Evidence of meeting #55 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 opposition.
A video is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
Should we suspend to talk about this?
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
We will resume debate on the motion of Mr. Simms.
Mr. Genuis has the floor.
Conservative
Jamie Schmale Conservative Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON
I have a point of order before we get going.
Conservative
Jamie Schmale Conservative Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON
Mr. Chair, does the committee have unanimous consent to accept the amendment as proposed?
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I appreciate, I'm sure, the good faith efforts that were undertaken in the context of the suspension. Nonetheless, I think members have quite wisely elected to create an opportunity for me to continue to advance the important arguments that I have been advancing and to bring them to a conclusion in the fullness of time.
I will reflect, though, on the core issue here, because there are a lot of things that are being discussed, and I think it is important that we develop the principal issues that inform our perspectives and our concerns about the way the government has proceeded.
Fundamentally, here is where we are. The opposition is united in its conviction that the amendment that is standing before us is important, because the amendment would ensure that we will proceed on a consensus basis. It would ensure that what has been the general practice of the committee will continue to be the practice of the committee and the House with respect to changes to the Standing Orders. That's the position of the opposition: that this is what needs to happen and that we need to have unanimity in the way we proceed with respect to changes in the Standing Orders.
I also think that attached to that we have made the reasonable ask that we have a built-in assurance that the consensus approach will be what is undertaken through the study.
It is not unreasonable for us to simply ask that in the motion convening the study, those terms are clearly defined and set out. That's what we want. That's what we're asking for.
I think we should pass this amendment and then proceed with discussion and, fairly efficiently, the adoption of the motion, and then have a detailed study of the Standing Orders. That's our position, and we have reasons. I am talking about them and I'm going to continue to talk about them.
The government's position is quite interesting, as I understand it, because I haven't heard the members formally argue in defence of what seems to be the actual effect of defeating the amendment. I haven't heard anyone from the government say “We want to do this unilaterally.” In fact, Ms. Tassi, during our discussion earlier on in the day, said that they want to be able to proceed with the discussion, and she was not keen on the use of the word “unilateral”, yet the government is reluctant to adopt the amendment.
It's a mystery to me that there actually seems to be broad assent to the principle—well, I don't know if there's actually broad assent to the amendment, and this is why we in the opposition are looking for an assurance. The arguments that the government members make suggest that they might well be open to the principle of the amendment but don't want to support the amendment itself because they see it as premature to talk about the process of the study before the study is begun.
I'll just say that of course it's not premature to talk about how the study would proceed before the study is undertaken. That is how you study anything. You initially define what the study is going to be about and how the study is going to unfold.
If I look at the main motion that the amendment proposes to amend, it does what you would expect a motion to do, which is to define the contours of the study that the government intends to undertake. It prescribes a time period. It's actually more prescriptive already than many of the motions I've seen, in terms of prescribing the amount of time before which witnesses must be submitted and describing the specific sub-themes of the study. As opposed to just talking about the general study, it's actually describing the sub-themes of the study. There is a process for inviting members of caucus who are not members of the committee.
There is a fairly prescriptive nature to this motion that we can see, as is appropriate, I think, when a study is being undertaken, yet members of the governing party on this committee, broadly speaking, seem to be allergic to the amendment for reasons that are difficult for me, at least, to understand. If they agree that we should all work together, if they agree that we should not proceed without some measure of agreement, then simply pass an amendment that says that.
If you are opposing the amendment, people are liable to come to the conclusion that you are doing so because you disagree with it, right? For people who are watching these proceedings and who see that the government members here do not want to support the amendment, it is reasonable for them to conclude that the members probably don't want to support the amendment because they don't agree with the amendment.
In various conversations, people from the government side have pleaded good faith in just wanting to undertake a discussion and wanting to ensure that everybody is listened to and heard in the context of that discussion. If that's what you want, then pass the amendment. If that's what the government wants, then they can pass the amendment. If that's not what they want, then we have to have this out, right? If their intent—as it seems to be, as I think we have concluded—is to actually create circumstances under which the government can impose changes unilaterally, then we have....
Sorry; I lost my train of thought there.
We have a problem here that we have to debate if the government actually disagrees with this amendment. What has been striking—
Conservative
Blake Richards Conservative Banff—Airdrie, AB
On a point of order, Chair, I know how much Garnett loves his wife and I know he pointed out to her earlier that there was Red Bull. He wanted to make sure she knew he wasn't going to be drinking any of that Red Bull.
I want to assure his wife that he is not consuming any Red Bull. The only thing he has is a bit of water. He has a clear mind and he's giving a great speech, and we're really proud of him.
Liberal
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
Further to the same point of order, this will forever live in Hansard. I'm sure it will be the subject of a Ph.D. thesis in 20 or 30 years.
That's all I wanted to say about the overall discussion of the amendment. I don't know why members of the government would oppose the amendment if at the same time they are suggesting that they agree with it in spirit.
We are going to continue to have this debate, I think, on the basis of the presumption that if the government is opposing the amendment, it's because they don't want to do what the amendment says. If there comes a point when government members conclude that this is an amendment that reflects what they want to do, then actually, numerically, it would only take one government member to come to that conclusion, and then we would have the ability to proceed. I draw the attention of members to that.
Nonetheless, in the absence of support for the amendment from any member of the government, we will proceed with arguments in favour of the amendment, which I hope will further elucidate why the amendment is important.
I was speaking earlier about the discussion paper, the whereabouts of which have escaped me. Oh, here it is. I was speaking earlier about the issues that are raised by the discussion paper.
To build very quickly to the point where I was, because I want to really make this point in a clear way, we were speaking about theme 3 of the discussion paper, which is on page 7. It speaks of management of committees. It speaks about concerns about members “resorting to tactics”, whatever that means, but then it goes on to the possibility of an option for committees. I'll just read the section:
An option would be to make one independent Member an ex-officio member of committees with all privileges except for the ability to vote, or to constitute quorum. This would allow independent Members to participate in in camera proceedings, question witnesses, and travel with committees.
There are some issues there, which I've talked about, such as how the independent members would be selected and how to reconcile the fact that members who are independent would have a potential opportunity to self-select for committees, whereas that opportunity would not exist for members of the government or of other parties, who typically end up on committees as a result of assignment by the whip and not as the result of voluntarily electing to be on those committees.
This is used as a jumping-off point for immediately trying to make arguments for indirectly adding a government member—a non-voting member, but a government member—to every committee.
With regard to this discussion of good faith with respect to the process and the amendment, it is this kind of flow that makes us look and say, “Okay, well, the opposition is probably just moving forward with this on the basis of an evaluation of their own interest.” That's the concern that we have here.
The section I am talking about specifically deals with parliamentary secretaries. It says:
The Government committed to ensuring that Parliamentary Secretaries would not be voting members on committees that fall within their Minister’s mandate. That commitment does not, however, mean that Parliamentary Secretaries should not have a role on committees. Parliamentary Secretaries could be given the same rights on committees as is proposed for independent members.
That is what is being proposed by this discussion paper, and I think this suggestion is quite insidious. The present rules involve the whips allocating positions on committees to specific members and doing so in whatever way they see fit. That's all well and good, and it is up to the individual parties, when they are in government, to decide whether or not parliamentary secretaries sit on committees.
The practice at times has been for them to sit on committees. During the tenure of the previous government, parliamentary secretaries did sit as members of committees, and there is a whole discussion to be had about advantages and disadvantages of that. A possible advantage is that it provides some linkage between the committee and the government. A possible disadvantage, though, is that it could have the impact of compromising the ability of members to act independently, although what can often happen is committee members act at the behest of government anyway, so the removal of parliamentary secretaries from committees isn't a solution, unless it is accompanied by a genuine response that gives the committee the ability to be master of its own domain. That can never be fully a matter of the rules; it has to be a matter of the culture and the will of the people involved.
Of course, in this Parliament we see some degree of variability where some committees exercise some greater degree of independence than others, depending on the disposition of the people involved.
That's the context we had. Different things can be done with parliamentary secretaries. Some may have a substantive impact, but some possible changes may well just be window dressing. In other words, you can have the removal of parliamentary secretaries and have some degree of inappropriate influence, however defined, exerted by the government.
I'm told there was a time, by the way, when parliamentary secretaries would not be members of the committee but potentially would take on a role similar to that of officials. The parliamentary secretary would appear with officials at a certain time or during clause-by-clause study, but instead of sitting with the other MPs, the parliamentary secretary would sit with the officials.
Conservative
Conservative
Blake Richards Conservative Banff—Airdrie, AB
I hate to be Mr. Point of Order, but it has become fairly noisy in here in the last few minutes—
Conservative
Blake Richards Conservative Banff—Airdrie, AB
I can imagine Mr. Genuis has a lot of things he's trying to get across here. It must be difficult to try to speak in that environment. I'd ask for a little respect for him and his intervention.
Liberal
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
Thank you, Mr. Bagnell. I appreciate the job you're doing. Hopefully, if we can assert the role of private members' bills, we'll get good PMBs like yours passed in the future.
On the issue of parliamentary secretaries, there was a time, from what I understand, when the parliamentary secretary would be a part of the witness panel or would sit as an ordinary member of the committee. The model this government has followed was, with some fanfare, to remove parliamentary secretaries from committees, so that they are not part of committees anymore. We discover, however, that parliamentary secretaries do have something to offer parliamentary committees. We want to preserve the independence, but we somehow want to have them engaged.
It would be great to have Kevin here.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Think of the House. He could get the word count up here.
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
Yes, he would be the parliamentary secretary in this case, but he would have to leave the House of Commons in order to come here.
Anyway, this is perhaps not germane to the amendment. The issue....
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
Okay, folks, I think we're getting a little punch-drunk here, and I know Blake wanted me to get a good sleep, so we will now suspend until 10 a.m. in this same room.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
I call the meeting to order.
We're continuing a debate on the motion by Mr. Scott Simms.
Tom Kmiec is next on our list of speakers.
Conservative
Tom Kmiec Conservative Calgary Shepard, AB
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm very pleased to be able to join the debate, finally, after my colleague Mr. Genuis was able to complete his introduction and reserve future comments at a later point.
I have written an outline of the comments I want to make. Unlike Mr. Genuis, I don't have the gift for being succinct and even-tempered in this commentary.
Maybe what I'll start with is my first day here in Parliament, those first few weeks when we started. I remember being a brand new member, a rookie, and about 200 of us were at the Sir John A. Macdonald Building for the first rookie orientation session. When we went there, we were told what our roles were going to be and what a privilege it was to serve as a member of Parliament. We were told that very few people have come here before us, and that it was an opportunity very few people have had to take the seats of our predecessors and be able to serve our country in that way, whether serving at a provincial legislature, which is equally a privilege, or serving in the Parliament of Canada.
I remember, then, that the Prime Minister had come in at one point, and the proceedings were interrupted. He was given the opportunity to speak and to address all the rookie parliamentarians who were there. He mentioned how important the role of a member of Parliament would be and how he would raise our capacity to contribute to Canada, to contribute through legislation and debate. It was a fine sentiment to have at the time. I just don't see it being followed through in the day-to-day activities when I see motions such as this, and then a very reasonable amendment being proposed to make it even better, to make it exactly what this place should be about, which is about the members of Parliament, the parliamentarians, and not about the executive.
I have big problems with the discussion paper and how the process went down to get to the point where we have this motion now before this committee for what I would consider to be a rushed study.
This isn't camp. I've been a camp counsellor before. I've been responsible for others. I've been a supervisor at the Chamber of Commerce for policy staff and for the operation of volunteer committees that did a lot of the same work that Parliament does, but for the business community in Calgary.
I say this isn't camp because we shouldn't be treated as though we're a bunch of children who need the government to look over the activities we undertake on behalf of our constituents. I just don't think that's the right level of responsibility. That's not the right relationship we should have towards the government.
What I see in the motion being proposed for a study here is basically just that, the type of treatment that says we parliamentarians cannot govern ourselves, that we are incapable of doing what's best for both Parliament and in addressing individual public policy issues affecting Canadians from coast to coast or affecting individual provinces or cities. I think that's a very important thing to remember.
I really only have a couple of points, but I do have about three dozen sub-points to each of those couple of points. I think the motion is unreasonable as written, without the amendment to fix it. I think it's also reckless.
I've gone through the effort of looking at past times when there was unanimous agreement to change the Standing Orders of the House, and then other times when there wasn't unanimous agreement and Parliament started to break down. There was disagreement. The trust and the co-operative environment that we live in broke down and didn't exist anymore, and then things started to slow down. The government wasn't able to pass the legislation it wanted, and it would blame the opposition.
In truth, the government holds all the power. You all are not members of the government; you are members of the government caucus. You support the government because you believe in the policies they are putting forward. You are also free to disagree with them, just as we are on this side. We are free to disagree with our party and to vote according to our conscience and the dictates of our supporters and volunteers.
Sometimes there are members who will say that when they belong to a political party, the political agenda, the platform they ran on, is what they want to implement in this place and in this House. They do their best to get through as much of the policy books and as many of the policy platforms as they can, to try to get them implemented.
I would say, though, that we have circles of responsibilities that we have to adhere to. However we choose to vote and whichever policies we choose to advance, we are still responsible to somebody at the end of the day. I would like to think that as members of Parliament, as parliamentarians who have taken up seats that others have had in the past before us, we have a dual responsibility.
One is responsibility to today's Canadians, to the electorate that we have—our supporters, our donors, our volunteers, our families, our political affiliation, and our faith, if we're members of a faith community.
Our second responsibility is to those who came before us. Parliament didn't simply come to exist because it began as a start-up last year in 2016. It came about long before that, as Mr. Genuis has mentioned before when he started reading parts of the Magna Carta, which gave birth to a lot of.... Thankfully, he didn't go through reading the whole thing, because that would have been long. I was joking with him that he should maybe read it in French. A good translation would help him get through it.
Many members who have come before us, whom I could quote, have said how much more they appreciated Parliament after many years here than they did when they started as a rookie. I think it's natural when you start at a new work place. You wish you did things differently or you could show up at different times. You wish your supervisor was different or that your days were arranged in a different manner. I've heard this a lot before. I used to work in human resources. I was a registrar for a professional association in Alberta. This was very common. I had 6,000 members. I would talk to my membership quite often, and they would mention the types of issues they saw in their workplaces and the types of environments people work in.
Then you have that intergenerational mix. People like to work in different ways, depending on the generation they're in, so then there's an adjustment period for that.
I think Parliament goes through that as well. It changes the way we organize our business in order to match with the expectations of groups of Canadians and the generations as they come through the demographic cohorts that we live within.
I do not think, though, that Parliament is like a corporation. It is not like a not-for-profit organization. It's not like any other business. I wrote myself a note that if tomorrow a private business were to fail and people were to lose their jobs, people would go find other jobs. The corporation would wind down. Its assets would be redistributed. That can't happen in Parliament. It simply cannot. We must not let that happen. It's our job as parliamentarians to ensure that doesn't happen.
The changing of the rules and the way we do our business could easily lead to a situation of even less engagement by parliamentarians in the debates of the House. Our primary role is unlike a business. If you're in a for-profit corporation, you generate a profit either for shareholders or for the owners of the company, in whatever format that may be. If you work for a not-for-profit, as I did in a professional association, the chamber of commerce, it was to generate value for the membership in whatever form that was.
Here our role is truly to debate. We're a deliberative body. We're not rated based on how much legislation we pass on behalf of the government, which is why the amendment is so important. Changing the rules to make it more efficient has been the term that's been used in reforming the Standing Orders of the House of Commons, or the modernization of the Standing Orders of the House of Commons. I have a problem with the word “modernization”. It somehow implies that this place is not modern and that we can't do things in a contemporary environment through a past practice or through unanimous consent, as we've done many times before. These things actually help us do our work, so it's not “modernizing”, since we are modern, but maybe “contemporary” would be the term to use.
I also think another issue that we have is a conception that Parliament can't fail. It should not fail. It's the job of parliamentarians, not the Government of Canada, to figure out the best model and the best work environment we can have, and to determine how our daily business should be conducted in order to achieve that goal.
As a parliamentarian on the opposition side, my goal is to ensure that the government is held accountable for both its spending decisions and its policy decisions. By tradition, I really believe my role is to review the main estimates and to review the spending of the government on a regular basis, in the committee I'm on, which in this case happens to be the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development.
After that, it is to contribute to the policy debates. We deliberate. We don't have a certain quota of legislation that we're supposed to pass at the end of the day, both for the government and for private members' business and motions.
Before I continue too much more, I just want to give you a brief outline of what I'd like to cover.
One of the first things I want to make comparisons to is a governance board. I want to compare Parliament to how corporations, chambers of commerce, and the places I've worked in did their business. Second, I want to talk about consensual leadership and consensus-based decision-making. I really think that Parliament works best when there is consensus, co-operation, and trust. You gain trust and you lose trust by different activities. I think it goes both ways, on the opposition side and the government side, but because we on the opposition side are really at the mercy of the government—both the government caucus and the government—we look for those opportunities for co-operation to build trust and understanding.
I've been going through different quotes from former prime minister John Diefenbaker, who had a great love for Parliament. In fact, one of the speaking crutches he had, instead of ums and ahs, was “I love this Parliament”. That gave him just enough time to think of what he wanted to say next, and then he continued for another 20 minutes. I'm sure that if he were here today, he would be repeating “I love this Parliament” every hour, but it wouldn't be a crutch. He would be truthfully saying how much he appreciated and loved this place. He loved this place so much that he refused to move his office at one point, and that has been to the benefit of the opposition since then.
He did say that Parliament was the guarantor of our freedoms. It wasn't just legislation that was passed in this place and it wasn't some belief in something outside of Parliament; Parliament is the guarantor of the rights and freedoms of Canadians, but also of parliamentarians and the privileges we enjoy in order to do the work that we have been elected to do in this place.
After that I want to briefly talk about the Great Reform Act of 1832 in the United Kingdom. For us on the Conservative side, the year 1832 and the decades that led into 1867 are quite important for the conservative movement in the United Kingdom and Canada because they led to the breakup of the original Conservative Party. Those 1832 reforms were really about how Parliament worked. They were about the rotten boroughs and how prime ministers were responsible to parliamentarians, as well as about the responsibility of political parties, political units, the whole coalition, the trust they had amongst themselves, and the lack of trust between the Peelite factions and others. I think it bears speaking about, at least a little.
Lastly, I'll probably finish by going through this document, “Reforming the Standing Orders of the House of Commons”, because I have deep problems both with the content of it and also with the process by which it is being implemented. I will go through the notice of motion and the very reasonable amendment we have proposed that would improve it. My issue is that much of this would have to be done as individual studies. I just want to speak more about that and give you examples from other jurisdictions that have done it exactly in that way. There is so much material in here that you cannot do it justice by rushing it from now to June 2. There simply isn't enough time and opportunity to do that.
I do have the McGrath report here, which I know many members have referred to as well. Mr. Christopherson referred to it repeatedly, showing that at the time there was unanimity, agreement, consensus, and co-operation at the committee level to put forward recommendations that all parliamentarians could consider to reform the way they do their business, but it was done with the trust and the confidence that they had done their work, which they had.
It's a pretty voluminous report. The joke goes that a standing committee of the House writes a report and puts it on the shelf, and nobody reads it. This is the one time, I think, that many of us have read it and actually gone through it in fine detail. It is an important work that should be referenced here, and it bears repeating.
I also wanted to mention, with the McGrath report, my experience on other committees. I have substituted on other committees of the House of Commons here during my time, and I have also worked on reports and studies with other committees where we did find unanimity. I happen to serve on the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development, and to my knowledge, since I joined the committee on a permanent basis, we have not had a moment when we've tabled a dissenting report. I stand to be corrected on that, but I cannot remember having to write a dissenting report. That is because we have worked extremely hard at co-operation and seeking consensus. We've given in, as opposition members on the committee, and the government caucus members have given in as well. We found an opportunity to find common ground and recommendations that we could propose to other parliamentarians that actually reflect the views of the committee. You will find that the reports we write actually say, “the committee finds that...”, “the committee believes that....”
In every single instance where you find that in those reports, it's truthful. I know it's truthful because every time we have one of those lines, we stop and ask each member if they are okay with this, if they actually believe every single sentence that follows, and every time, we have found that consensus. I don't think it will be found here, first because of the process by which this motion was brought before the committee and then because the unreasonableness of resisting a very reasoned amendment proposal by my colleague to improve on this hurts the trust.
I understand that this committee so far has been able to work with a great deal of co-operation and consensus-building, which I think is an important feature of committee business and the way we do the work of the House of Commons.
Those are five main points I was going to raise. At different times I might move between them, and you'll forgive me for that if I do. I'll try to reduce repetition to as little as possible to make my points.
The motion does say on the back end, “...to create or to revise a usual practice of the House, which is not unanimously agreed to by the Committee....” I think that's critical. You don't get to this point without building trust at the committee level, and right now there just simply is an empty tank of trust between the two sides. I've been at this committee since Tuesday to debate this issue, and I had the great pleasure to listen to my colleague, Mr. Genuis, make his points. I think it was a Herculean effort on his part.
I also want to congratulate all of us. It was a Herculean effort to listen to him for the past nine hours. He's a great friend of mine. He made a lot of good points, and he robbed me of an opportunity to make those same points. I don't want to repeat what he said.
I'd better mention too the experience that I bring to this debate at this committee. I am a rookie parliamentarian and this is my first term in office, but I also used to work for a member of Parliament, about 12 years ago, when he was first elected to the House of Commons as a rookie. That was Mr. Steven Blaney, who became a minister. He's still a serving member of the House of Commons. I remember being just as confused by the standing rules of the House and the regulations as he was, and I took the time to learn them as well as I could to assist him in the work that he did.
I come to this debate, then, from several viewpoints. I'm both a sitting member and I used to work for a member of Parliament. I also have had the distinction of serving for the Minister of National Defence on his exempt staff on parliamentary business affecting the portfolios I was responsible for. Through that process I gained a deeper appreciation for the ability of the opposition to confound and complicate and make my life much more difficult as a staff member. At the time I didn't appreciate it, but I appreciate it now in retrospect. I think it's only with time that you begin to appreciate the ability of the opposition to slow things down, which might not be very efficient, but it gives time for reflection and it's well worth having.
Unlike many members here, as well I served as an exempt staff provincially at the Alberta legislature for both the Minister of Sustainable Resource Development and the Minister of Finance in Alberta, whom we also call the provincial treasurer. I served on his staff for three years as a policy adviser, but I also dealt with a lot of the standing rules of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta, so I bring both viewpoints here. I know there are many members, both on the government caucus side and in the opposition caucuses, who have served in a provincial legislature or a provincial parliament, as the case may be, who bring that type of experience with them as well.
I would always caution parliamentarians here not to look necessarily at how the provinces do business to find the best model of efficiency. In the Alberta legislature you can pretty much pass a piece of legalisation in one day. I don't personally believe that type of efficiency is what we want here. That's not the type of efficiency parliaments and legislatures were set up for. What we were set up to do is to deliberate, and this is maybe one point....
I'm just going to segue here to the actual document that was proposed, which is the study, the motion, which is based on studying parts of this and parts of the Standing Orders during that day of debate on October 6. It does say here, “While Parliament by its very nature is an adversarial system....” Now, if we stop right there, I have a problem with calling this place adversarial. I don't consider members of the government caucus my opponents. You're not my enemies. I actually think of you as colleagues.
I'm a junior colleague to you, Mr. Chair. We've enjoyed a couple of flights flying through Toronto, as well as Air Canada's stellar service, and we've been stuck in Toronto a few times. It does happen. I have great appreciation for my veteran members and those who have been here, who have more experience than I do, regardless of the political party they belong to, because they bring a great amount of experience to how this place works. I did not appreciate that as much when I came here.
We were elected in different “class years”. I hang out, so to speak, with my class of 2015 much more than I do with “the others”, we call them, regardless of the political affiliation they have, but it's from those others, such as chairs like Tom Lukiwski, that we learn. I have learned a great deal from him about how to be a better committee member at the table. He's taken the time to explain to me the rules around committees, how they function, and where the great advantages and disadvantages are. I've changed the way I both behave and do the work that I'm asked to do at committee.
I appreciate that type of guidance. You don't get that from the rookie members, obviously, because we don't have that experience here. Those changes to the rules, then, depend upon the more experienced members giving us some guidance and telling us that these are where the pit traps are, these are where the fault lines are, and if you change the rules in this way, there will be unforeseen consequences.
I depend on members like Mr. Simms to explain to us what's happened in the past. As I was saying before, I look to the more experienced members, regardless of the political party, for judgment calls on rules, procedures, and how those should work.
Now, I really do feel that if the government pursues the contents of “Reforming the Standing Orders of the House of Commons”, as laid out here, and they achieve these goals in the timelines being proposed in the main motion, with or without the amendment, it would be to the detriment of parliamentarians. It would, in effect, through the rule changes, turn the opposition into an audience. We would be able to speak up occasionally, perhaps, but not really be able to contribute to this place.
In every single past reform and in every report I've read, from the McGrath report to the debates in 1991, 1986, and 1969, the thing that was most important for parliamentarians participating in those debates was ensuring that they were the ones who were receiving a greater opportunity to keep the government accountable—if you were an opposition member, that was key to you—and to do more effective legislative work. This would include proposing amendments and finding opportunities for unanimous consent motions that everybody could live with to change the rules temporarily for a particular situation or to make exceptions.
I'll just mention that before the election, I was registrar for the human resources profession in the province of Alberta, a not-for-profit corporation. Unlike the CPAs, the accounting profession, or the engineers, we had, and still have, voluntary certification, with 6,000 members who voluntarily pay dues in order to have a professional certification. In human resources and labour relations you would always say that the rules exist not as a straitjacket. They're not supposed to be a straitjacket. For HR professionals, you look at the rules and you ask where the exceptions are and where you can make your employees happy by making those exceptions. The right opportunity for that comes with experience, which builds judgment and then trust. They're all interlinked. You cannot get there by any other fashion.
I would always tell them...and these were experienced professionals with 30 to 35 years in labour relations, negotiating with unions on both sides. We had members on both sides of the table negotiating. They would always say that the rules exist, sure, but as long as we can all co-operate, we can reach an agreement and suspend the rules temporarily. If we all agree on that, we will find consensus. We will find agreement. Then we can move forward with it.
But you don't move forward with a motion like this, with the contents of this report produced by the government, which I believe it is unreasonable and reckless, and say that by unanimous agreement we will proceed. I think that's a mistake. That's an error. Many members before me have mentioned it. I am pretty confident that members on this side will repeat the point that it is an error. It would change the opposition into an audience. We would be ineffective at keeping the government accountable.
When the debates were moved from Parliament to the committees and we were given time limits for speaking in the House—that was a maximum time, but you can always speak less than the time you're allotted by the Speaker and by the rules of the House—they moved it here into the committees so that we would have an opportunity to speak, an opportunity to raise the points we would otherwise raise in the House of Commons, in Parliament. If you take that away here at the committee level and don't give us an opportunity to speak up on behalf of our conscience, on behalf of our constituents, our political party, our experience that we gain from being here for four, eight, 12, 16, 20 years, then I think you do a disservice to Parliament, do an injustice to this institution.
It's a human institution that has survived in this country since 1867 and in the preceding colonial parliament as well. I think it's important to remember that we are here as stewards of Parliament. We don't own this place. It's not ours to keep; it's ours to steward for future generations. This is something I tell my staff and that I tell my constituents. I say I may be the first member of Parliament for the riding of Calgary Shepard, but I will not be the last.
Now, I may be the last, if we change the rules so badly that Parliament ceases to work. There are many cases in the world in which the legislative assemblies don't work very efficiently anymore, and by “efficiently” I mean as deliberative bodies. I don't mean the speed at which they pass legislation; I mean as deliberative bodies, where people can debate ideas, in our case here in the safety of the House of Commons. I think this is important and bears remembering.
The last thing I'll mention about my personal experience and what I bring to this debate is that I used to work as the manager of policy and research at the Calgary Chamber of Commerce. At the time it had six policy committees, made up of anywhere from a dozen business persons interested in a particular subject matter to as many as 30, 40, 50, or 60 members, who sat in the morning at 7:15 a.m.—and our staff had to suffer through that almost every single day of the week—to debate policy issues. We would produce papers for them to consider, and then they would deliberate, much as Parliament does.
We had rules in these places, and it was the manager's job to apply the rules on behalf of the board. I was empowered, as a non-executive team member. The chief economist was the member of the executive who would direct me in managing the work of these volunteers. Each of these volunteers was a member of the Chamber of Commerce and had participated in the elections for the board of governors of the chamber. In a lot of ways, because they were members, they had a vested interest in how the chamber functioned, and they then deliberated.
We never said to them, “These are the policy issues you will talk about. These are the rules that will govern you.” Much of our work was done by consensus between the members and members of the staff. The members were there to deliberate the points they were trying to make. We never imposed on them a specific way of doing things. We would always try to find an opportunity to empower them to bring forward the issues they wanted to bring forward, especially if they were working co-operatively among themselves. If half the committee wanted to speak to an issue and the other half didn't want to, it wasn't the job of the staff to decide whose issues we would deal with. We waited and we deferred, based on the rules that we had.
That's the type of experience I bring to this discussion. I have seen how the Alberta legislature functions and I have seen how Parliament functioned 12 years ago. I've spent time learning the rules. Like everybody else here, I got that big green hardcover book, the Standing Orders of the House, and I've taken the time to read through it.
Now, I have not read it cover to cover. I have a great amount of difficulty to do that through and through.
