some things we ought not to be looking at. We should not be asking about international human rights questions, defence questions, questions relating to the status of women or the Library of Parliament. Those things are outside our mandate.

But the actions of people like members of advisory boards are very much under our mandate. How we choose to deal with this is the subject of any individual motion we would bring forward. So, this new motion would allow us to fill in the lacunae that were left by the nature of the original motion. I have to say, going back to it, that had I realized such restrictions would be in existence under the original motion, I would have raised these objections at the time and sought to broaden our mandate, because I could have told you from the start that I actually thought the members of the advisory committee, whose CVs were posted online, were impressive. So the questions regarding their qualifications were, quite frankly, unnecessary. I didn't doubt their qualifications or their objectivity, but I do have questions about their mandate.

Of course, they have a system for reporting to the Prime Minister. But it is not unreasonable for us to want to get separate information about this. I want to stress this because I think it's an important distinction that might be lost on a casual observer here. The fact that individuals have a mandate to report to the Prime Minister does not mean that they are exempted from a mandate to report to us. That is a general mandate. The Prime Minister is, at least in theory, an agent of the crown, and that is distinct from the House of Commons. So, reporting to the House of Commons is something that is not exhausted by the fact that some form of mechanism exists for reporting to the Prime Minister, an expectation that you report back to the House of Commons and, indeed, to the Senate should it choose to conduct any hearings of its own and invite in these individuals. None of that is exempted. That is a reasonable thing to ask for.

That brings me around to Mr. Chan's initial comment, which was that they're letting us speak to the minister. I have to say that was an odd way of phrasing it, but I don't want to fault him for that. We have a right to question the minister. She is coming here at a time and place that is, frankly, inconvenient from our point of view. She should have been here earlier. Inconvenient—I should use that word advisedly; I don't mean.... It's untimely. She should have been here earlier. The Liberal members insisted on writing into our invitation that she come at a time that fits with her schedule. Well, frankly, that's the way these things are always written. Actually, it's implicit. If ministers don't want to come, we can't force them. So, maybe we should be grateful. Maybe we should be—I don't know—kissing someone's ring in gratitude for having been allowed to summon a witness before this committee. I don't think that is what is conventionally understood, that is what the public understands to be the case here. I don't think the public believes that the ministers are responsible to the crown and the House of Commons represents the peasantry waiting outside who may or may not be permitted by the grandees to ask deferential questions, to humbly beseech a minister of the crown for a question. I think quite the contrary.

I know the minister, who I actually like a lot. I kind of think she likes me too. She gave me her little pink flower yesterday because I forgot to wear a pink shirt. That's pretty cool.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

That's respect.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

I'm glad I got that on the record. It was a nice thing she did. I appreciated that.

I think she doesn't view things this way, necessarily. Look, the important thing is this. The way their mandate is written, they're reporting to the Minister of Democratic Institutions. They're reporting to the Prime Minister.

I anticipate, when she comes here, the minister may well say that she can't answer this question or that question, that it's not in her remit, that it's not in her mandate letter. That is a separate mandate given by means of an order in council from the crown to these individuals. Not only ministers of the crown are commissioned by the crown, but many other people are as well. So is every military officer. So is every commissioner, every head of every board. Everybody who isn't commissioned by the House of Commons and Senate is commissioned by the crown. Most people who are out there, those thousands and thousands of people working for the Government of Canada. They aren't answerable to her. Indeed, I think she would make a point of saying that they aren't answerable to her: they're supposed to be independent. The word “independent” is actually written into their title or at least it's written to all the talking points about their title and their mandate, and therefore, she can't answer.

What do we do then? We go back again, and beg and plead with Mr. Chan to, I guess, kiss his ring and say, “Could we please, humbly beseech you and the ministers, or whoever, to come back and speak to us”.

What I want, and I may be speaking for some others here, is to have these individuals come back, because they do have a mandate and they are the only ones who can speak to their mandate.

While I respect Professor Jutras' discretion in choosing not to answer certain things certain ways, it seemed clear to me that what he was saying is that he was attempting—although it wasn't really his responsibility to do this—to be respectful of our mandate. In fact, he actually worded things to say exactly that, “the mandate of your letter”, “the standing order under which you've convened this meeting”.

Now, we would have a different meeting at which we would deal with all aspects of his mandate and likewise for the other two permanent members. That would include questions, such as the one that I raised before I was shut down by the Chair, which was: How many applications did you actually get? How many nominations did you get?

There are a series of things they can't answer. It's not their fault that any filled-out application or nomination form becomes a level B protected document. They really can't talk about that. That is why it's written in there. That's a secret that freezes them from saying anything on the nominal basis that harm would be done if the content of those letters was revealed. Of course, we would respect that.

We'd be asking: How many actual nominations did you get? I'm interested in knowing that because look at how this process was set up. This process was set up through a press release on January 29, 2016, that we would now be accepting phase one nominations. The whole process was announced at that time, a process which, until then, was a complete secret. We knew nothing about it. It's a process, I should add, that was designed by the government and not by the advisory board. That's just to lay the blame where the blame ought to be laid for this.

The phase one process was announced to the public on January 29, 2016, and we were told that nominations would be open until February 15, 2016. You can add it up. That is 15 days, if you count the 15th and if you count the 29th. You can check the date on the email when it was sent out. The 29th was a Friday, and Saturday and Sunday are on the weekend.

This information was not posted in the normal spots we'd expect to see it. It wasn't, for example, on the website of the Minister of Democratic Institutions. Knowledge that this process was in existence took a while to spread out. I didn't find out about it until I got an email from the minister after a weekend had gone by.

You can't get appointed under this process, and your name cannot be passed on to the Prime Minister by the advisory board unless (a) you've submitted your application, (b) this brand new nomination that nobody knew existed isn't filled out by an officer of an organization, and (c) someone fills it out and says he's from such and such organization and has such and such a title.

Now, I'm involved in a number of charitable organizations. This very Saturday I will be chairing, as I do every year, the annual cystic fibrosis fundraising dinner in Ottawa. I volunteer in an organization, a community kitchen called The Table, and I host a fundraising dinner for them at my house every year. It's not because I'm special or important. It's just because that's what happens when you're a member of Parliament and have been around for a long time. But I do know a little bit about how organizations work.

Let's say for the sake of argument that one of those two organizations had wanted to put forward the name of someone, and they wanted to do it responsibly. What they would have to do is send out notice of a meeting. They would use their rules of order, and everybody has different rules of order, but I submit that it might be Robert's Rules of Order. Those are the most commonly used rules of order, and others are very similar with regard to notice requirements for board of directors meetings. It would normally take two weeks to summon a board of directors meeting. Maybe they didn't learn about this until Monday—but why would they learn about it? Do you think that the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation or any other organization like that spends its time hunting through the various outlets through which these notices are put out? No, of course they don't. So they might not find out about it immediately.

You call your meeting. February 1 is a Monday. We have to call a meeting, and we have a two weeks' notice requirement. When would that be? Well, two weeks from February 1...oh, that would be February 14, which is a Sunday. February 15 at noon is your deadline, so I guess if we had an extraordinary meeting on the weekend we could pull this off and then submit it on Family Day. Now, it's not Family Day in every province, but it is in Ontario, and one of the vacancies is in Ontario. I don't know whether it's Family Day in Manitoba and Quebec. I'm just not up on their provincial holidays. It's one of those areas that I haven't researched perhaps as well as I should.

But there you are. So it would be literally impossible to appoint or nominate somebody on the advice of the board of most organizations. It's practically impossible for virtually everybody. On the other hand, if you're just submitting that so-and-so who's an officer of an organization should nominate someone, supposedly on behalf of that organization, because that is the cover story, then that person's name could go forward. So why the preposterously tight deadline? Why the lack of notification?

Normally, every time something minor is announced by this government, supposedly a step forward in terms of democracy or consultation, there's a national press release, they're thumping it, and it's an epoch-making moment in Canadian democracy. But there's nothing on this except a press release, which is not followed by a press conference, not put on the normal websites, nothing.

Perhaps you can see why I want to know the number of actual nominations that were made. I'm interested in the number of applications too, but the number of nominations, I want to see that, because my guess is it was really, really small.

In Quebec, where you actually have to be representing a district of the province, the 24 districts of the Senate, it must be tiny. How tiny? I don't know, but it must be tiny.

Let's say for the sake of argument you were trying to design a system that was ostensibly open, that was ostensibly about inclusion, ostensibly about removing the prime minister's control, which he had in the traditional system. The Prime Minister advises, by convention, the Governor General on who should be elevated to the Senate, and by convention the Governor General always takes the Prime Minister's advice.

Okay. So the government is saying that this is a thing of the past here. We're doing things differently now. You submit your application. A board decides. They submit it to the Prime Minister. He chooses or doesn't choose, as he may see fit. But we want to have him choosing someone who's on the list as a way of showing our purity in this matter—and we only get a couple of names.

In fact, they only have enough names to make four or five submissions. The people on there would likely include those who knew in advance that this would be the system; those who were informed in advance. Now, those who knew in advance would therefore have.... Well, first of all, this would make a farce of the system. Certain people were notified. As tight a restriction as possible was placed upon the process to ensure that very few applications could occur. This would ensure that the names of the people the Prime Minister wanted are now going forward, are guaranteed to go forward, in phase one. I'm not saying this is true of the later phases. I'm saying this is true of phase one because of that ridiculously tight timeline and the novel innovation of the requirement for a nomination.

Any organization that knew could have dealt with this in advance. Did the organizations know? Well, in all fairness, the members of the advisory board won't know that, and probably the minister won't either. But it is reasonable to guess that this is the case—that some organizations indeed knew this would be happening, that some individuals knew this would be happening, that they knew to make their application and to have the nomination submitted at the same time.

Indeed, Mr. Chair, I will submit to you that it is beyond the realm of credible belief that you could have a situation in which the applicant and the nominating organization would not have known of each other and would not have been working in tandem. Can you imagine a situation, plausibly, where that would be occurring? I certainly can't.

Now, they know, and possibly they have been tipped off by the government ahead of time, that they should be doing something—all of which we can't ever know, because we are not allowed to summon the board members, or the minister will say it's outside of her mandate. So these individuals who are on the government's actual short list get rushed through.

I mean, if it's not plausible to believe that this is true in Ontario or Manitoba, think how implausible it is to believe that there wouldn't have been coordination in Quebec, where you actually have to be the owner of real estate in a specific senatorial election district, one of the old electoral districts of the province of Lower Canada way back before Confederation. In some of these districts, this is actually a real practical problem. It's hard to find available real estate, because these are districts that have very tiny populations. They were once populous. The land has been consolidated over time.

So this is just beyond the realm of plausible belief. The argument to be made here is this. It may very well be the case, when you have the government working closely in tandem...not with the applicant; that's fine. Or it may not be fine when you're pretending you weren't working with them, but it's fine constitutionally. Constitutionally, however, it is problematic, when you have a situation in which the nominating body or organization, or individual from that organization—president, chairman, or whomever—and we can't find out whether that was done....

Indeed, I'm not sure the advisory board is powered to make further inquiries and find out—I don't know—whether that person was speaking on behalf of the whole organization. Was there a vote taken? Was there a meeting of their board of directors? We don't know. We can't know. Maybe the advisory board doesn't know or can't know, although I would like to ask that question.

That the nominee, the applicant, is not in practice subject to a tremendous amount of limitation on his or her independence.... They had to compromise their independence in advance in order to get that name into the process. Maybe that's not true with someone who somehow managed to get in under the wire, discovering this at the last minute. Maybe that's not true there, but it has to be true of the people who were pre-selected by the government, as most certainly some individuals were.

Now, we can't ask about this here if Mr. Chan and his colleagues shut down our ability to bring back these advisory board members. If the minister says “I don't know”—and she probably won't know—it is outside of the Senate's ethics rules, as I understand it, to raise questions like this.

We can have individuals whose independence is being compromised, and the Supreme Court has been very specific—and I did hear Professor Jutras say some of this in his testimony today—in saying that it is a requirement that senators be independent, a term that is not found in the Constitution Act, 1867, but which is, as the court said, implicit in its architecture. They must be independent.

This could very well be a compromise to their independence and a compromise to their independence that is, through the nature of the process, kept secret from everybody so that we can't know how their independence has been compromised. That is an irreparable harm. That is why I want to get the minister here before rather than after the point at which these appointments are made.

And why did I ask Professor Jutras how long it would take? I asked because I want to find out. Minister LeBlanc said yesterday that they are taking a little bit longer than we thought, so there may be time to ask them if this is a problem before it's too late, because they've had to submit the names. Perhaps this is why they are taking their time submitting the names. They have been stuck with a situation in which they don't think the candidates who are being presented to them are the right kind of candidates.

I'm not sure how they would express that, because I understand their requirement for discretion. But it may very well be something else on their mind. I wouldn't fault them if they didn't answer a question like that because that really would be a lapse of their discretion, but that implies that the rules that were designed for them are inappropriate, certainly when it comes to the first term round.

Finally, he said that he would be submitting a letter to the Prime Minister, or a report to the Prime Minister, that will be public. While it's reasonable for him to say, “I don't want to start making independent comments and I want to discuss this”, I think he meant to say “discuss this with my colleagues”, the other commissioners, first. That's a reasonable position, I think.

It is not unreasonable for them to know that we would likely be asking them questions like that an if they're all present, they could share something with us. It is not unreasonable for us to want to find out, rather than deferring to our betters and waiting for Justin Trudeau, in his imperial awesomeness, to look at this, see it first, and then let us peasants know what is permissible for us to know. We can all tug our forelocks, thank him for the privilege, and kiss the buckle of his shoe. That is not reasonable.

That's all I have to say. I'm not trying to filibuster on this. I would actually like a vote today, Mr. Chair, in part because we are going to be away for a week, and I don't want this motion to wait until then to be decided.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Blake Richards]

Okay.

Well, we have about five minutes before I'll have to suspend and move us in camera to deal with the budget, but I do have two speakers, Mr. Christopherson and Mr. Chan. If they can both be brief, we may be able to have a vote on your motion.

Mr. Christopherson, you're first.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you. It was good that Mr. Reid did that and said that he wanted that vote today. I was getting ready to settle in, so I'm glad you gave me an early cue that your preference would be a vote. That's fine; I'm okay with that.

I have a couple of things. First of all, I'll take this opportunity to remind the government that I am the one who went out on a limb when you put forward your clause that the minister would come in as her schedule permits. I raised the initial concern that this is what governments do when they want to have the flexibility to not have the minister come in a timely fashion. The government member...and I believed they were sincere, and they were so sincere with “are you kidding, we would never do that”, that I supported it, if you recall. I supported the motion and said that I'm going to trust them. Well, Chair, look where my trust got me. We're still working on dates. I think we finally have one, but it's well after why the motion was moved in the first place. I wanted to mention that for the history.

Second, I want to ask Mr. Chan, through you, Chair...because my feeling was the witness today was almost pleading the Canadian equivalent of the U.S. fifth amendment in terms of not wanting to incriminate himself. I want to ask Mr. Chan where he sees the problem in asking somebody on that panel about competency. Why is it a problem to ask them how they view candidates? How is that not competency? Competency is the ability to do the job. Qualifications, nobody is questioning. The qualifications of all the candidates have been stellar and dizzying, with many letters after their names. It's truly impressive. I grant that to the government.

On the question of competency, it speaks to the ability of the individual in terms of how they see and do things. I'd like to know why it would be unacceptable to the government to be asking a question of someone under the rubric of competency and how they feel about, for instance, accountability in a parliamentary setting. I would ask him to be mindful of the time, unless he wants to filibuster. I was going to raise that when I had more time. I'll leave it rhetorical now if Mr. Chan wants to answer that, but that's where I'm having a problem. How is that not speaking to competency by asking someone on a particular subject how would they view this, and what were the traits and the characteristics they would look for in a candidate coming forward? To be told that this is not competency leaves me wondering what is competency if not that.

Those are my points. I'll defer to the time at hand so that we can have the vote.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Blake Richards]

Okay.

We have Mr. Chan, and we now have Mr. Graham added as well.

Mr. Chan, the floor is yours. I do hope that we can be brief and then we can have the vote it appears that the committee desires.

[Arnold Chan, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

First of all, I wanted to get back to Mr. Reid's point before I turn to Mr. Christopherson's point, with respect to the ring.

I want to note on the record that my wife has just arrived. Jean, welcome.

The only time I defer with respect to the ring is the vow that I made.

With respect to the broader point, I would simply say on the record again, Mr. Reid, that we find ourselves in this situation because of the actions of the previous government. We're now faced with the potential of, I understand now, 25 vacancies for the Senate because the previous prime minister chose not to make appointments for over two years. We are now faced with the situation where we have a constitutional requirement to have a functioning upper House, and where we need to appoint this large number of senators, including someone who will ultimately be the government's representative in the Senate, given that we have moved forward toward greater independence and recognizing the importance of the greater independence of senators. We are simply faced with this situation.

I would also note on the record that at the end of the day from a constitutional perspective—and this is why I raise the question and withdrew it, recognizing it was a process question—this advisory board's recommendations to the executive council and to the Prime Minister are ultimately not binding on the Prime Minister. It would fetter his discretion.

At the end of the day what we're trying to do is create a more open democratic process for people to apply into a process. Unfortunately, we're dealing with a problem we have right now on short notice with the interim process and subsequently trying to invite Canadians of exceptional competence throughout the land to consider serving in a public way on something that we are constitutionally mandated to do.

With respect to your question, Mr. Christopherson—

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Blake Richards]

Maybe before you get to that, Mr. Chan, I'll just interrupt you. If the committee does wish to deal with the budget today, I would probably have to interrupt us at this point and suspend briefly to go in camera to deal with that. If the committee would rather use the last four or five minutes of our time today to continue with this, it is something we can do.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Unless there's a problem, could we not just approve it with unanimous consent and be done in a blink? It shouldn't be controversial.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Blake Richards]

The budget has been put before you. Do I see any objection to the budget?

[Arnold Chan, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

I'll move the motion. Could I have a seconder on the other side?

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Blake Richards]

We don't even really need a motion, necessarily, if the committee has agreed to the budget as presented. It's all been put before you.

(Motion agreed to)

Thank you to the committee.

Mr. Chan has the floor. We have a few minutes left, but keep that in mind if we do want to see a vote today.

[Arnold Chan, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

I have the floor back. Thank you.

Again, I want to thank Mr. Christopherson for raising these issues. I understand the angle that the third party, the New Democratic Party, has historically held with respect to the Senate. I understand the kinds of questions you have ultimately been presenting. At the end of the day, throughout the electoral process, we made it very clear that we have to comply, ultimately, with the Constitution rules as they stand, which is to have a functioning Senate. At the end of the day, if we do not appoint these senators, we ultimately will be left with a situation where we will have one chamber that is incapable of responding to the passage of legislation coming from the House of Commons.

I appreciate the point that you are ultimately making with respect to the issues of legitimacy and so forth. As I say, with all due respect, the NDP can rail all they want with respect to the Senate.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

[Inaudible—Editor]

[Arnold Chan, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

I have the floor right now, Mr. Christopherson, so please. I granted you the courtesy to say what you wanted to say. I granted Mr. Reid 20 minutes to say what he wanted to say. I've granted you the courtesy many times in the past to keep going, so I now have the floor and I think I have the right to continue, to get the points I want to get out. Thank you, Mr. Christopherson.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

You're welcome.