Procedure and House Affairs Committee on April 14th, 2016

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Yes, you are. We have Mr. Chan, Mr. Reid, Mr. Graham, Ms. Sahota, and Ms. Taylor. We're at Mr. Chan now.

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

Forgive me, Mr. Chair, could you just tell me what the list is, the order of the list?

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

I just read it: Mr. Chan, Mr. Reid, Mr. Graham, Ms. Sahota, and Ms. Taylor—and Ms. Vandenbeld.

Mr. Chan.

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

For the record, let me to simply thank you, Mr. Bosc, and your entire House administration team for your professionalism, and for the fact that you've made it very clear and have demonstrated time and again that you and your entire team work ultimately to serve the members and whatever decisions the House makes. You carry it out with tremendous professionalism. I simply want to put that on the record.

I want to briefly address some of the points by Mr. Reid, and then I want to get back to a very specific question. I might wander past by a couple of minutes, but I haven't spoken yet.

Mr. Reid, I want to get back to first principles. The point the government made in the campaign with respect to making the House more family friendly is more a function of trying to make this place a more attractive place for all Canadians to feel they can fully participate and become members of the House of Commons. What we're trying to do is to find that sweet spot where we remove as much as possible the structural barriers to participation.

I'm going to say on the record—and I know Ms. Vandenbeld shares this particular view—that there is not unanimity in the Liberal caucus on the elimination of Friday sittings. I think some of the members who have been here longer than I have, those who have served as staff, understand that the practical reality is that when we signed up and became members of Parliament and we have the privilege to do the work that we do, it is a 24-7 kind of job. No matter whether you have a four-day House sitting week or five-day House sitting week, we're going to be working a lot, no matter what.

What we're trying to do is to find an opportunity where we can have full participation and recognize the incredible impact this job has, particularly for those of us who have families. You and I share that particular reality. I simply wanted to address that.

That gets me to my substantive question that I wanted to raise with the clerk and his team. I'm ultimately concerned about its impact in terms of its interplay with the Standing Orders. I wanted your thoughts, perhaps—and we haven't raised this yet—on changing the concept of sessional days to perhaps.... I note in some of the papers the analysts had prepared that over time, the time for debate has been reduced in the House through changes to the Standing Orders.

I've observed, frankly, that a lot of members now, in the standard 20-minute allocation of time, split their time to 10 minutes. What's your thought on further reducing time for debate and changing from the concept of sessional days to maybe sessional hours, and how would that have an interplay with respect to the Standing Orders so that we could perhaps get through the business of government and the business of private members perhaps a little more efficiently?

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Mr. Bosc.

[Marc Bosc]

I recall the exchange we had, Mr. Chan, on debating time. I think I made the point that yes, you could reduce the duration of speeches, but there was a point where you reached a point where it became absurd if you were going to conserve the questions and comments period after speeches. Right now, many, many members split their time and make 10-minute speeches, leaving five minutes for questions and comments. It's a bit hard to imagine a two-minute question and comment period or a one-minute question and comment period. I would just put that out there. I don't think it's an impediment to reducing speaking times. You could have five-minute speeches and five minutes of questions and comments if you wanted. Right now, we have a two-to-one formula for questions and comments. It doesn't have to be that. It could be anything that the committee decides it ought to be.

On days versus hours, there again, that is certainly a possible way of looking at the time of the House. However, I would say that you have to be careful with hours, simply because of the existence of procedural mechanisms that are available and that could come and disrupt that. The perfect example is when something is time-allocated, let's say, and a day is allocated to that final day of debate, say at second reading of a bill. As long as the day starts, it counts, even if it's only two minutes long, whereas if you've allocated four hours to it and a clever opposition decides to do other things leading up to that time, then you won't get it that day. That's the challenge. I'm not saying that it's not insurmountable, but that's the kind of thing you have to consider when looking at that.

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

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Are you finished?

Mr. Reid.

Oh, yes.

[Marc Bosc]

One thing I did forget to mention earlier on, on the question of proxy voting, was to bring up something that has fallen into disuse and might be of interest to the committee, and that is the practice of pairing. I think it exists in the Standing Orders. It has been there a very long time—Standing Order 44.1— and it is a way to have members' names appear in the Journals as being paired, if they were absent for legitimate reasons essentially. It's a way of getting around this idea of members' names not appearing anywhere if they can't come and vote.

I just put that out there.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Thank you.

Mr. Reid.

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

Mr. Chair, I just want to determine if the speakers list is going to have the effect, with the number of people still on it, of eating up the remainder of our time. Obviously I want to get to the motion that I distributed on Monday, inviting the members of the independent advisory board for Senate appointments, the so-called independent advisory board for Senate appointments, to appear before our committee before the end of May. I just wanted to find out whether, when you add up the time there, we're going to have a chance to get to this, or we're not.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Well, we have four people who are supposed to take three minutes. It looks like they're not taking as much time as Mr. Christopherson took. It looks like we'll have time at the moment.

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

All right, maybe you could add me to the bottom of that list in case that doesn't happen. I appreciate that.

I should know this but I don't. I have the parliamentarians' bible sitting in front of me, and seeing as one of the authors of the parliamentary bible is right here with me, is it right that for all dilatory motions, once someone calls for one, there's a bell for 30 minutes, there's no debate, and then you must have at least 20 members present to deal with that in order to cause the division to occur? Is that correct?

[Marc Bosc]

That's correct, if you're having a recorded division, yes.

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

You need 20, okay. That confirms what I was going to say in answer to Ms. Vandenbeld's earlier comment about needing the people present. You only need to have 20 people present on a Friday to cause a dilatory motion to go to a recorded vote. That's all you need. If you have something that's coming up, an item of government business on a Friday that you're worried about, and you want to pursue it but you think that dilatory motions could be a problem, you can seek unanimous consent of the House and discuss that in the Tuesday meeting of the House leaders about not allowing dilatory motions on Friday. That would resolve that problem. And then dilatory motions can be legitimate. It's not illegitimate to have these things.

I don't see a situation in which this is going to cause more than one-ninth of a 180-member caucus to have to be here on Fridays. Being here one Friday in nine doesn't seem like a terrible burden to face. It's a little tougher for us in the opposition, but we're willing to do it, and so are the NDP. I don't think that's a good reason not to sit on Fridays.

That's all I wanted to say.

[Marc Bosc]

Mr. Chairman, as a point of clarification, the The 20 really refers to the necessary number of voting members for the decision of the House to be valid. All that's required to force a recorded division is five members, and parties want to win votes, so they're going to have members present to win those votes. I think that's what I would add to that answer.

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

In that case, I'm sorry for my incorrect statement. You pointed that we need even fewer people to force a recorded vote. The 20, essentially, is the quorum requirement.

[Marc Bosc]

Correct.

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

You only need 20 people there. If there aren't 20 people there, it's just that the business wasn't that important. One of the dilatory motions is that the House do now adjourn, and if they have nothing important to discuss, let's take that Friday off or end the House at that time. We are always seeing the clock in order to pretend that we left at the normal adjournment time when we actually got up and left several hours earlier, anyway. Everybody's experienced that.

You can see what I'm getting at. The only time we'd ever have the House continue to sit is when, frankly, one of the parties felt strongly enough about it that they were prepared to be there and engage in a dilatory motion. All of our parties got millions of votes. If one of the parties, just one, feels it's important enough to do that, then why on earth shouldn't we be sitting on Friday? It means that at least one of our three recognized parties thinks that the matter before the House is more important than a day off.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

I wouldn't call it a day off, so there you go.

Mr. Reid, don't worry. I'll be brief. I am not a big fan of dragging it out, as you saw with my very rushed filibuster one time.

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

[Inaudible]

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

I was going to say that from my experience as a staffer sitting next to Tyler, when I learned that he is the more expendable of the pair between him and David, there are a number of things that we used to have that I kind of miss. One thing, Clerk, is the one-stop shop. It would be very useful. It doesn't really fall in the category of this study, but I would really like to see the one-stop shop come back. If I need basic office supplies, why should I wait three days to get them? If I need a pen, why can't I go downstairs and get a pen? That's the way it was.

Tying back to what we were talking about before, here is another idea about after-hours, or members' access members to get back to the parking lot, for example. In particular circumstances at night, members perhaps could have the opportunity to use the Mounties to get down the hill. It would provide the protection that they would request in certain circumstances. The vehicles are already there. There are no major logistical problems with that. It's an idea to put out there, nothing more than that.

There is one other thing, on the Standing Orders. We haven't talked much about them today. Standing Order 14 is about strangers in the House. Perhaps it could get a subsection specifically exempting the care of infants. It's food for thought.

I also wanted to come back to the calendar thing we started the meeting with. Right now calendar-sharing between staff is difficult enough. My staff cannot view and edit my calendar on their phones, which I think is very frustrating.

If you want to take the logical step of enabling families to see our calendars, I would like the whole office to have a properly integrated calendar so we are not stuck, as we are now, using Google calendars. You are talking about security issues as one of the concerns. We are already circumventing the security issues because of the limitations. Yes, you can make it secure, but if nobody uses it, it's pretty useless. I'll put that out there.

[Marc Bosc]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Ms. Sahota, go ahead.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

I'd like to start by thanking Mr. Christopherson for his comments about this government coming from a place of being open-minded. I assure you the reasons I keep bringing up the Friday sittings, and making them constituency days, are coming from a place of trying to be open-minded.