My intervention last time, so I'm told by Mr. Graham, was 1,200 seconds long; I had to look that up. That's 20 minutes. But for those who are interested it's also 1.2 million milliseconds and 1.2 billion nanoseconds. So I'll just respond briefly to this. I am hoping we'll have a chance to have a vote today.
A couple of things are factually wrong in what Mr. Graham said, and I thought I'd draw his attention to a bit of that. Elections are not forbidden in the reference ruling the Supreme Court made two years ago. I invite him to reread it. He'll see that federal enabling legislation is ruled as being ultra vires, outside the federal government's powers.
There was nothing indicating that Alberta's Senatorial Selection Act, for example, is unconstitutional. Nor are the choices made under that act such as that of Mike Shaikh, to whom my colleague was referring, a senator-in-waiting from Alberta, who will, unless Prime Minister Trudeau doesn't care about democracy, be appointed to the post to which he was elected in an advisory election. There's nothing unconstitutional about that.
The Alberta government still has on its website the fact that Mike Shaikh is a senator-in-waiting. We have several senators sitting in the Senate right now who were elected through that process. Senate elections are entirely constitutional as long as they're done the right way. The right way has been indicated through the process adopted by Alberta and I hope will be adopted by the provinces in time, one that could indeed be the system by which Canada's Senate becomes democratized in every province and ceases to be a 19th century institution.
I should mention as well that if one rereads the Confederation debates... I invite Mr. Graham and anybody else to do so. They are available on a website to which I've contributed called PrimaryDocuments.ca. You can take a look at the Confederation debates and you'll discover that many of the Fathers of Confederation were advocates of an elected Senate. The reason the Senate became an appointed body, historically speaking, is that it was a way of providing jobs to the people who were in the legislative council of the Province of Canada who otherwise would have opposed.... In other words they were bribed by Senate seats. That's a matter of historical record that was brought up several times in the course of the first Parliament in the new Dominion of Canada. To get the record straight the members debated as to whether or not Sir John A. had handed out the bribes to the former legislative councillors as per his secret agreement with the members of the other party in the pre-Confederation Parliament of the Province of Canada.
Mr. Graham is suggesting here that if we're going to get the minister in on Thursday every question we have will be resolved, therefore we don't need to bring back the members of the advisory committee to answer substantive questions about what they're doing and how they're conducting their affairs. I'll just say several things.
One is that these are people who have demonstrated discretion. I think we've all agreed that they are all very discreet people. They know when they have to stop answering a question. Just as when we bring ministers here they have to know this is the point at which it's a cabinet confidentiality and they can't go beyond that. We trust in their competence. I don't think Mr. Graham would dispute their competence, their ability to know when they need to refrain from answering some aspect of a question that would involve a violation of one of the secrets they are entrusted with. I have no fear there and I don't think he needs to have any fear either.
The other problem we've got is that the minister is going to come here and there's every chance that she's going to say she's not privy to some of this information. For example, the question I asked today about how many organizations have you been in touch with and was it the three permanent national members of the committee or was it the provincial members who contacted these individuals. I think this is quite germane to the issue of whether or not these are individuals or organizations that represent—what kind of interests do they represent? I don't think the minister would know that. Maybe she will but there's a great chance she won't, after all this is supposedly an independent advisory board.
If we take the process as actually working the way that it's said to work, then presumably she wouldn't. We have questions like this that she can't answer. A series of questions will simply go unanswered, and look, it becomes hard to believe after we've seen that every time I try to raise a substantial question, it gets shut down.
I do thank you, by the way, Mr. Chair. I thought you handled it right this time. You gave the witness the choice of answering, as opposed to saying that she couldn't do so. I've never approved of that technique whenever a chair does it.
But on the constant points of order—you can't ask this question, you can't ask that question—if we accept that the standing order is the reason why, then the solution is to bring them back under a different standing order, where we can seek answers to these questions and actually get substantive responses.
My expectation is that on Thursday we will be disappointed, simply because either time will run out.... The minister, after all, has to answer questions on this issue and on a number of other issues. She has one hour to do so. We'll be dealing with, for example, the issue of legislative reform in regard to electoral reform and whether we change our voting system, how, and what her system is. There won't be much time to deal with this, unless we bring her back.
I'll just say now that in the event that it turns out she can't deal with these questions and this is defeated today, I'll be bringing back a version of this same motion to accomplish the goal in light of the new facts of having not received full answers from the minister, not because of ill will but because of time constraints and a lack of knowledge of things to which she is simply not privy. Likewise, if we find that we're unable to probe deeply enough into the Senate and that process with the minister because we're dealing with the other issue that's on her plate, then I'll be asking for her to come back as well.
Having said that, I'll stop now. We could go either to a vote or to a different person, depending on what the speakers list looks like.