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.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Well, I don't know. It's a good thing we don't have to be at bazooka lengths or have to talk or text, but you get my point.
At this committee, like at public accounts, the two swords' length just don't exist. It just happens to be that you sit over there and I sit over here. In fact, I don't think I'm telling too many tales out of school in terms of the trip that you and I and Mr. McColeman went on to London to see how they did things in the mother ship, but we came away with some great ideas and gave them a great idea—something they didn't know.
There's a great approach in that committee room. Anybody who comes in and hasn't been there before says “wow”. They say that they haven't been in a room where everybody respects each other and where there are no games, where they're all nice, they all get a chance to have their say, they compliment one another, and they build on each other's ideas. Really, I've talked to people who drop in on the current public accounts committee, leave, and then say, “Wow. Why can't all the committees be like that?”
Ours is very similar. Ours at PROC is even more difficult, because at least in public accounts you're all focused on the report of the Auditor General. That and ancillary issues are pretty much the business. Here, we get virtually everything. Every time the Speaker has a problem, a dilemma, a concern, a question, or is unsure, it's boom, off it goes to PROC. “I'm going to send this to PROC,” the Speaker says, “that's my decisive decision, and they're going to figure it out.”
Conservative
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
It is a heavy responsibility. All the matters of—I'm trying to think of the language, and it's starting to get late—of any wrongdoing, matters like that, and matters and questions of confidence.... We've had people who were alleged to have broken confidence, in camera stuff and things, and if the Speaker of the day finds that there is a bona fide on the basis of it, a facie...what am I reaching for?
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Yes, prima facie. Thank you.
If the Speaker finds a prima facie case, if it looks as though there's enough evidence that there may be something there, it comes to us. Again, for whatever we've been working on, we have to shift gears, because now we're dealing with a colleague, and we always think “that could be me”, don't we? You're trying to be fair-minded and still trying to hold people to account, and then suddenly you get something else thrown at you.
As much as possible, it's a busy committee and it's a nimble committee. We deal with a whole lot of issues. For the most part, we very rarely get like this. Up until now, you could say “never”. For everything that has been thrown at us, no matter how many gears we had to shift, or how many times we were asked to do two or three things at once, we always accepted it as collectively our responsibility and said, “Let's get at 'er.” We would put together a work plan and go to work.
Not now: we can go on making suggestions about how to get off this dime, but that only works if there's a government that wants to get off the dime. Right now, it looks as though the government is more interested in winning at any price, that the Liberal government is so bloody-minded that they want more control. Let's understand, too, that nine times out of ten, more control means that some right that we had somewhere along the line is about to be extinguished, whether it's a time frame, whether it's a “duty to” or a responsibility, or whether it's our ability at committee to speak until we're done.
That's the price to be paid for the government to get what they want. In real negotiations, we'd be tabling a few things that we want. Rather than the nonsense that somehow we should be grateful that maybe the government is only going to take half a loaf from us in terms of the rights we now have rather than the whole loaf, and we should be happy for that, we would rather look at it and say that if they want to take half a loaf away from us, we want to have another half a loaf added, and they can give up some rights.
I think they call that give-and-take. That's what that means. You give a little. We give a little. You have an objective, and we have an objective. Maybe both of us don't like those objectives and we can't come to agreement, but put them together, and maybe we can find a way that we can live with what you want by doing it this way, and you can live with what we want by doing it that way. Lo and behold, we work together and we get a report that we can all agree on.
You know what hasn't been mentioned and needs to be? That's what Canadians want more than anything. We all know how difficult that is in a system designed to be adversarial. Canadians wonder why we can't all work together. Our process, our whole system, is structured around “us” and “them”, “them” being the government that has the power, and “us” over here who don't. To work together only happens when we sincerely want it to happen.
I come back to where Ruby was. There's always the ability—and we've done it—to enter into a process where we really don't know how we're going to resolve the things we don't agree on, but there's enough goodwill, and enough trust and respect, as my friend Mr. Doherty has said, that we're willing to engage in that process, and we'll see where we are on the rest of it.
But that ship has sailed on this one, and now, we in the opposition seem to be the only ones who are trying to find a resolution rather than a victory, because as long as the government indicates that it is going to vote against Mr. Reid's motion, that means that from the get-go the government believes and will reserve the right to use their majority to create a report that only they support. That's what that means.
I can tell you that I spent most of my time here.... When I got here, we were still under a minority Liberal government, but most of the time, prior to this Parliament, I've been here under former prime minister Harper. Instead of this being something extraordinary and unusual, people are asking what's going on with this government: where did all the sunny ways, transparency, and respect go? Instead, this feels like a regular Wednesday in the last regime.
Conservative
Conservative
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
You already know that's not going to happen, so you have to get over it. Listen, I'm still living down the Rae government. You carry what you have to carry too.
That's the difference. It feels as if we're in that time of “I have to think about every political angle, and I have to think out every move the government makes”. You're on the defensive. You have to look at where you can take your shots. That makes Canadians nuts. They like the adversarial system because it does work for us and it's our parliamentary system, but they like it in the Canadian way.
Mr. Chrétien offered up what would seem to be a very Canadian way to deal with this issue. Let's take the deputy speaker, make him or her the chair of the committee, and take the three House leaders and make the government House leader and the official opposition House leader vice-chairs, and they only will pass on the things that they agree on. That was good enough for Mr. Chrétien, and he did pretty well. Three, four.... ? Did he get four? He got three. He could have had four if it weren't for that vicious stuff, but we won't go there. We all have our baggage.
That's what Mr. Chrétien did. I don't know if he ever uttered the words “sunny ways”. He might have, but it's not part of his legacy, especially for that guy in the park.
But Mr. Chrétien's way of doing things is not good enough: the government wants more control than a three-time majority prime minister and former government Liberal believed that he was entitled to by way of controlling the House by the throat. If necessary, that option was always available to Mr. Chrétien, as we know. It was the Shawinigan handshake, yes, from the little guy from Shawinigan. We were once here on a tour when I was on city council, and Terry Cooke and I told the driver, “No matter what, even if everybody else goes back to the hotel, you have to take us to drive by to see where Chrétien lives.” The little guy from Shawinigan was that successful. When you're first starting out and someone like that is in power, you pay attention to it.
I think it says a lot that Mr. Chrétien thought that was a fair process to deal with this, yet Mr. Respect and Sunny Ways feels that's not good enough, that the government should retain the right to ram through the changes. Mr. Chrétien did not see it that way. You have to acknowledge that we have at least a good case, even if you don't want to admit it's the winning case. I feel sad and disappointed that I'm even talking that way in terms of winning and losing, especially when we're talking about the rules. There shouldn't be any losers on the rules; there just shouldn't be. It's that deep sense of commitment to Parliament and a desire to do a lot of this stuff.
I make no bones about it. A lot of the changes the government wants to make in the election laws, I favour. For a lot of the stuff it wants to remove from Bill C-23, I can't get that out of there fast enough. I make no bones about it. I don't want to see this Parliament go by with that stuff not taken out. We have a majority government with, at the very least, a third party—if not the opposition—that is very supportive of doing real modernization and paying real respect to the Chief Electoral Officer's report. Do you realize that when they brought in Bill C-23, they didn't even consult with the Chief Electoral Officer? That's how bad it was.
I want to get off this dime. It's wrecking all my other stuff. I'm missing the public accounts committee.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
On that note, David, when I was staffing for Scott, you were chairing public accounts.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
You were briefly on that, and I have to compliment you on being the only chair I've ever seen filibustering his own committee.
NDP
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Yes, exactly.
My point then, before I move on, to summarize, is that not only are we engaged in a battle to the political death, in a war that the government picked and started, but at the end of the day, my priority—and I suspect it's that of the official opposition, but I'll let them speak for themselves—is to get us past this and get back to work. This is screwing up everybody's schedule. It's costing I don't know how much money to keep this place going so that we can have this debate.
Again, had we had a different approach, we might not be here. There are no guarantees and I'm not saying that all would have been wonderful had it gone differently, but I believe there's a really good chance, if you look at the evidence of how we've been working as a committee since we got here, that with a different approach we would be in the midst of reviewing that very document, and probably entertaining some opposition ideas and laying out our time frame. There was a suggestion that we can always meet outside our regular hours. If we were committed enough, we could do that. How much do you think we want to do that if this is going to be the way that we're treated?
Had the government approached this in a way similar to that for similar projects and undertakings, there is every possibility—only a possibility, but a distinct possibility—we'd be in very different place. The proof is that we've already done it. We'll never know. The Liberal government never gave that a chance. They just went straight for the jugular, yet we keep offering options and ideas that are not stacked in our favour, the most recent being, as I said—and I'll stop referring to it now, Chair, and move on, because I'm seeing that look—
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Yes, the most recent being, as I've said, Mr. Chrétien's proposal. How could the NDP and the Conservatives pushing a Liberal model for change be us trying to “gotcha” you? I don't know how much more fair-minded we can be than to formally put on the table between the two opposition parties a model of dealing with exactly this issue that was used by a three-time majority Liberal prime minister.
In the eyes of the public, it has to be getting difficult for the government to convince people that we're playing some kind of game, especially given the fact that we didn't start it. Our intent, though, if we're going to turn into that “us and them”, is that we'll finish it. If this doesn't get resolved and we keep wasting money and wasting time debating 24-7 because having a filibuster inside the regular committee hours wasn't a good enough fight for this government, and they wanted to have the nuclear war, where you're a 24-7 filibuster or nothing.... The Liberal government did that, not us.
At some point, we're going to stop trying to help you get out of your own mess when you won't even stop digging, because the first rule when you're in a deep hole is to stop digging. You guys keep digging and we keep offering you ways to get out. Eventually, that's going to evaporate. Quite frankly, we're running out of ideas, since we're the only ones who are trying to be creative over here. With the Trudeau Liberals, so far on this issue, it's their way or the highway.
I was working my way through this document. I talked about the parallel debating chamber, and some of the discussions around that, but again, I was pointing out—and I'll leave this now—that because of the goodwill that existed.... I remember the discussion we had about this because, again, I had a particular interest in it. We meant it when we said that we may revisit this topic because it has some great ideas, that it may have some potential for giving backbenchers more of an opportunity to play a role. Every one of us agrees with that.
You wouldn't get that in a government-dictated report, because it would be meaningless. You might just as well say that the opposition will do whatever we make them do. Because of the kind of environment we have and the respect that exists, we put in that sort of thing to show that as a group this thing had some potential, and we wouldn't mind revisiting it to see if we can't tease that out a little further and come up with a viable new idea that might provide backbenchers with a greater opportunity to participate than now exists.
Moving on, I would draw another example from this report, Chair:
The Committee has no recommendations to make at this time regarding the implementation of proxy voting or electronic voting; it may revisit this topic in further study.
Again, to go to where Madam Sahota was, that may have led ultimately to a big crash coming, a slow-motion train wreck. We don't know.
As someone who was part of this, I can tell you that when we had the discussion, we exchanged some ideas on it and we said that we'd revisit this thing, because there are implications beyond whether or not you just like the idea. A lot of that has to do with going back to the lessons we learned from talking about the family-friendly Parliament and how it is a huge deal to come here just to vote, because we know one of the standards that we're measured by, unfair as it is, is how often you vote.
By the way, they should be looking at anybody who has a perfect voting record, because it does speak to what they aren't doing. Do they never go anywhere? Do they never do anything else? Is that the only thing that matters so that artificial number looks good?
Nonetheless, that aside, it is a real issue. A lot of people travel a long way and have some good arguments about why there ought to be some form of voting other than physically schlepping across the continent. A lot of us can give good reasons for why it's been like that and why that works, but nonetheless, there were valid points on all sides. Although we couldn't come to an agreement, we were sincere when we said that we may revisit this. If we weren't, we wouldn't have put it in. Nobody was forcing anything down anybody's throat; this wasn't foie gras. This is exactly what it says: that we may revisit it in the future.
I'll continue. This is always interesting:
The Committee has no recommendations to make at this time regarding decorum in the House. It does note, however, that a purpose of this study was to identify and remove barriers to attracting and retaining a broader spectrum of Canadians as members of Parliament. The committee, as such, may revisit this topic in a further study.
Again, that's not about deferring it to some la-la time. We recognized in our work plan, at least notionally, that we were going to come back to this stuff, if for no other reason than the members who cared about a lot of these things and who didn't see recommended changes in here weren't going to go away. They were going to keep advocating, and this is the place where we deal with this issue. We were going to be seized of this again one way or another, but in wording it this way we're being respectful of the fact that there are real issues here.
Again, it wouldn't be worded like that in a government-dictated report. If it were, that kind of thing would have been attacked for making the report resemble something it is not, which is a work of collaboration. In this case, we're all prepared to back up every word in here.
Again, Madam Sahota didn't agree with all of it and wished there were more in there. I understand that, but at the end of the day, I think that's a good sign of compromise. There was stuff in there that I didn't agree with and things that I'd like to have seen changed, but what really mattered was that we were willing to make those recommendations on the matters we did agree on. We put them in a report and we sent it off to the House, so at least where we do agree, we were willing to have it go somewhere and be of some use, as opposed to this.
I won't say anything about this one, but I'm going to read it for you. It's totally self-explanatory. It's from the report:
The Committee is interested in providing flexibility to members who are in the late stages of pregnancy, new mothers or parents, or who serve as primary caregivers. The Committee, however, does not have any recommendations regarding this matter at this time; it intends to revisit this topic in further study.
On that one, I'll just say this. Because of its importance, and because we heard from colleagues who made very sincere and heartfelt presentations to us about it, even though we couldn't come to agreement—yet—we not only used the respectful language that we used earlier in saying that we would revisit this, but we bumped it up to make this part say that the committee “intends to revisit this topic in further study”. Again, this is not the sort of language a government would use in a government-dictated report, because it would be laughable.
In concluding on this report, Chair, I would reference the fifth paragraph from the bottom, just above your signature. It has to do with the travel point system, just to give it context. The travel point system is the “current system” reference here. It reads:
The Committee would appreciate if the Board of Internal Economy could examine possible approaches to amending the current system with a view to encouraging members’ spouses and children to make use of travel points to visit their spouse or parent. The Committee suggests the Board consider blending the points allotted to designated travellers with those allotted to dependants. The Board might also consider creating a “family travel point” that could be utilized by a member’s whole family, regardless of its size.
You might wonder what would give rise to that kind of recommendation. Again, I won't go into any names or details, but in the real-world politics of where we are, the media, in their capacity of holding us all to account, report every year how much we all spend on travel. There are some members who have bigger families and a greater distance to travel.
I live in Hamilton. There's my wife Denise and me. Our daughter is 25 and off on her own. She just graduated from university, and she's off and living her full life. There are just the two of us, and it's Hamilton. When Denise comes here—it's not that frequent, because she's busy with her job as the CEO of the YWCA in Hamilton—it's not very far, it's not as costly, and there's only her. If it were a spouse with two or three kids who was from one of the far western reaches, the same number of visits would show a much larger dollar figure.
I will tell you this. It was the spouse of a member who made the point that they deliberately don't travel as often as they would like to do to be with the member as a spouse and partner and as a parent because of the politics of the reporting mechanism. I've never had to think about that. Up until recently, Kayla, my daughter, qualified for the travel. Whenever she travelled, I was just thrilled that she had a chance to be here in the capital with Denise and me. I never once had to think about how it was going to look back home, because it was two or three times a year at most.
A plane ticket from here to Hamilton, Filomena, is a very different plane ticket from one from here to Vancouver or Calgary. That's not even talking about those who go west and then north, like our chair, who did not make presentations. None of this is about him, but I think it's fair to say that, if you looked at the life that our chair has to live, this issue could come into play a lot more. If the chair were bringing three or four kids as frequently as many of us do from Toronto, say, or the Niagara Peninsula, where it's a non-issue for us, it would be a huge political issue for him. Once a year, they get this great big number, and of course people start thinking, “Oh yeah, there you go, living high on the hog on my tax dime.”
What's unfair is that we don't have to go through it. They might compare my travel to Filomena's, or compare us to David Sweet's or to that o fother colleagues in the Hamilton area. That's the worst that it gets. In all my time, in the almost 15 years that I've been here, I don't think any one of us has been out of whack, and from Hamilton it's been a mixture of Liberals, NDP members, and Conservatives since I've been around.
I have to tell you: my heart broke. All I could think of was some five- or six-year-old who wants to be with mom or dad. We provide that means. One of the things that impressed me so much, coming from Queen's Park, was the amount of consideration that was given to family. It was greater than it was at Queen's Park. I appreciated it. Again, it didn't affect me in a big way, because I'm not that far and I don't have a big immediate family, but I appreciated that I was in a place where we have more respect, consideration, and sensitivity around the fact that, in addition to being MPs, we are still people.
When we leave office, we go back to being just people from whence we came. When I heard—in this case, from a mom—that there were deliberate trips when ordinarily they would have come to see dad.... Again, very rarely do I have to stay all weekend because of something I do in Ottawa. I'm so close to Hamilton I can usually get home—not always— and if I'm travelling or speaking, that's different. I know that there are members from the west, the north, and the east who will come here and, just out of self-preservation, stay for weekends.
On Monday morning or Monday afternoon, you can tell in my caucus who's from B.C.—I don't know about the rest of you—because their eyeballs are like this.... A lot of them come in on the red-eye. Not only that, they live in two different time zones. They live in this time zone, but they deal with their constituents, their family, and their office in a completely different time zone. I get all upset when I have to go to Africa and it buggers me up for about 10 days. These folks live like that all the time.
When I heard that, really, all I could think of was that a little five- or six-year-old wanted nothing more than to be with their dad, that we have the rules that provide it, and that they deliberately didn't go because of the reporting mechanism we have. Because of the nature of our dialogue—nobody was standing over us with a hammer saying “we're just about done this” and we were all treated equally—we framed it that way. The reason I know this is that I was the one who made that suggestion. I wanted to see something done. It wasn't right. Never once did my daughter not come to Ottawa because dad had to worry about the politics, yet there are other members whose kids do not come to see their parents because of the politics. That's not right. That's not fair.
We weren't able to completely revise the whole travel system. It's a big undertaking. It's complex. We have public staff whose full-time job is to deal with that one single part of our life, which is the travel we do. Given the fact that we were working together and that we did consider what was being said, we didn't have to worry about the politics of the day.
I'm going from memory, but I think when I threw that suggestion out there, it was one of the Liberal members who said that maybe we could send something to the Board of Internal Economy to bring it to their attention and ask them to take a look at it. I think that's how it unfolded. That's how this got here. That wouldn't have happened if it had been a government-dictated report; I would not have been in that mindset in which I didn't have to worry about the politics of the room. As it was, I could worry about what my colleagues and their families were saying as witnesses. I could take that into my heart. I could work on it and try to find a solution, knowing that I had a government in the majority that was at least willing to entertain these ideas. That's why it worked.
The process we're under now is not going to allow that, and it's unfortunate, because we could very well be in a different place. I'm hoping we still end up in another place, because if this doesn't work.... Really, the only way we can get out of this if we don't find common cause, as in referencing the Chrétien model or a couple of other suggestions that have been sent through Mr. Simms, if we don't find some way to positively segue this committee into some actual positive work, what we're going to end up with is—however this ends ultimately—that the government either has to do a full 100% surrender or turn its guns on us and use 100% of its majority to run right over us. That's where we are.
Our preference, as you can see by the fact that this letter was just made public today.... It's not like I'm talking old politics and new stuff has taken over. It was this afternoon that this letter was drafted and signed by the Conservative House leader and the NDP House leader offering the government.... Imagine that: we're the ones offering the government a solution out of a mess that they made.
That's what this does, and it provides a model that was good enough for Mr. Chrétien, who had his challenges in getting things through the House, as every government does. It's just that not every government is willing to change those rules by unilateral action. It's the last thing we expected from a government that had promised sunny ways, respect, and “meaningful” committee engagement.
This is pretty much the antithesis of that. Again, what's maddening is why. I could see it if there were a path where this was going to work. I could even see how you pulled together the first strategic plan. As vicious as it was, these things happen. I get it. No problem. If that had worked, you'd be okay, but when it failed, you should have.... Again, it failed. That didn't work. By the end of the week, we were starting to get the attention of Canadians, the media, and pundits, and there was a lot of support out there. I'm going to start reflecting that when I reassume the floor tomorrow morning at nine o'clock.
What happened, Chair, was that when you suspended on Friday—and I'm going to leave some parts out because we just don't need them—and said that we would reconvene a week Monday at noon, I thought, okay, the government tried their gambit, and I understand that. I'm angry at what they tried to do, I thought, but at least I understand what they tried to do. It failed, and they can see it turning now, and what they want to do now is give themselves a week to figure out how to get off this position and get this whole thing turned around.
Quite frankly, other than talking to Scotty—on Wednesday, I think, he and I chatted for a while—I really didn't think about this much. If anything, I was expecting maybe a contact from my House leader, who would want to talk to me as we were formulating our plans moving forward. I would have been part of that. Both as a member of this committee and as the chair of our planning and priorities committee, I would have been consulted before anything would be locked in. Other than maybe half expecting that I would hear from Murray, I didn't think about it. I thought, okay, the government tried something, nasty as it was, but it didn't work and they know that. They were smart enough not to live through a week of criticism for no reason when they know that when they come back they're going to be trying to get out of this mess.
It made every good sense to me that the adjournment happened and that the government bought themselves a week. Man, when you're in government, a week to think about something is a gift. That's a gift from heaven. You don't normally get that long, especially when new stuff comes up. You have a lot of time to think about what you thought of, but what's that old saying...? I can't remember the exact context, but it has to do with what it is that trips governments up. The answer is, “Events, my dear boy, events.” That's what happens. Eighty per cent of the time you're in government, you're dealing with issues that you never really paid a lot of attention to when you were in opposition, because the problem didn't exist.
Chair, you're either saying “Hi”, or I have five minutes.
