Procedure and House Affairs Committee on March 21st, 2017

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

It was exactly the same. I was going to filibuster for an hour and a half. They wouldn't let the committee adjourn, and I ended up filibustering for umpteen hours.

[An hon. member]

Eleven hours.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

You guys brought it on yourselves.

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

Well, by a happy coincidence, none of us will face this problem because Mr. Simms will ensure that opposition members are completely emasculated from the committee, so we'll get home early and be utterly powerless.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Yes.

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

I mean, this is the fundamental problem with what's going on here, a despicable attempt to gut the way our Parliament works. Our Parliament has been the foundation of the move from the autocracy we once were under, serving an all powerful king, to become, bit by bit, the foundation stone for democracy, not just in the United Kingdom where this started, but also in Canada, in Australia and New Zealand, across Africa, and in India, the largest democracy in the world, through a transformation I've described, and a revolution in the United States. The foundation of our democracy is that we have a Parliament in which there can be people who are loyal to the Constitution but not loyal to the government of the day, people who follow a higher law and who are able to express that. Under our system, the Westminster system, we are able to present a loyal opposition, loyal to the Constitution, the crown, and to the things that make us great and not to an agenda with which we disagree.

[Some hon. members]

Hear, hear!

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

Now, that is true when the Conservatives are in opposition. It is true when the New Democrats are in opposition. It was true when I was in the Canadian Alliance and we were in opposition. It was true when Justin Trudeau was in opposition. It was true when Jean Chrétien was in opposition. Both Sir John A. Macdonald and Sir Wilfrid Laurier were in opposition. It was true then and every single time every one of the people I've mentioned has wound up in government, every single one except Justin Trudeau has understood that it should remain that way when they are in government. But this man, this would-be tyrant, this would-be Juan Perón thinks that he ought to be governing without any mediating institutions and that no law should stand between him as the direct channel of the will of the people, as he interprets it. This man thinks he can throw all the rules aside because we know, Scott, you did not design this motion you put your name to. We know the statement you made is an absolute lie. We know that. We know that's why you didn't say it but got your staff to say it, because then you wouldn't be lying. But this tissue of lies this government is acting on, this contemptible abuse of our system, is beyond anything I have seen. It is typical of the kind of arrogant, selfish, rude individual who goes out there and elbows other members aside. I've never seen that happen either. I've never seen anybody other than your Prime Minister go out there and physically assault a member in the House of Commons.

There have been hundreds of members in the Commons, maybe 1,000 or more since I've come here, and never once except for your leader have I seen someone physically assault someone else. Then he got up in the House of Commons and used the language of a physical abuser when he defended himself, saying that “mistakes were made”, using passive language. He had to go through three apologies. The third one was written by somebody else, but his actions were contemptible. This is contemptible. Your willingness to be involved in it is equally contemptible. Your attempt to shove it through when we're having a budget hearing—because there will be a bad-news budget, you'll focus on that instead of on this—that's contemptible too. My goodness, this is a shameful government. I did not think I would be saying this. I'm not given to flights of rhetoric, as everybody familiar with my reputation for being boring is aware.

Now, I have a businesslike proposal for dealing with this. We will work as the Harper government did, as the Chrétien government did, to try to seek changes to the Standing Orders on which there is consent from all parties. I thought the part of Mr. Simms' motion suggesting that all members could make submissions was reasonable. That's why I didn't suggest amending it. People who are not members of a caucus—that includes Ms. May, for example—would be able to participate in the proceedings and file with the clerk of the committee any suggestions they have. It's a good idea, but it's an irrelevant idea when the Liberals in this committee just ram through whatever the fuck they want—I withdraw that word—without regard to what ought to be happening here. This is an abuse. I agree with Mr. Christopherson when he asked, and you think you're going to win this? I don't know, maybe you think you can just keep on sitting here, hour after hour into the night, tonight and tomorrow. We'd have to suspend for the votes, to come back, and it will exhaust us.

I assume that's your goal: just keep doing it and hopefully the media won't notice because they'll be so upset over whatever bad news you're dropping into your budget, they won't be paying attention.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

A point of order.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Mr. Christopherson.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Mr. Chair, you can see where we are, especially, sir, compared to where we've been, notwithstanding our little kerfuffle over Bill C-33, which derailed us for a short period of time. Some of us went out of our way to help get this committee back on track, if you'll recall. Most of the time, we've been very respectful of each other and of each other's rights. We've listened to one another politely, even when there is no media, nobody, around. That's the way we've been functioning. I've been on this committee for quite some time—not as long as Mr. Reid—and the committee works best, Mr. Chair, when we have that. You're our leader, helping us work collectively as a team, a team that includes each of us in the opposition too. It's easy from the government side, but we in the opposition have offered up that willingness to be part of a team and to work collectively on the issues that we have, especially on this committee because most of the things we do are non-partisan. The rule changes in the House should be non-partisan.

Mr. Chair, I'm appealing to you in your capacity as our chair. You have the authority to adjourn. I am personally, as a matter of privilege, asking you to please step in, preserve what's left of the ability of this committee to work as a single entity, and allow us to approach these rule changes in a way that's as fair and respectful as we've done everything else. I'm asking you to use your unilateral authority as the chair to adjourn this session. Allow us to get to our caucuses tomorrow to talk about this. Then let's come back on Thursday. That is not some gymnastics of parliamentary athletics. That's just polite common sense and respect. We haven't even had a chance to take this to our caucuses. Where on earth does the government think it's going to get the credibility to go out into the public and defend not just what you're doing, but how you're doing it? I'm asking you, Mr. Chair, to save the government from itself. Preserve the good work of this committee, the spirit of co-operation that exists, and adjourn this meeting. Let some fairness, common sense, and real democracy enter into this procedure. Mr. Chair, I implore you to please do that on behalf of this collective.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

I appreciate your description of how well we work together when everyone has a chance to input. However, I have to follow the rules, which the clerk has pointed out to me: “The committee Chair cannot adjourn the meeting without the consent of a majority of the members”.

Mr. Reid, you still have the floor.

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

Thank you.

The purpose of this is to create a situation in which changes can't be made without the consent of the other parties. Effectively, that is all this does, but in so doing it resolves both the timing problem and the problem of this being an omnibus measure. I've explained a little bit about how it reduces the omnibus provision.

As for the timing, here's what I think would happen if this amendment were adopted. We effectively would have to send a report back a report to the House by June 2. We have a manageable amount of subject matter because we would take the lowest hanging fruit and deal with that first, like the things on which we are most likely to achieve consensus.

If someone says, I think we may have less consensus on this, but we can achieve something on this or there are other items that are more important and maybe we can achieve consensus on that, that would be fine. It would effectively be an interim report. It would not be so different from what the committee has been doing vis-à-vis the Chief Electoral Officer's recommendations for the 42nd election. We have been nibbling away at them a bit at a time, so we'd have June 2.

We'd presumably have further discussions later on. If the committee wanted it to happen, these could take place during hours other than the normal ones, which is something permitted under the rules already and is a part of the motion that I've left in. We would still be able to have sittings in the evening or on alternate days.

The nature of the work we've established would allow us, if we chose, to continue during the summer. I'm not necessarily recommending that, but committees do meet in the summer sometimes. I've been on a number of them, including the electoral reform committee last year, and we could look into other issues.

Essentially, Mr. Simms' motion, as amended, becomes the opening of a process of formal study of the Standing Orders and goes from being an abuse of process to being a very reasonable adjustment to our processes. I think that would make plenty of good sense. I think that is a good argument for us.

Let me point out some of the difficulties you've got if you try and do things without some kind of sense of realism as to how much you've got, even if we had agreed on everything. Let's say for the sake of argument the committee passed a resolution that said, “We delegate to Scott Reid the job of rewriting the Standing Orders by June 2 and we'll approve whatever he says”.

I couldn't do it and do a decent job. I could make a decision and come back and report to the committee and say, “Look, I've taken some of these things. I've got a bunch of private members' business. I have left aside a bunch of other things, like prorogation hearings that would involve just too much data and information collection and learning the very diffuse source materials that are out there”.

I would not be able to do it. I know a little bit about this. I have written two books, Mr. Chair, as you may know, and co-edited a third with Mario Silva, a former Liberal MP. I have a little bit of experience in what it's like producing something of substance.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

I'm sorry, what were they on?

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

Sorry. One was on official languages. It's called Lament for a Notion: the Life & Death Of Canada's Bilingual Dream. That was my second book. The first book was called Canada Remapped. It was about the issue, then current, that in the event that Quebec was to secede from Canada—and parts of Quebec were not in favour of going along with secession and wanted to remain loyal—how would we deal with the so-called partition issue. In my view, that was the most vexing of the questions that Canada then faced in the context of the separation debate. Those books were both published in the nineties.

Mario Silva and I co-edited a book on anti-Semitism called Tackling Hate: Combatting Antisemitism: The Ottawa Protocol. You were in Parliament at the time we had hearings with a group called The Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat AntiSemitism. It was an informal all-party committee that met, produced a report, and then published a collection of the essays that had been submitted to us.

Anyway, the point of these parallels is the time that it takes. One of the smaller of the books, maybe the size of a report, took me a year. The larger one—I had a lot more experience—still took me two years, with a couple of research assistants. Doing something between now and then is hard to do.

In my illustration, where I'm writing the entire thing just to suit myself, I just go through and look at what's out there, and what I think are the best examples in my own exclusive discretion. I am kind of mentally assuming that I don't have a day job, so I'm also not going back and attending events in my riding, which we all have to do. I think everybody on this committee has to travel further than I do. I'm assuming I don't attend question period. Someone subs for me when the committee is doing other things, like the hearings into the minister's agenda on changes to the Elections Act.

All of these things, Mr. Chair, are burdens that we can't free ourselves from, and we've given ourselves, if we adopt this motion, an impossible task, reporting back on everything. I'll get to what the negative implications of that are for democracy, process, and rule of law in a second.

Let me first just take, again, another illustration from page 7 of the government House leader's report. It makes the point very clearly:

The House could examine the application of a “Made-in-Canada” programming scheme for Government bills, motions and for the handling of Senate amendments. It could include a range of time for all stages for the consideration of a bill, which would be negotiated between House Leaders then would be subject to debate, amendment and a vote in the House. It would be useful for any programming model to have the ability to accommodate more debate when desired. Including a mechanism for additional debate would make the programming model more responsive to the needs of opposition and back-bench government Members who wish to participate in debate.

It says, “Made-in-Canada”, so it implies we're not looking at international models. I don't know if that's meant literally. Sometimes the term “Made in Canada” gets thrown out because it just sounds good, kind of the way that people's sounds good in front of the word republic. However, if it's literally to be something designed de novo, without regard to foreign models, then that requires a significant amount of craftsmanship. It's also just not the way we do things, because you always look for the best models and take what we can from them.

Anyway, with regard to a “programming scheme for Government bills” to handle this, I would note that some of the things we have looked at aren't made in Canada. They're used elsewhere, but we've discussed the idea of a parallel chamber for certain items like private members' business of various sorts and statements where the equivalent of S. O. 31s could take place.

That's the way they do it in Australia. They have a parallel Federation Chamber. It's a very fancy committee room, where quorum requirements are reduced. Essentially it allows for more words to be said by members than the number of hours the House is sitting permits. That's how they deal with it.

It's an innovation in the sense that it's part of the Hansard. Just as we are able to suspend time by seeing the clock at a certain time, we can cause two things that are happening in separate rooms to appear on the record as if they happen in one, for the benefit of those who happen to read Hansard. That's not, I think, the way most of us interact with our members of Parliament and their statements; we interact with them now through electronic media, seeing them on Facebook or Twitter, giving a little talk in the House, or whatever.

Looking at that kind of model and then figuring it out that would take a fair bit of time. That in itself is a subject that could consume a significant number of meetings until we figured out what we want. Then we would have to do the actual drafting. Then we'd have to review the drafting. That wouldn't happen quickly. That in and of itself would be very time-consuming.

It says we would negotiate among House leaders. That would involve taking the informal House leader meetings, which happen every Tuesday.... They happen right after question period. The House leaders meet in camera, and the meetings are purely informal. They have no formal authority; they have a conventional authority, in the sense that everybody expects that everybody else at the meeting will not reveal what happened at the meeting, and that is firmly honoured. I know of only one case in the decade I spent as a deputy House leader when someone leaked the content of what happened in one of those meetings. That is an indication of how seriously it is taken, because it's a better record than most caucuses have. In all fairness, there are fewer people in the room, but nonetheless it's pretty impressive. They take this seriously, then. There's no formal rule. You're not in contempt of Parliament if you say what happened at a House leader's meeting.

That informal process is going to be formalized, I assume. It involves a substantial rewriting of the rules, if we're to do this, because this is about changing not the conventions but the Standing Orders. It means that you can't draw on conventions. We've drawn conventions into our Constitution, as when we speak in the preamble about the provinces of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick desiring a Constitution similar in principle to that of the United Kingdom. That is shorthand for saying we are drawing on the convention of responsible government that exists in the United Kingdom and importing it to Canada. That's what it means.

At these informal meetings, which are purely conventional and where we try to find common ground, sometimes there isn't common ground and the government will just say they're going to move ahead on something. this. But they'll also ask, “Are you opposed to this motion that we're proposing, this bill that we're proposing”, whatever it is, “because you oppose it to your roots and you want to fight it tooth and nail, or are you opposing it because you have a few people in your party for whom this particular issue”, whatever it is—child care or firearms, or whatever is their...I don't want to say hobby horse, as that makes it seem shallow, but their special interest...?

Then you have to give them a chance to speak and get their views on the record. How much time do you have to allocate for it? That's how allocation of time in the normal course of events works, and it works better or worse depending on the personalities of some of the people who are involved, but on the whole it does work.

We would, then, be talking about changing this and formalizing it. That's not necessarily a bad idea, though it's not necessarily a good idea either—I actually don't know—but which on its own would consume all the available time between now and June, if that were the item we decided to privilege. I'm not sure we would come to a consensus, although we might, because it's conceivable you could go through the process without actually taking power from the opposition and giving it to the government. It's a possibility, but again, my goodness, it would take all the time we have to deal with this, and there are so many others. That particular item is under “Time Allocation”, which is one of the subheads under the second of the three themes, “Management of Debate”.

It seems appropriate at this point, Mr. Chair, to illustrate another point that my amendment would allow us to sever. Page 8 of the government House leader's discussion paper addresses omnibus bills, so there's a certain irony in what I'll read, although I think it may have some merit.

The Government committed to end the improper use of omnibus legislation. Omnibus bills can be defined as a bill that contains separate and unrelated themes packaged into one bill. Members are then forced to vote for or against a bill that could have elements that Members would support or oppose. The only recourse for Members has been to seek to divide omnibus bills in committee, but these motions rarely come to a vote or are agreed to by way of unanimous consent.

I'll pause before going to the second paragraph of that point and point out that they rarely come to a vote or are agreed to by way of unanimous consent, which means that they sometimes are, which is a not insignificant point.

The reason they are, if you look back, is that something becomes contentious. Thanks to the tools of delay and being able to bring things to public attention, the government becomes aware that the opposition is succeeding at that and says they have a little water in their wine. They don't need to blow their credibility over this. Yes, they have a government. They are in power. Yes, if they are a majority government, they have all the reins of power. Nonetheless, if they face an election, it will be costly for them to have a record of opposing these reasonable changes, and so sometimes bills are divided.

It happens. It happened in the last Parliament. It has happened in Parliaments before that. Not all the time, but surely part of the reason for that is that not every bill is an omnibus bill. Nobody argues that. They argue that some bills are omnibus bills. They argue in particular that budget bills are omnibus bills and contain a whole bunch of stuff that shouldn't be in a budget. This may not happen. We don't know. There will be some irony if the upcoming budget turns out to contain omnibus provisions at the very time we are debating this here, but we don't know if it will.

At any rate, let's continue:

Since the Clerk of the House has the power in Standing Order 39(2) to divide written questions, a similar approach could be used by the Speaker to divide omnibus bills. The Speaker’s authority could be prescribed by criteria to define and establish “a unifying theme” of the bill. This approach would allow for the divided bills to be debated together at second reading, report stage and third reading but would be subject to separate votes at each stage. In addition, the divided bills could be sent to separate committees if the subject matter of the bills warranted such action.

That is an interesting suggestion. I don't know if it's a good suggestion, a bad suggestion, or has a precedent—that is to say, this is how they do it for the sake argument in the Parliament of India or some other Commonwealth jurisdiction. If so, has it worked out well for them or not when we look to these examples?

I think it's legitimate to find out more about this on its own. I think it would be hard to get this done by June 20 if it were on its own. It's not inconceivable. This is, if I may say, a more completely thought-through approach than some of the others. Again, it makes the point I'm driving at when I talk about the problems of dealing with all the subject matter at one time. I have to assume that this thought did not just occur to the government House leader out of thin air. It came from somewhere.

[An hon. member]

Absolutely.

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

Yes. Everything comes from somewhere. Occasionally, something interesting does occur out of thin air, the very first time, but I suspect it's not the case here. I suspect this is something that is precedented somewhere. I'm just guessing that. If there was a footnote to this, we'd actually have some idea where it came from, some authority would be cited, but we don't have that. So how do we find out?

I suppose if I had thought of it, I could have asked the government House leader on Sunday, because I ran into her at Pearson Airport. We had a brief chat. She was on standby, so she was distracted by the need to rush up to the desk and get her boarding pass. It was a nice chat. There could have been a Liberal caucus meeting on that airplane, by the way. It was amazing. Anyway, there were a lot of people on that plane, and she was one of them. I could have asked her then, “Hey, where did you get this idea from?” But I didn't think of it. Now I literally can't ask her because I am in this committee holding the floor in order to make sure that something doesn't get through, which could be disastrous, I think, for the way the House of Commons runs. I can't go and ask her where she got this from.

Then we could go and look at that example, where you got it from, and whether it works there. How does it work? How good is it? Is it a successful sort of thing or not? It may have positive features. It may have features that look positive at first glance, but aren't so good once you look at it in a little more depth. That happens a lot.

That was the feeling I had when I looked at the Australian Federation Chamber. It's the room where the parallel debating takes place. It sounded better at first than it seemed as you investigated in more detail—at least that was my impression.

This might be brilliant; it might not be brilliant. I do wonder. The Speaker, of course, is meant to be independent. But he's independent in a way that essentially allows him to garner increasing independence from the agendas of the parties as time goes on, so a new Speaker has less gravitas than a Speaker who has served several years. This would be true with every Speaker, regardless of how much intrinsic gravitas they have. It's true of the current Speaker; it's true of his predecessor, Andrew Scheer. It was equally true of Peter Milliken, who came very well-equipped for the speakership, but who nevertheless grew in his job as time went on.

Here we're getting the opposite starting to happen. The Speaker is supposed to define a unifying theme for the bill. Maybe there's academic literature out there he can draw upon to say here's a unifying theme. Maybe there isn't. I actually don't know. But you'll notice when the Speaker actually has to make a ruling on something, a tie vote, for example, he almost magically has in his hand a piece of paper that he reads, which says that—and I'm paraphrasing—whereas the underlying principle of Parliament is the continuation of debate, and it is second reading, and my vote against this would cause debate to be precluded, thereby also precluding the possibility that a majority of the House will find on one side or the other; therefore, I'm voting in favour. Whereas we are at third reading, and voting in favour of this motion would cause it to cease to be within the purview of the House where no more debate could occur; therefore, I'm voting against.

He is breaking a tie vote, but he's breaking it in a way that is entirely based on precedent. His authority is all based on the will of the House. I wasn't sure if you wanted to....

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Carry on.

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

It's all based on going to precedents. He never stands up and says we're doing this because it's what I want—never. He always makes a link, regardless of who is in the chair, to either a standing order or—in the absence of a standing order—a practice of the House, which is our version of a convention. The Standing Orders take priority. They sweep away practices if they contradict them, but with practices otherwise governing the way he behaves.

No actual rule requires the Speaker to vote the way he does when he breaks a tie. I would be astonished at a Speaker who breaks a tie in a manner different from that. Indeed, I think it would be the end of that person's career as Speaker. I think they would bring down condemnation on themselves for having failed to represent the practices of the House.

Here we are with a unifying theme. I get the idea behind this. I don't know how a Speaker steps in and effectively separates a bill into two parts on his or her own without engaging effectively in a discussion of what the unifying themes are. I guess the Speaker could rely on an advisory group, but where does he get that advisory group? How is it constituted? The normal way is that it would be some kind of committee. That means the committee is set up, a committee like this one. Actually it would be this committee or something parallel to it, which is a replica in miniature of the House. The government members don't divide the bill. The opposition members say yes, divide the bill. They might very well say, “We see different unifying themes here.”

If you get a bill that says “a bill to protect animals from abuse and make certain changes to the Elections Act”, that's got two unifying themes that are nice and clear. But in all fairness, that particular unifying theme, that kind of omnibus bill, you don't see. You see something more like this. The omnibus is appropriate. You see a budget bill. Within the budget bill, you see a bunch of stuff that is not really about the allocation of funds and could have been put outside. But you've got a whole bunch of these things, so how would you as a Speaker go along and pare off the bits that are not about taxes, revenues, tax credits, and the allocation of funds, that become stand-alones? I really don't know how you would do that.

Maybe, at a technical level, the clerks who design legislation at the Library of Parliament, the Justice Department, and the PCO, could do that stuff. But for the Speaker, it's not his area of expertise. It could by chance be someone who formerly filled one of those roles, where he could have expertise added to him, but that's....

Do you start to see what I'm saying when I note there's a lot of stuff here? We are being presented with the entire smorgasbord on a cruise ship and told, it's your job to eat this before you're allowed to leave the room, and you've got to leave the room by half an hour from now or something like that.

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

On a point of order, Mr. Chair, I note that Mr. Reid is laying out his very compelling argument, which I appreciate. He also mentioned “cruise ship”, which kind of got me thinking.

I have a question for or through you to the government. As question period approaches and we're all expected back in the House, can we get an idea from the government on its thoughts about adjourning so that we can attend the question period, or are we expected to go right through? Scott, I'm sure, can keep talking for hours.

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

Is this a point of order?

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

Yes—through the chair to the government.

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

I'll respond to the point of order.

As I say, we would like to get to a vote on both the amendment and the main motion. If committee members would like to proceed to that point, then we can adjourn the committee at that time, once we've dispensed with the amendment and the main motion.

If there isn't the will of the committee to proceed to that particular point, it would be my intention—

[An hon. member]

My way or the highway.

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

—to continue to listen to your compelling arguments about why we should or should not support the amendment, or the main motion.