Procedure and House Affairs Committee on March 21st, 2017

[An hon. member]

Fair enough. That's a fair comment.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Not just that would be lost. One of the things we pride ourselves on is that no matter how limited we are in the House, when we come to committee, there's latitude from the chair. Often we call each other by first names when we're moving really quickly on issues and getting along, and there's a lot more latitude in creeping a little further away from the subject, as opposed to the rigidness in the House. There are still limitations, as the chair reminds me during the course of my filibuster.

It is also a matter of knowing that you can go to committee and unpack an issue. I talked about water quality being a big issue for Hamilton, and about the environment in Hamilton Harbour, not Burlington Bay. We have that eternal battle with our neighbours.

Partly because I like to talk—again, that's a fair criticism, and I accept it—but more importantly, often it's a matter, when you get to committee.... Many times on bills in the House, we don't even get a chance to speak, because there aren't that many speaking slots. There are 338 of us, and it's just not always possible for everyone who wants to speak on an item to do so, given the limited time, relatively speaking, that it's in the House .

That is offset by the fact that we can come to committee, and we can set up all our arguments, and we can dissect step by step the bill, the motion, or the matter that's in front of us and take the time to reflect in detail on the issues that our constituents care about and the perspective that they have on this issue that is important to their quality of life. Most of us accept that that's a fair trade-off, that we're limited in the House just for practical reasons and due to the laws of physics. There is only so much time. But at committee we have that opportunity.

During my time, if a government member wants to say, “Dave, can I just stop you for a second on that one? Can we delve into that a bit? We see that differently. Your version of that and how it affects your constituents is not the way we see it.”

I'm going to be like, “Sure. What have I got to lose? Nothing. What have I got to gain? Lots.” I have a government member who is listening to what I have to say, who cares about the perspective that I'm bringing on behalf of the people of Hamilton Centre, and they want to make sure that I'm understanding this correctly, or they want to ask questions or make queries about my position. I'm quite willing, Chair. It's very rare that we deny a colleague the opportunity to have the floor as an interruption to our presentation, because I know it's not coming off my time because my time is unlimited. We will be seized with me dealing with this issue until I'm done. Then my colleague from either the Conservatives, the Liberals, or my own caucus will then have an opportunity, and I will respectfully listen to them as they take the time to make the case and break down the issues that affect their constituents. That also would be lost if we had ten-minute time limits.

Other than favouring the government's ability to whiz things through committee more quickly and to have an absolute guarantee of when legislation will be through the House, that's their only justification. That's what this editorial is saying, that if you're making the case that the opposition has too much power, and you're not able to get things through, that doesn't wash. To the best of my knowledge, the right to speak your mind at committee without facing closure or the guillotine, as it's referred to in some parliamentary settings.... You have the right to speak your mind. Isn't that the fundamental right that we all believe we have as MPs?

To that degree, we are all sovereign to the extent that each one of us got here the same way, as flawed as it was: first past the post. We should have proportional representation, but the system is what the system is, and we all got here the same way. As far as I know, since the beginning, at committee, members have had the right to say their piece.

Continuing with the editorial, Chair:

For the record, the government's proposal includes one to limit committee members' interventions to 10 minutes—an obvious attempt to reduce the opposition's ability to make a public display of its dissent by filibustering during hearings.

I just pointed out some of the other things that would be lost if we had an arbitrary 10-minute limitation on what we can say at committee. Even if we can get on the list and go over and over, that's not the same thing.

It continues:

Another one is to implement “programming” motions in which the opposition and government jointly fix the time for debate on bills. This move would allow the government to avoid the stigma of imposing time-allocation motions unilaterally.

Another proposal is for Parliament to adopt Britain's famous Prime Minister's Questions, in which the PM stands in the crosshairs for 30 minutes on Wednesdays taking questions from opposition party leaders. Doing so could well lead to Mr. Trudeau attending only the one Question Period per week, and to diminishing the media's interest in the days he skips....

which we see a lot of, in terms of there not being the attention when the Prime Minister is not here, and he's not here more and more.

further weakening government accountability.

Now, again—to stay timely—we had that yesterday, where the Prime Minister de facto created the prime minister's question period by being the one who stood up and answered every question on a Wednesday. Cute!

The salient point is that not a single rule had to be changed. I won't go long on this, but I've heard an argument—I think it was from one of the committee members, or I might have read it—from a government member, saying that this is such a great idea that we should entrench this wonderful benefit for future parliaments, so that all prime ministers have to do this. Come along. Come along. That doesn't make any practical sense.

It was one of their best arguments for wanting the ability to make changes, and they found a way around it without changing a single rule, so it would seem that now Wednesdays are the Prime Minister's question period. Okay, fine, as long as he's here the other days, too, not all of them, as the Prime Minister has responsibilities, but more than just one day.

To continue:

There are some useful ideas in the government's discussion paper, but they pale in the face of the Liberals' desire to make the life of a majority government even easier.

Somehow, and I'm not sure how, Mr. Chrétien managed three majority governments with these rules, and he managed to pass enough legislation to go back to the people and say, here's what I did with the mandate you gave me. Not to mention that the current Prime Minister's father was able to repatriate the Constitution and bring in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, for which he will forever be remembered as a critically important prime minister, at the very least, in the history of our country. Pierre Elliott Trudeau managed to do all of that with all of these obstructionist rules that exist on the part of the opposition. In fact, he probably had even less.

All those governments—Liberal governments—managed to survive the horrible threat to democracy that filibusters represent by every day, step by step, smothering real democracy and denying the majority government of the day the right to implement the mandate that it was elected to carry out.

Somehow, in the face of all that opposition power and obstructionism, it still managed to repatriate the entire Constitution. But those rules aren't good enough for this government. Maybe those previous Liberal governments had to work far harder than this government wants to, or maybe the nuisance factor has just grown over time, in terms of how the government—the Liberal government—perceives the opposition.

It becomes hard to believe, or pretty thin gruel for the government to argue, that they have to have these rules because the unco-operative opposition is using all the massive powers it has to thwart the will of a duly elected Liberal majority government, or that at the very least it sees a way, as a majority government, to find it, as The Globe and Mail puts it, “even easier” to govern.

That is what the parliamentary system is mostly about, of course: to make sure that the governing party has the easiest possible way in its time in government. We all know that's why Parliament exists: to make life easy for the government.

Of course, that's nonsensical.

To continue:

It is also disillusioning to discover that the Liberals have this all so backward. The imbalance in Canada’s Parliament is weighted entirely in favour of a majority government and its legislative agenda, not the other way around, as Mr. Trudeau’s party absurdly claims.

It's not just “claims” or “alleges”. These are wordsmiths.

We like to think of ourselves as wordsmiths. I would think that if ever anybody deserves the title—I would defer to Mr. Reid and his knowledge in these areas—or if ever there was an appropriate application of the word and the title wordsmith, it would be the editorialists for The Globe and Mail. In other words, they don't throw around words lightly. Their business is words and the meaning of words. They choose those words carefully. I suspect that sometimes they will even consult with each other to make sure that of all the English words available they find the one that is most applicable, in the greatest detail, to the point they want to make in a sentence.

I think it's important to note that they went, I would say, out of their way to put in the word “absurdly” because it is absurd to suggest that Parliament is skewed in favour of the opposition. You can hardly get the sentence out without bursting out laughing. Remember, this is The Globe and Mail using the word “absurdly”.

To continue:

That's because MPs, who were once elected to form governments, and oversee them, now mostly serve the wishes of their parties.

Again, Chair, I've enjoyed many interactions with Mr. Reid, who has a wealth of knowledge on the history of our Parliament and parliaments in general, and of political science. He's a very learned man. I enjoy the interactions.

It wasn't that long ago, I remember, that we were having a discussion about this very point, about how far away we have gotten from the concept of what a parliamentary democracy is really meant to be.

I'll just quickly hearken back to one prime example, and that is that in the Province of Ontario, back in the day, it was so fundamental that, when you elected a member of the provincial legislature, they were your representative. It was their job to represent you in the Parliament, and, collectively, they would form and exercise the powers that were given by the Constitution. That connection between the elected person and constituents was so strong and so well understood. If you were invited by the premier to join the executive council, the cabinet, meaning the crown, you had to resign your seat. Then you had to run again in the riding and get permission for your top priority to no longer be your constituents but the oath and duty you have in your obligations as a minister. That sounds almost like a different country in terms of that relationship, but when you go to the fundamental—

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Sorry, when was that?

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

It was probably in the—Go ahead, Mr. Reid.

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

It may have existed in the province as well. That's an interesting question. As you know, the legislative—What's that?

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

It was in Upper and Lower Canada.

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

Yes, that's right. In the Province of Canada, 1840 to 1867, is the ancestor both of our federal Parliament and also of the legislatures of Ontario and Quebec. The actual legislation was passed in the 1850s requiring you to resign your seat and then seek re-election in order to be put in cabinet. It was continued at the federal level. I don't know what happened at the provincial level in Ontario and Quebec. It's one of those interesting questions. However, at the federal level it continued until the 1930s. An interesting historical note—

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Really? I didn't know it went that long.

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

Yes. An interesting historical note is that in 1926—everybody remembers the famous King-Byng crisis—when Arthur Meighen was sworn in as Prime Minister after the Governor General Byng dismissed Prime Minister King. He was faced with the awkward situation that he would lose his parliamentary one-seat majority if he had members resign to run for cabinet, because they were not cabinet members following the election. His solution was to retain all the cabinet posts for himself in order to get around that conundrum. He ultimately was defeated, but that legislation played a key role in the outcome of that event, which I think is why King subsequently got rid of it when he was Prime Minister.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Was it King who held all the cabinet positions?

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

No, it was Meighen who held all the positions. He held all the positions in order to avoid the problem of having to have, basically, his entire front bench resign. That piece of legislation did result, nonetheless, in him losing his parliamentary majority. He was then defeated almost immediately by King and the Liberals because, having taken government, he could no longer command the majority he had, ironically, at his command in opposition—if you follow that—his own party, plus a series of minor parties supporting him. That was the cause of his downfall. Then King campaigned in the 1926 election, arguing that Arthur Meighen was an incipient dictator because he held all the cabinet posts and subsequently abolished the legislation when he was returned to power.

If I may add another historical piece of trivia, this is my chance to revise a bit of incorrect history that is widely, but incorrectly, held by Canadians. Mackenzie King did not win the 1926 election, as people think. What happened was he won the majority of seats in the 1926 election. It's a shame Elizabeth May isn't here for this part of the discussion. He actually got fewer votes than the Conservatives in that election, but he won more seats due to one of the most bizarre accidents of the first-past-the-post system, which is that, in the Province of Manitoba, there were five parties that were competitive. The Conservatives won more votes than any of the other parties did but did not win more votes than another party in any of the individual ridings, and as a result won zero seats. Based on that, and a somewhat less dramatic version of the same thing that happened in Quebec, the Conservatives were out of power, despite the fact that they had won more votes than the Liberals had. The irony of this is not so much...because these accidents happen from time to time...but it's that our Canadian mythology has been that the 1926 election was all about rejecting the power of the Governor General, and how Canadians endorsed Mackenzie King's view of things. This was emphatically not so. That part is a mythology that needs to be corrected. I think our path to independence took a different course than the one we now remember, at least in that particular incident.

Thanks for letting me intervene.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Thank you for that update.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

That's fascinating, eh?

Go ahead, David.

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

At that time, the party leaders were selected by caucus, not by party membership, as well. But everybody else was still done by caucus.

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

Not the Liberals. Mackenzie King was the first one elected at a convention.

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

And for the previous half-century or longer, it had been done by caucus, not by party membership.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

I'm glad that happened, because it's a snippet of the kind of dynamics that happen when we're dealing with issues. We can always rely on Mr. Reid to give us a historical context to provide some guidance or to show where lessons have been learned in the past. Then newer members put forward their ideas.

But mostly, it's about the respect. Chair, I would think anybody watching that short interaction between the four of us got a pretty good example of how we work together, whether the cameras are on or off. I stand to be challenged by anybody. It's interesting, especially when you're working in common cause, which is most of the time on this committee as it is on public accounts, unlike every other committee of the House.

I raise that because I was pointing out how far we have gone in evolutionary moves. Step by step, parliament by parliament, things evolve, and the focus gets changed. I'm reading a book called Blood Oil, and I think we all got a copy of it. I'm about a third of the way through it, and one of the things it does is talk about the British monarchy and about the devolution of power from the crown, ultimately to Parliament, and the civil war in which that got upset, and they got rid of the monarch, and chopped his head off. Then the leader of the government that followed ended up being his own kind of tyrannical monster, and at the end of the day, the monarchy came back. But what was interesting is that it talked about the fundamental power of parliament to control taxation. Having control of taxation limits the power of the crown. The crown now, in our constitutional monarchy, is represented by those who are part of the executive council commonly known as the cabinet.

I was merely pointing out that we have gone so far away, that this relationship used to be so strong between the constituents and the elected person, and that again if they were going to join the cabinet, they had to resign their seat and run and win with the understanding that this was permission by your constituents to allow you to make things other than your constituents the priority, because once you're a minister, your responsibilities under that oath of office have to be your priority. Not that you'd forget about your constituents—quite the contrary—but it's a benefit because you have more opportunity for influence and input into things that affect your riding. But fundamentally when you join cabinet, the business of the government is a greater priority, so going back to its core, you used to have to get permission to no longer make the constituents' business the priority. That's fascinating.

Again, when you take that discussion and put it in the context of where we are now, where does this end up at the end of the day? If you extrapolate this—and every couple of parliaments more and more power, or whatever opportunity for power the opposition has, gets lost. Where does that leave us in another 150 years? It's a bit scary if you think about going back a little over 150 years to the world that Mr. Reid and I just described, and that relationship and what you had to do. When I joined cabinet, all I had to do was say yes. That was it. I signed a paper, took an oath, and, bingo bango, I was a cabinet minister. If that much evolution-devolution has taken place over 150 years unchecked, where will that leave us in another 150 years? How much of the magic of what makes the parliamentary system the best available in the world, in the opinion of many of us, will be left ?

A healthy parliament has to have a healthy, vibrant, and loyal opposition. In the absence of that, it's autocracy at best, and—I suppose—dictatorship at worst. Neither is acceptable or good for the ordinary person.

You'll be pleased to know, Chair, that we have only two more short paragraphs on this editorial. Then we'll be moving to that thing you like the most from me: new stuff, because then I'm not repeating myself.

To continue:

The neutering

—You have to love The Globe and Mail. I haven't read this in a couple of days. I forgot this was coming up. Oh, oh! Isn't that wonderful? It just ties in nicely.

The neutering of MPs has been constant over the past 50 years, and it is the reason so many Canadians find Parliament to be irrelevant.

That's under the current rules, the ones the government believes invest too much power in the hands of the opposition and are becoming a nuisance for the speedy efficiency of sunny ways.

I'll continue:

Opposition filibustering, and a Question Period with the Prime Minister in attendance, are among the last remaining ways our elected representatives can hold a majority government to account.

I will defer to Mr. Reid, who is usually great at picking up these little bits I know and then filling them in with the real stuff, but it seems to me it might have been Nixon. There was a U.S. president who uttered something to the effect, publicly, that they would love to have the power of a majority prime minister in the Canadian parliamentary system, because in terms of absolute direct power—notwithstanding the real nuclear button, and we don't even want to think about that these days—the power of a majority government Canadian prime minister is awesome.

Regardless of the fancy new process that leads to it, the final decision about who sits in the upper chamber is the purview of the Prime Minister. Actually, it's the Queen, then our Governor General, and it's based on recommendation. That's the language, but we all know the reality is—and no one questions it—that it is the Prime Minister who appoints the upper house.

I like to remind people that Putin, at most, appoints governors. He switched this: they used to elect them, but now he appoints them.

Our Prime Minister appoints—it breaks my heart to say this, as a commoner—the upper house, the red chamber, the chamber that represents the crown and vested interests. It was ever thus.

Plus, the Prime Minister appoints the Supreme Court of Canada. Right now, a certain U.S. president—as with most U.S. presidents in the past—would give anything to be able to just say and then sign a paper that dictates who the next member of the U.S. Supreme Court is. But they have to go through that whole hearing process and a vote at the Senate. We don't have any of those “nuisances” here for the Prime Minister to worry about.

It's only recently, and only because we're now creating a convention—over enough time, it will be a convention; I think we're getting close—that the government can unilaterally enter into international treaties.

We now are developing a convention whereby some of these treaties and agreements are being brought to the House for debate and vote. That's good, but let's understand that's not the dictated process. It's the politics of the day bringing that about.

The legal right to enter into a treaty without the approval of Parliament is 100% the constitutional domain of the government of the day, and the government of the day, if it's a majority, is the Prime Minister. This is in addition to all the other powers the Prime Minister has. This is why a U.S. President, whom we often think of as being omnipotent, looks enviously north of the border and only wishes he had some of the power, the added power that a majority Prime Minister in the Canadian parliamentary system has.

That brings us to the last paragraph of the first editorial:

A party truly committed to invigorating democracy would enhance the independence of MPs and allow them to vote freely, rather than as a bloc controlled by the Prime Minister’s Office or that of the Leader of the Opposition. Instead, we have the Trudeau Liberals, whose new rules threaten to make a government less accountable, not more.

That was fromThe Globe and Mail, and it's not exactly a dry, staid, cold, dispassionate analysis. It's just laced with emotion and words that evoke reaction. It goes out of its way to make those choices.

Let's remember, Chair, that as well as I can figure, the government's plan was that as the pundits began to refocus away from the budget, to spend a little time looking at what's going on at the procedure and House affairs committee, and to start to give their opinion, the government hoped that at the point in time when this editorial was made public—and others—they would say something oh so different.

I see my friend Mr. Doherty has rejoined us.

It's good to see you, sir.

[Todd Doherty, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

It's good to see you continuing.

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

Repetition.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Repetition, really?

See how bad it has gotten. I say, “Good morning. Hello,” and that's repetition.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

You guys are getting...really, is that where you're at?

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

I disagree with that.

This greeting of Mr. Doherty is a new greeting, because Mr. Doherty left the room and re-entered the room. Hence, it's a different greeting on a different occasion.

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

So he'll cycle through the repetition.

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

As he's not a speaker, there's no problem.