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
Tom Kmiec Conservative Calgary Shepard, AB
My colleague here is saying “Shame”. I will get there. I will get there eventually.
Speaking of Parliament, I mentioned Diefenbaker already and the speaking crutch. I get that from Sean O'Sullivan's book, Both My Houses: From Politics to Priesthood. I recently read it upon the recommendation of a member of the whip's staff.
Sean O'Sullivan was a member of Parliament here many years ago, who sadly passed away from cancer. He had a great love for this place, but he did not come here to—
Liberal
Filomena Tassi Liberal Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas, ON
There's a connection right here. His nephew is right here.
Conservative
Tom Kmiec Conservative Calgary Shepard, AB
That's fantastic. Even better, I get to reference the ancestor, so to speak, of someone who is here too.
I immensely enjoyed his book. He started as a staff member in this House and was working for John Diefenbaker as his executive assistant. He had been a long-running volunteer who started very young. In his time, he was one of the youngest members of Parliament ever elected. His mentor was Diefenbaker. When he left this place, it was partly because he was disillusioned with how the place functioned, but he was also disillusioned with politics in general. He went into the priesthood. He heard the call of his faith and became a priest.
I've been thinking about a lot of the points he makes in this book, about the observations he makes about Parliament and how important it is, and I think a lot of his quotations from Diefenbaker bear thinking about. There are many parliamentarians who have come before us who have made immense contributions, who have served here for 12, 16, and 20 years. Reading books like O'Sullivan's and speaking to former members of Parliament, such as Jason Kenney, have made me rethink this, and I now completely disagree with term limits for members of Parliament, something that in my youth I thought was a great idea. Now I think it's not such a great idea, mostly because it's the veteran members, the experienced members, who pass on to the next members the traditions and the customs of this House, the House of Commons specifically. You won't have that happening very often if you change the rules so drastically that people get disillusioned much more quickly with regard to their ability to contribute.
The number one reason that people leave a workplace, an organization, or a corporation—and this was consistent across the board when I worked as a registrar—isn't that they weren't making enough money. It wasn't because they were not getting the opportunities to get training or professional development, or to travel, or to work on interesting projects. Ninety per cent of the time it was because they could not see how their individual activities, their personal activities in the workplace, were related to the achievements and success of the organization they were in. That was the number one reason.
I know what happens because I've seen it happen at the Chamber of Commerce and in other workplaces. I've been invited in either to give counsel or to listen to the HR professionals explain to me what the issues are, and then to listen to them debate about how to fix their workplace.
Ninety per cent of the time that's why people leave. I've seen it happen. People get disenchanted with the type of work they do, so they do less of it. They find opportunities to not be there as often, and then they start finding other work, typically on work time. They'll start using their workplace email and the workplace phones to find work opportunities elsewhere. I'm sure there are parliamentarians who have come before us who've taken the opportunity to sit in the House to do just that because they've become disenchanted with their individual ability to contribute to the whole—to make an amendment to a piece of legislation or to propose a rule change or regulation change.
I would hope that we would not change the rules through this motion without this amendment. It's a very important amendment. We should not change the rules in such a way as to disenchant members at committees and in Parliament from doing the work that they should be doing on behalf of their constituents, their supporters, and the political movement that they belong to.
I always mention “circles of accountability”. It's something I picked up in talking to so many HR professionals. We are not just accountable to our supervisors; we have circles of accountability. I'm accountable to my wife. I'm accountable to my three kids—whom I'm missing, as I haven't been able to Skype with them for the past four days because of this committee meeting—but I'm also accountable to my board of directors of my local association, just like I believe many of you are as well. I'm accountable to my supporters, to my electors, and I have a great many of them. I have the second-largest riding in Canada by population size. In my riding, it was a privilege to earn more votes than even Stephen Harper or Jason Kenney. I have an enormous riding. It's a big number: 43,706.
Conservative
Tom Kmiec Conservative Calgary Shepard, AB
That's a big number, and it's a big riding.
I'm also accountable to all of them, and not just to the people who voted for me, but also to the people who didn't vote for me. How you do the balancing of those interests is actually one of the main points in the standards of professional practice of the HR profession in Alberta. I know that because I helped to write those standards for the balancing of interests. What I don't find in the reform of the Standing Orders of the House of Commons is that balancing of interests. I don't think the term even exists in here. There's no mention of that.
Also, it's not the balancing of interests here in this House between the government and parliamentarians, because that's not a balance. Parliament is supreme. Parliament comes first. Governments come and go; Parliament stays. There may be a time in the future, a hundred years from now, when political parties have broken down again and they no longer function the way they used to, but governments will always come and go. We as parliamentarians will always be here, and we should ensure that the rules of the House don't protect the government but protect parliamentarians first, which is why we can make points of order and claims of breach of privilege against the government and other members when we are defending our rights.
If we choose not to defend our rights, that is our responsibility. It is our fault if future parliamentarians become disenchanted with this place. I think that's what this motion will do without the amendment, because it gives us an opportunity to seek that common ground.
Also, if we don't achieve all our goals immediately, the goals set by the government that I believe the government caucus presumably agrees with—to varying degrees, I would hope—there is always an opportunity for future parliamentarians to take up the task themselves and find ways to change the rules to suit the needs of that generation, but they should always do it by unanimous agreement. The wording of this amendment to the main motion should be unanimously agreed to by the committee here.
The concept that you should seek common ground is not only the title of the Prime Minister's book, but it has happened many times before that members have tweaked the rules. I have examples here. I asked my staff to look into it.
Since 1867, there have been occasions when controversial proposals have led to lengthy debates where the government used its majority to amend the Standing Orders.
These include the adoption of closure in 1913, time allocation provisions in 1969, and a series of Standing Order amendments in 1991. I'll be referring to debates from that time. There were many members who were veteran members in the Chrétien government and in the Paul Martin government who had very astute remarks to make. Many of them had been rookie members then, but had excellent points to make. Just to the point I made, they looked to their experienced members to explain to them the traditions or customs of the House, how things had been done before, and why they should not be so quick to change all the rules, throw everything out, and bring in new ones.
Then there were amendments to the Standing Orders with respect to the report stage of bills in 2001—
Conservative
Tom Kmiec Conservative Calgary Shepard, AB
It was 1991.
In the 1969, 1991 and 2001 examples, closure was imposed to bring the debate to an end and force a decision.
I think those were errors. They should not have done so. I have the debates and I've read the debates from the time. I have former speaker Peter Milliken's speech from the time. I found it interesting. I found it sharp in its criticism of the government of the day, a Progressive Conservative government. I found it insightful into how Parliament should be working, how you build trust and consensus, and how you get to that point.
In many circumstances, however, procedural changes have been the result of broad consensus among members of all parties and have been readily adopted without debate. You'll forgive me; I cannot tell you specifically what those amendments were each time, but they were done in October 1997, March 1998, November 1998, February 2001, February 2004, and November 2008. On all of those occasions, when there was broad-based support from all the political parties and members of Parliament to make amendments to the rules, that came about by trust. They built trust through debate, and got—
Liberal
Scott Simms Liberal Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL
On a point of order, in the past, on unanimous consent, the speaker ceded the floor to someone to make a point or ask a question. I was wondering, politely, if the member would like to cede a bit. I just have a couple of points.
Conservative
Tom Kmiec Conservative Calgary Shepard, AB
Sure. Mr. Chair, are they the same rules we've used before when Mr. Genuis was speaking?
Liberal
Scott Simms Liberal Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL
Did you say 1991, with the changes made then under the Progressive Conservative government? That was a pretty adversarial process. We should probably go there, because Mr. Christopherson is saying we've always done this unanimously, but we haven't.
Liberal
Scott Simms Liberal Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL
I don't know. I'm asking a question. I just want to get your point.
Conservative
Tom Kmiec Conservative Calgary Shepard, AB
That was in debates in the House of Commons. The committee produced a report in which there was agreement, to the best of my knowledge. Whether there was unanimous consensus at committee, I can't tell you that.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
I'll just make one quick point on this.
It's my understanding—and I stand to be corrected, since I haven't done the research—that the only exception to all-party agreement on these changes is that there are a few one-offs over history on which the majority of the government of the day did prevail. I don't know how many of those there are, but any time—to the best of my knowledge, again—there was anything you might call a comprehensive or systemic review of the Standing Orders, that report, as other reports have told us, was always done with all-party support.
It's important to note that every one of those reviews I've seen talks directly to the future and asks us, in our time, to do the same thing they did, even though it's difficult and even though you don't always get the changes you want, and that for a healthy Parliament, the only way to proceed on major changes to Standing Orders is through all-party agreement.
Liberal
Arnold Chan Liberal Scarborough—Agincourt, ON
I'll come back to Mr. Barnes. I have a question on the same point.
Just to remind other colleagues, particularly those who aren't permanent members of the committee, we had requested a paper, Mr. Barnes, with respect to historical past practices. I find it fascinating that Tom is now raising it in his presentation. I wanted to get a sense of what status that might be at, because the point with that was to inform us about every time we had major changes to the Standing Orders. If you have that evidence or research, Tom, or if we could get a sense from the analyst, from Mr. Barnes, of the status with respect to that paper, it would be informative to us as a committee.
Andre Barnes Committee Researcher
I was meant to meet with the table research branch of the House of Commons on Tuesday, but of course this meeting continued on, and I stayed around until around eight, so I wasn't able to meet with them. Most of my time has been here, so now I have a colleague working on the paper as of today and collaborating with the House.
The House has a list of all the changes to the Standing Orders from the present back to 2006, which a colleague is going through to see whether or not they were done by majority or unanimous consent.
Liberal
Arnold Chan Liberal Scarborough—Agincourt, ON
When I asked, I was particularly interested in every time there was a particularly substantive change to the Standing Orders through the history of past Parliaments, and how that was dispensed with.
I am reading some of the papers that are on this subject matter, but if we could have one that could be neutrally distributed to all of us, that would be informative.
Conservative
Liberal
