Evidence of meeting #144 for Procedure and House Affairs in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was signatures.
A recording is available from Parliament.
12:25 p.m.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
I ask this in part because we just had a debate at second reading on the indigenous languages act. I can't remember what the bill number is, but I'm sure you're familiar with it.
12:25 p.m.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
Yes. My own intervention was to draw the attention of the House to the fact that in the case of one indigenous language in particular, Inuktut, a very high proportion of people who speak that language are unilingual speakers. Not every indigenous language has a written form, or a consensus written form, but that's not true with Inuktut, where there is a consensus written form in syllabics that are pretty much universally understood among Inuktut speakers, who are numerous. It's literally the only language that many of these people understand or can read. If someone wanted to have a petition on something that's relevant to Nunavut, it would literally be not presentable, as things stand, in the language that is the only language spoken by a substantial proportion of the population of that territory, to give a real-life example.
12:25 p.m.
Deputy Clerk, Procedure
Let's talk about a paper petition, where it's much easier to implement. If that paper petition were written in an indigenous language and, on the side, in English or French, that petition could be received in the House. If we're talking here about e-petitions, that would probably require intervention from this committee in the form of a recommendation from this committee that was adopted by the House.
12:25 p.m.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
That's really helpful, and as you've probably guessed, my comments were directed less at you than they were at the rest of the committee to think about. I very much appreciate that.
I have one last question. Not on this screen but on another screen, you showed keywords associated with a petition. I assume it's the case that if I were to search for a keyword such as “cannabis”, for example, I would essentially get to see all the petitions that have that keyword in them.
12:25 p.m.
Deputy Clerk, Procedure
Yes, or it could be “marijuana”, for instance, because there are some other terms associated with the different—
12:25 p.m.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
Yes.
Now the screen's back up. I look down, and “cannabis” is a nice easy one. That was E-1528, the first petition. If I look at the second one, it has some keywords that might be non-intuitive.
How do you go about selecting keywords? Is there a protocol you follow?
12:25 p.m.
Deputy Clerk, Procedure
The same people who work on our parliamentary publications help us as well. We call them information management officers. They have a terminology book, if I could put it that way. Essentially, when we're talking about cannabis, you would also have “marijuana” or “drugs”, the different words associated with the different terminology presented.
Clearly, if the petition being prepared has defined terminology in it, this would appear there, as you imagine.
12:25 p.m.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
Right, and that's a really good example of what I'm getting at. I'm glad you said that. An example here is that if I'm trying to encourage people to sign a petition, and the petition I have in mind is over pharmacare, and I'm directing towards something about.... You can see how “drugs” is an issue, but they are prescription drugs, not illegal drugs, whereas somebody else is trying to get a petition signed that is dealing with the issue of LSD or heroin or whatever. You can see how there's a certain overlap that is inherently problematic.
I'm just throwing that out again as more of a comment than a question, but can I ask if the book they use is a source that's available for us to see if we ask for it? Is it the sort of thing we could take a look at? I don't doubt their objectivity or their best efforts; I'm just genuinely curious as to what it contains.
12:30 p.m.
Deputy Clerk, Procedure
This is a living document. I shouldn't have used the word “book”, because it's more of a living document.
12:30 p.m.
Principal Clerk, Chamber Business and Parliamentary Publications
It's more of a database, really.
12:30 p.m.
Deputy Clerk, Procedure
It's more of a database to permit them to identify different terminology, and it evolves with the nature of the debates in the House. It's clearly related to the work done in the House and in committees.
12:30 p.m.
Conservative
12:30 p.m.
The Vice-Chair Mrs. Stephanie Kusie
Are there further questions?
Mr. de Burgh Graham, go ahead, please.
12:30 p.m.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
I have a couple of questions.
You were here for the previous panel when we discussed a secondary debating chamber and the idea of the 100,000 signatures to create a debate. Has there ever been any kind of practice like that in Canada in the past?
12:30 p.m.
Deputy Clerk, Procedure
In the last Parliament this issue was discussed significantly, and if I remember well, in this Parliament as well, when Mr. Kennedy Stewart presented a motion regarding that issue.
Regarding the possibility of having a debate in Canada on different legislatures in Canada, I'm not too sure if that is the case.
12:30 p.m.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
Would that require changes to the Standing Orders? I imagine it would.
12:30 p.m.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
I'm going to go slightly off topic to build on what Scott was asking about.
One of the things that's always driven me nuts as a bilingual person is that Hansard is available in either English or French, and there's no untranslated Hansard available anywhere online. It would be really helpful if there were English, French and floor as online options. I put that to you as a “please do this one of these years”. I'd very much appreciate it.
In the same vein, when you're looking at an MP's profile page on the parliamentary website, motions are virtually impossible to track. They're not run through LEGISinfo, which they should be. Most of our private members' motions, which fall under private members' business, should be under LEGISinfo. If you could fix that too, I'd appreciate it.
Those are my comments. I don't know if you have comments on that.
12:30 p.m.
Deputy Clerk, Procedure
Jeremy's responsible, as his title indicates, for parliamentary publications, so he could speak to—
12:30 p.m.
Principal Clerk, Chamber Business and Parliamentary Publications
I've taken notes.
12:30 p.m.
The Vice-Chair Mrs. Stephanie Kusie
Thank you Mr. Graham.
Does anyone have any further questions for our guests?
I will leave it to the chair.