Procedure and House Affairs Committee on Feb. 2nd, 2016

[Marc Bosc]

Sure. If you take something as simple as the number of supply days per period, by taking one day out of the five-day week, you've reduced the number of days the House sits by 20%. The number of supply days per period is set down in the Standing Orders, and it's fixed. That increases proportionally the number of supply days in each period relative to government business. That's one example.

For private members' business, you would lose an hour of private members' business. If you didn't make it up somewhere else, you'd lose that. For bills and notices, a bill can only be read once in a given day, so if you lose a day in a week, that delays the options. It reduces the options for the government.

For notice periods, if you take a day out, what do you do with that day? Do you allow it to continue to be a day that's valid for notice purposes or not? That's something to consider. This is where two sittings in a day kind of compensates for that. If you still have five sittings in a week, you could still accomplish a measure of what you would have accomplished or could have accomplished in a five-day week. Those are some examples, and there are of course many others.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Banff—Airdrie, AB]

In order to be able to compensate for that lost day, I can certainly see that especially for things like private members' business and for the progress of all legislation, including government legislation, having that there would be important. But in order to ensure there are those two sitting days in one day.... You talked earlier when talking about question period about adding some of that time to each day. How would that work crossed over with the idea of two sitting days in one day? Would you not almost need to put all those hours into one specific day in order for that to work without having other unintended consequences, or do you not think that would be an issue?

[Marc Bosc]

There are bound to be unintended consequences, as I said, particularly when we're combining several different changes to the Standing Orders.

Let's start with making up the time. It would be quite easy to add an hour of private members' business, the one lost on the Friday, either at the end of the day on Thursday or at the beginning of the day on Monday, let's say, or at the end of any other day for that matter. The government time lost, which is essentially two and a half hours, or a little less maybe because of routine proceedings, could be added on over several different days. You could sit a little bit later. That's just to maintain the number of hours in total.

The consequences for the sitting duration per se, say, on a Tuesday or a Thursday, the longest days now, would certainly exceed what it would have been on Friday for government business. If you're only having two and a half hours on a Friday, then sitting from, say, 9:30 or 10 o'clock on a Tuesday morning until near 2 p.m., you have a four-hour block there, or thereabouts. It's longer than a Friday would have been in that sense.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Thank you.

Ms. Taylor.

[Ginette Petitpas Taylor, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

I'm going to share my time with David.

I'd like to begin by thanking you for your presentation this morning, Mr. Bosc. I quite appreciate the briefing notes you provided for us.

I have a quick question. Are you aware if the provincial or territorial legislatures in the country all sit five days a week, or if it's a minimum schedule that they have when they're sitting?

[Marc Bosc]

I haven't done a full survey of all the provinces, but I don't believe that very many of them sit five days a week. A few do, but they don't all, that's for sure.

[Ginette Petitpas Taylor, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

So the majority of them don't sit—

[Marc Bosc]

Again, I hesitate to state that firmly because I haven't checked, but just from past knowledge, most of them do not.

[Ginette Petitpas Taylor, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Thank you.

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

Thank you, Mr. Bosc, for being here.

We talked a lot about sitting days, but maybe it would be more complicated to write and simpler to implement if we changed the entire language to “sitting hours” instead of “sitting days”.

Is that a possibility or something we could look at? What would be the consequences of that?

[Marc Bosc]

It would require a lot of thinking; let me put it that way.

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

Fair enough.

[Marc Bosc]

So many Standing Orders are predicated on either “sitting day” or “sitting”. It would be a significant rethink of the way the Standing Orders are structured.

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

I think that's why we're here: to redraw things as we need to, instead of being stuck in the past.

I have a number of other simple questions that are probably more difficult to answer.

Do you have any idea historically why we have an academic calendar for when we sit, why we rise in June and don't come back until the end of September? Would it make more sense—or maybe it doesn't make any sense at all—to sit, say, two weeks on and two weeks off year-round, as an example, instead of having seasons?

Is there any impact that you can think of?

[Marc Bosc]

You know, that's entirely up to the House. History has shown us that people in Canada like to benefit from the summer months, their short summer season. I would say that at the outset, but certainly there's nothing stopping the House from amending the parliamentary calendar and sitting more weeks in the year. That's entirely possible.

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

Different weeks, right?

What would the consequences be if, let's say, we started sitting at 8 or 9 in the morning instead of 10 in the morning? That's just for the sake of argument; I'm not saying I want to do that. I don't particularly want to do that.

What would the impact on us be of starting our days earlier and ending them later in terms of the business of the House and the way it operates around here?

[Marc Bosc]

With starting earlier, you're getting into more party-driven impacts. A lot of parties will be planning their day at certain early hours ahead of the opening of the House. Regional caucuses might be meeting and other groups of members might be meeting at that time. That would have to be taken into consideration.

With any change to a schedule, you have to look at what other stuff is scheduled in the time you want to use up as an alternative. I'm not familiar with all the things that members are doing earlier in the day, but certainly any start time the House wants to implement is doable. There would be impacts obviously on staff who would have to be here in advance of the opening of the House. If you were talking about an 8 o'clock start for the House, that obviously would have quite serious impacts on everything from collective agreements, to overtime, to whatever. It could be an important change.

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

Those are very good points.

How about for votes? I don't know if it's the case right now, but is it possible to say that votes cannot under any circumstance take place on a Friday but we can have a sitting on a Friday? This would change the mathematics on the numbers of who would have to be here on Fridays.

[Marc Bosc]

I'm not sure I understand the question.

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

Would it be possible to say, for example, that under no circumstance can a vote be held on Fridays, but we'll sit on Fridays anyway?

[Marc Bosc]

Right now we're almost there. It's very rare to have a vote on a Friday. The votes that do take place typically are what I would call procedural votes, where parties try to use dilatory tactics. Other than that, votes on legislation and so on don't generally take place on Fridays. There already is a reduced duty schedule, if I could put it that way. All parties approach Fridays in that way and reduce their presence to a degree.

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

Okay.

This is my final question. Again, I'm doing a lot of creative thinking here. We have the e-notice system which uses these wonderful secure IDs so we can do things from the office, from home, or from anywhere. Could that be used, or is there a good reason not to use that for votes in the House? We could vote from the riding, for example, using our secure IDs.

[Marc Bosc]

Again, I think this gets into a whole other area of discussion surrounding the role of members and what it is to be a deliberative assembly. It's a much bigger question than a practical one, if I could put it that way. That would almost require a separate examination. That would be a very significant change. I'm not saying it's impossible. I haven't really looked into it very much, but it is definitely significant.

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

I think we haven't really defined the boundaries of what we're studying yet, and I want to see what those boundaries are.

Thank you very much for that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Mr. Dusseault, I'm sorry. You were supposed to be before that round, but you're on now.