Evidence of meeting #17 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 staff.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Arnold Chan Liberal Scarborough—Agincourt, ON
It is the opposition party's motion. Do you have a particular proposal you want to suggest in the first hour for what you would like to do?
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
No, we don't at present. I'll have to get back to you on that.
I don't necessarily think we're talking.... Questions of privilege are typically dealt with as being urgent, but they need not be time consuming, if you follow the distinction. What we need to figure out is whether we can deal with this in a manner that simply gets it dealt with in a single meeting or if we need more than that. That seems like a reasonable starting point.
I don't know if you were in the House when it came up. You saw that this is not a matter that's highly contentious. I'm inclined to think it can be dealt with quickly. That's the only observation I can make.
Liberal
Arnold Chan Liberal Scarborough—Agincourt, ON
I'm amenable to that. I wanted to get a sense of whether there a particular process or outcome from the direction coming from the House, given that is was your opposition house leader's motion.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
Right. It would be reasonable to have him here, I suppose.
That's the obvious thought. He is also an ex-speaker, so he has lots of procedural matters and that. Could I get back to you guys?
Liberal
Arnold Chan Liberal Scarborough—Agincourt, ON
Sure. My thought on that is to get the law clerk to give us some guidance on what's happened in the past where a similar order has come from the House to this committee, so that at least we have a foundation of what to expect.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
That's a good point. It's obviously going to add to the amount of time we take.
Liberal
Arnold Chan Liberal Scarborough—Agincourt, ON
I'm not looking to spend a lot of time on this. Maybe we could do this informally, but I think a bit of guidance would be helpful in what was the practical outcome of the process.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
You know what, that's not a bad way to start this, maybe getting a primer for all of us, because we'll have more questions of privilege. Having the law clerk to guide us through what we do, how we deal with this, how it's been dealt with in the past, and some best practices....
Liberal
Arnold Chan Liberal Scarborough—Agincourt, ON
Even if it's just a submission of a quick paper, so we have some sense of what.... I have a few anecdotal ones, more from dealing with the Ontario legislative experience, of similar prima facie cases of breach of members' privileges pursuant to this, where something was leaked.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
What I'm hearing is that for the first hour of our first Tuesday back, we would have the law clerk, and that would hopefully guide a short process as to what we do following that. For the second hour, we'll get some witnesses in. Maybe we'll tentatively leave another hour open on the Thursday, depending on where the law clerk leads us, and use the second hour on the Thursday for other witnesses.
Liberal
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Mr. Chair, I think that's a good idea.
We're starting out, and we know we're on a four-year voyage. Starting out with the law clerk makes all the sense in the world. It would be nice if we could do a secondary piece of work rather than just listen to the law clerk. Even if we set aside to try to scope out how much time we need, we could agree to hear from the law clerk and attempt to put a path forward, so this thing doesn't get ahead of itself.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
Let's have him for 45 minutes, or so, and then spend 15 minutes defining the rest of the study.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
We can have the macro from the provincial law clerk, and then we can do the micro in the remaining 15.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
I think we have a bit of agreement here that we're not going to spend a lot of time on this particular point.
NDP
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
Yes.
The week we were going to have Elections Canada is the week before the May constituency week. We have an hour on main estimates on May 17, which we might be able to move to the first week back. In the second meeting that week, the last day before the constituency week, we are giving, at least for part of that meeting, drafting instructions on the interim report. We'll try to juggle all that, I guess.
One last thing before we....
Yes, Mr. Chan.
Liberal
Arnold Chan Liberal Scarborough—Agincourt, ON
Just as a suggestion to the rest of the committee members, maybe we could use the steering committee. I apologize, because now my timing is a little bit more sporadic, but that might be a way we can figure this out as opposed to using committee time. Maybe we could schedule a more regularized steering committee process, maybe at least once a month.
I'm sorry; if you could work it around my unfortunate—
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
No, no, that's fine. There's that, but also, as I was going to say, we can go only so far before we need a work plan in front of us where we can actually see the dates and move them all around.
I think a steering committee would be well in order, Mr. Chair, and it would solve a lot of your problems.
Liberal
Arnold Chan Liberal Scarborough—Agincourt, ON
Maybe we could go really long on that Tuesday night, treat part of it as a steering committee, and then schedule it going forward so that we have some regularity.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
We have the next little while scheduled.
Mr. Reid, you wanted to bring up a point about television before we leave.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
Yes. Thank you for reminding me.
I was just going to say that seeing as we're frequently meeting in a room that's televised—
