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.
9:30 p.m.
Some hon. members
Oh, oh!
9:30 p.m.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
You'll live to regret it.
I am cognizant that we're still on the same motion—
9:30 p.m.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
That's what I meant, the amendment motion.
I just want to indicate to you that I am cognizant of your cautionary note about repeating myself, so I will continue to persevere into new territory, which is not difficult given that the argument I have to make is that the government is being unfair, undemocratic, insincere, and breaking their promises. That comes pretty easily to me, Chair, so it should just roll off as it needs to.
9:30 p.m.
An hon. member
There goes an hour.
9:30 p.m.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Let me just pick it up, if I can, Chair. One of the nice things about this amendment is that it speaks to how we're making the decision, and therefore, it pretty much opens us up to talk about any aspect of what's in front of us, as we can read into the chair's latitude.
I would just like to take a second, perhaps, to pick one of the issues that the government has placed in their discussion paper as it relates to the amendment, because the amendment would be the deciding formula as to how we make our decisions. Therefore, it's applicable to all aspects of the report. In my humble submission, that would make it germane to the point, and, I hope, keep me in order.
What I would like to do is just to spend a little bit of time talking about prorogation. The government has suggested that they want to do something there. This is another example, Chair, in which there were all kinds of opportunities for the government to find common cause around prorogation had they tried.
The first place to begin on that...and I'm trying to remember if Mr. Reid was there. I'm not sure if anybody else on this committee currently was there, but in one of those Parliaments, in one of those minorities—because they kind of came quickly and were a bit blurry—this committee was seized of the issue of prorogation, the same way that we're seized of the issue of the Chief Electoral Officer's report.
We brought in experts from across the country, constitutional experts. Actually, it was a motion that Jack Layton got the House to approve that sent the mandate here to PROC, and we spent—now, it's been a few years so my memory is a little fuzzy—at least four or five months on it. There were a lot of meetings and we generated a lot of information. There was not just expert testimony, but there were submissions that were made.
It was very complex, as you can appreciate, Chair, because once you start talking about prorogation, you're talking about the suspension of Parliament. There are a lot of rules around it. A lot of it is tradition. We were taking a look at what had been the tradition, what the rules were, and what was done in other jurisdictions. It was the kind of wide, expansive review you would expect.
I raise that because it occurs to me that if the government had indicated that this work had been done and that there was a wealth of information we could all use, again, that would have provided groundwork for discussions ahead of time. Maybe it would have meant a separate process around this, and maybe we would have linked it with other.... There are so many “maybes” about what we could have done.
We probably would have done that at the steering committee, and as you know, we do that in camera. We try not to be partisan. There's no BS. It's just us. There are only a handful of us. Basically, what we're trying to do is work our way through the various pieces that are in front of us to provide some cohesiveness to them, and then, ideally.... You know how a steering committee works. It cannot make decisions. All it can do is make a recommendation to the full committee. If you don't have unanimity, then the recommendation doesn't go to the committee. It just goes to the committee as a cold item with no recommendation.
It's a really good work environment, and whenever we used it in this Parliament and in the previous Parliament, the steering committee did exactly what we hoped it would do, and that was to sort through everything and take the time to get into the weeds, get into the minutiae, try out different ideas, and take into account all of the concerns, all that was there. A wealth of work was done.
I don't know whether the government intends for us to revisit that. Are they going to want to reinvent the wheel and do it all again? Are they planning to ignore all that?
Their opposition to this motion leaves the Conservatives and the NDP to conclude that it's the government's intention, as soon as they get the opportunity and once this filibuster is over, to use their majority to ram through changes to our Parliament.
I use the prorogation because I was there for all those meetings. I know the amount of work that was done, and it seems to me we could have been halfway there by just saying we'll take a look at that as a side piece, see where it gets us, and then how it fits into the overall.... That's the kind of thing you do when it's give and take, when you're all trying to work to a common cause. In this case, it's our understanding that the deadline of June 2 is very important to the government. It doesn't really matter why. I don't know why, but that's the deadline they are married to. Again, if we had enough goodwill, then we could have attempted to work toward a process that would accommodate that. It's only the government moves that have caused all this ill will. We didn't have this before.
To be fair, we hadn't yet got to some of the heavy lifting on the Chief Electoral Officer's report. Every time somebody said they were going to have a problem with that, we would say we'd set that aside, move on to the next low-lying fruit, and find the ones we can agree on. Some of those tough things were still to happen, but I think what's important is that we were working as a team. When we raised concerns, it was often as much personal, our own experience of what we knew from elections, as it was partisan. Besides, what is partisan about deciding where you can put signs? It's hard to make that partisan.
Prorogation is much the same thing. It's really not so much partisan as it's government opposition. You know why. This all came from the great prorogation where all of Canada watched a doorway for hours and hours. That's when Jack Layton said, “This is not right. The government shouldn't be allowed to run and hide from a confidence vote”, and so those kinds of practicalities were taken into account.
As I said, what we ran into, of course, was the complex rules, but a lot of it is by tradition, so you need people who understand that history and can explain it to you. We did all that, but the way the government's presented this now and said June 2, at the same time as they just rolled in and said Bill C-33 on May 19, the next thing you know they are going to want to know where the strawberries are, because this is starting to get a little bit strange.
9:35 p.m.
An hon. member
Oh, oh!
9:35 p.m.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Thanks, Scotty. I know you knew the reference because we could get a couple of bearings...where are my strawberries?
But listen, it's almost that bizarre.
9:40 p.m.
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
I have a point of order.
I wonder if the member could explain the reference for the benefit of the rest of the members.
9:40 p.m.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
The movie opens with.... Oh, you want the book version. We could do the book. The preface starts.... Let me see if I can remember. That's Queeg, and that was The Caine Mutiny. According to the movie, anyway, the captain went a bit crazy.
You're serious; you wanted to know.
9:40 p.m.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
I thought you were kidding.
In the movie, anyway, the breaking point, when they concluded that the captain was actually nuts, was when he went crazy about who ate all his strawberries. He was practically ready to hang the crew to find these damn strawberries, so it was just an indication of somebody who went off his nut. I thought that was somewhat apropos because I don't understand what the government's doing. It makes no darn sense.
Prorogation is another example of what they could have done if they had been sincere about trying to find a way. Let's remember this is not a promise. In fact, this is the opposite of the promise the government made. If this was a government promise, like legalizing marijuana and its coming to the committee, there's a different dynamic taking place there. The government ran on it. They can claim they have a legitimate public mandate to bring it in. It's government legislation and it follows the usual process. This is not that at all. This is about how our House runs. This is about how our committees run. Most importantly, this is about what tiny bit of real influence.... I won't even call it power, because it's not. It's influence, and they want to remove that.
Now, I had mentioned earlier about how filibusters were similar to strikes. I see them as very similar. I haven't yet heard the government argument, by the way. We haven't heard a single argument on what's in their discussion paper, but somehow they think that filibusters are happening all the time and it's wrecking the ability and it's obstructionist. I'm assuming that's what they're going to say, yet the reality is that much like strikes, while they get a lot of attention when they happen, they're actually few and far between. Why? And I've been there; I know. The threat of a strike provides motivation for both sides to find a compromise. In a strike no one wins. As soon as you strike, you lose. You may win your objective, but make no mistake, the company is losing production and workers are not getting paid. How can that be a win for anybody? Yet sometimes it's necessary.
I forget the numbers. If somebody has them, they can help me. It's provincial mostly, because most of our agreements are provincial. But I think the rate of collective bargaining resulting in an agreement with no strike—and I stand to be corrected—is 92% or 93%, maybe even higher. There's no lost time, sometimes not even a lot of ill will. If you remove the right to strike, you're not going to get those same kinds of agreements. You would end up reducing the union to having to find other means to put pressure on the government. That's opening up a whole lot of other problems. That's not a good answer. But people who are desperate for fairness, and a lot of us came here speaking for those folks, are going to take desperate measures.
The ability to strike doesn't mean that everybody's going on strike every time you have negotiations, and it doesn't mean that every single set of negotiations is going to fail and lead to a strike, and the unions are going to be saying, “Oh, we got all this power and we're going to use it.” That's not what happens. That's not the real world, and I would say the same thing about the filibuster. Yes, right how we're having to use it. Thank goodness we have it.
9:40 p.m.
An hon. member
Hear, hear!
9:40 p.m.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
If the government members were on this side, trust me, they'd be making the same argument.
We didn't pick this fight, which is part of what my main theme is. We didn't pick this fight; the government did. This is not about their right to do what they want because they have a mandate. They did not have a mandate to take away the rights of the minority. I didn't hear anybody make that speech in the last election. I didn't see it in their election material. They have no mandate to do this, yet they think they can roll in here and force us to accept it based on their vote alone, because that's the amendment in front of us. It's unreasonable. It's undemocratic. It's unfair. It's nuts.
It's nuts that the government thought that. I'm hearing that some of them on the other side were sort of surprised that we reacted the way we did. Really? You want to take away the only real effective means that we have to express displeasure with the government. At the risk, by the way, of being held to account for possibly being obstructionist, you want to take that away, provide no fair process, and expect that we're going to be happy, that somehow this wasn't going to happen.
Again, it perplexes me. I don't understand. I understand what they want, which is everything, all the power and control, total control. They want to neuter the opposition so that all they can do is squawk now and then and do a few quotes in the media, but nothing real that would get in the way of this divinely inspired government to do as it pleases. Somehow they thought that it wasn't going to be problematic. Who is making these decisions? It's nobody who has been around here for a while.
I won't name names. I don't know who made the decision, but I do know how silly it is. However, hope springs eternal. My mother taught me, hope springs eternal.
Mr. de Burgh Graham is going to speak after me, and maybe by the time he is done the light will go on and I'll think, oh, now I feel so bad having said those things. That could happen and I'll be spending the next four hours apologizing and going back over all the horrible things I said, because Mr. de Burgh Graham enlightened me as to why the government is doing this and why it's a good thing for me and a good thing for my constituents.
I await that spellbinding presentation. However, I know you're saying, no, we need more from you, David, much more. Those who have more must give more. You're the only one who has offered any real hope that there might be an answer as to why this is being done.
On prorogation and the filibuster, again, I will be very interested to hear the government, once they get going, on how this is a good thing. In terms of the only way that taking away filibuster can be good, given the fact that the government cannot, in my opinion, statistically prove that filibusters are abused to the point where they are becoming a regularized, obstructionist measure on the part of the opposition. Good luck with that. I was a part of a good number of the filibusters in the last few years and there aren't that many. Maybe that's why. Maybe I'm the best insurance for fewer filibusters because nobody wants to hear from me. That's fine. The goal is not to have filibusters.
Filibusters are only used when you feel that you have no other choice but to just go on and on, as I'm doing now, and hopefully get enough attention from the public and get the public on side such that the government feels the pressure, comes to their senses, backs down from this, and gives us the opportunity, if they really want to make these changes, to do it in a way that has some semblance of respect and how things have been done in the past.
I don't know, Blake, when you're getting ready. I'm going to go down another road now, but at whatever point you want to jump in, if it's five or 10 minutes from now, that will be good. However, I'll get a start down here.
What I want to do is again point out that the government is the one that....
David, I do have to take a moment to get this right. Does it say “McGrath”, but everybody says “McGraw”? Help me.
9:50 p.m.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
I had a friend in school who was named McGrath. I thought it was pronounced “McGrath”. I called him “McGrath” for years and he told me it was “McGraw”.
9:50 p.m.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
So it's written correctly but needs to be pronounced “McGraw”.
9:50 p.m.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
So that's correct. I don't need you to know why. I just need to know it's correct.
9:50 p.m.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
It's like everything else in English. The pronunciation matches the letters exactly.
9:50 p.m.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Why can't I get a straight answer from you. You're not even a minister yet and you're not answering a straight question.
He's practising. He's getting good at it.
9:50 p.m.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Something's sticking in your McGrath.
The government loves this report, and that's good, because we're going to make a lot of reference to it. You know the one I'm referring to. It's the report of the Special Committee on Reform of the House of Commons, tabled June 1985, and the chair was James A. McGrath, member of the Privy Council and member of Parliament.
What I'm doing, Chair, is finding elements that are relevant, of course, to our study now. I know if I fail to do that, you'll be all over me, so I'll do my best to make sure that the relevance is clear. I will just read a couple of short paragraphs and then make reference to what we're doing here.
By the way, I wanted to just highlight something, which I did find earlier, when my friend jumped in to save me and then I managed to set it aside again. It was three international trips that they did. They went to three places. I believe it was London, Paris, and one more that they went to. I can't think of what it was. Anyway, it will come to me later. They had something like 57 meetings. Again, I stand to be corrected. I'll check my notes. That's why we have staff. It's in the second sentence of the preface:
Since its creation on December 5, 1984 the Special Committee on the Reform of the House of Commons has held 57 meetings and presented reports to the House on December 20, 1984 and March 26, 1985.
Between December 1984 and June 1985 we heard 50 witnesses and, in reply to a call for submissions published in newspapers....
That was really the only way then. If we were going to do that now, it would be a little more comprehensive.
