Thanks, Mr. Chair.
I appreciate Mr. Simms' intervention. It's good to hear from someone on the other side. I don't doubt his sincerity in what he was saying. I wish I could feel the same way about the motion that we have in front of us. I wish I could feel the same way about the actions we've seen from the government. When I say “the government”, I am not talking about the members of this committee; I am talking about the powers that be: the PMO, the House leader, and the others.
At the end of the day, I don't doubt anything Mr. Simms just said. I believe he really means that about Friday, that we could look at other options or full days. I think he is sincere about the idea of trying to have discussions about some of these items to see what's possible and what's not. I believe he means that.
I've worked with most of the members of this committee for an entire Parliament. Some of them are a little newer to the committee, but I think that's typical of the members of this committee on the government side. The problem is that none of this means that much when you have a motion in front of you that is pushing an artificial timeline like this. There is an attempt being made to amend the motion to make sure the opposition actually has input. It's great to say that we'll have discussion, and I believe in all sincerity that Mr. Simms means that, but we saw what happened earlier today. Mr. Chan was trying to work collaboratively with the opposition parties until the whip's office came over and whispered in his ear, and things changed. This is not to condemn Mr. Chan or anyone else. It's just what happened. It can happen again, and it seems that it will.
When you have this motion here, it seems that the government is refusing.... If I am wrong about this, I'd love to hear it from Mr. Simms or anyone else on the government side. When there is this deadline being imposed, and when there is what seems to be opposition to allowing the opposition to have a say, you can say, “We can let the opposition have all the discussion it wants, but at the end of the day we are going to do what we want”, or you can allow this amendment to pass, and therefore allow the opposition to actually be a part of that conversation and a part of forming what the final discussion, the final decision, and the final recommendations are going to be.
We worked that way with this committee in the past. The result in one of those cases was to say that we are not going to recommend getting rid of the Fridays. To speak to the point about the Fridays, it's sincere on Mr. Simms' part, but it doesn't seem like the result will be there, when that has already been the recommendation of this committee and we are now being given something else in a letter from the House leader. It doesn't seem that the unanimous input of this committee was considered. Although it is written in a way that would make one believe they might be willing to consider other things—there would seem to be an attempt at least—it doesn't really seem that way.
I am not trying to accuse any of these members of not wanting to work on Fridays. They don't want to be here on Fridays, but I'm sure they would do other work in their ridings and things like that. I don't want to be taken as trying to accuse them of that. I think what it actually boils down to is that the PMO has decided they want one fewer question period every week that we are here. That's what it really boils down to. That's what it is. And it's the same thing with the Prime Minister. Let's face it, his attendance record is pretty poor. It's terrible, in fact, in terms of attending question period.
It's funny because we often hear these allegations about Stephen Harper not having wanted to be accountable, and all these things. We even heard some of them today. Say what you want, but Stephen Harper showed up at question period and was accountable. He was very rarely not at question period. If he was in the country, he was here, attending question period.
You cannot say the same about Justin Trudeau. There's no question about that. He's just not here very often. There are people who argue he's probably only there once a week now. I've heard that. I've heard that comment by Canadians. Many Canadians have come up to me and said, “He's only there once a week, anyway. He's just going to put in what he already does.” Now, they're not happy about that, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying it should be codified, but that's being recognized.
I can understand that. His office can only write so many scripts for him, and if he goes off script, man, it goes badly for this government. So I get why the Prime Minister would want to try to avoid question period, but it doesn't make it right, and it doesn't mean that it should be possible. It doesn't mean that they should provide cover for him to do it, and that's what they're trying to do. And “they” is not referring to the members of this committee. I don't think that's their intention at all, but it's probably the orders they'll end up getting.
At the end of the day, I appreciate what Scott had to say. I believe he's sincere, but if this amendment isn't carried, it means nothing. It means nothing at all. It's words, and that's all it is if the amendment is not carried. It really reinforces for me why that amendment is so critically important. These are changes that change Parliament and the way it works for all Canadians. If the government thinks it can just change those things to suit the Prime Minister and his willingness, his effort, or his desire to try not to be held accountable, to really be able to dictate the way things are—that's what he's trying to do—then there really is no input from the opposition and from Canadians. It's just the Liberal Party, or probably just the PMO dictating how things are. “Dictating” is a word that describes this Prime Minister quite well.
, Mr. Chair, I'd like to take a bit of time to compare some of what is in this “discussion paper”. I use that in quote marks because I'm not so sure it's really about discussion at all, but a dictatorial letter, whatever you want to call it, from the House leader. The summary was put together by our analyst here, who does a great job, by the way, as do our stand-in analysts as well. I recognize all the hard work that he did on our electoral reform efforts, which ultimately didn't go anywhere, thanks, again, to our friend Justin Trudeau.
The analyst put together a great summary, in a chart here, of the discussion that took place during the take-note debate on the Standing Orders on October 6 of last year. He's categorized it and put it together quite nicely. I want to compare that to this “discussion paper”, again in quotes, from the government House leader.
I went through it, and from what I can see—and I may be skipping over something—there are about 14 key recommendations, I guess I'm going to call them, that have been made here. We'll compare that to what's in this document from this take-note debate. We'll see how seriously the government really took the debate and the considerations of the members of Parliament. From that we can probably conclude how seriously they are considering it and what's being brought forward by the opposition during the debates that will happen in this committee.
This is very germane to the amendment, because the government's position is, “Just take our word for it. We'll consider the opposition and what they have to say. Take our word for it. We've already had this one day of take-note debate, so we listen to people.”
Let's just see how much of that made its way into this discussion, which is supposed to be a starting point, apparently. Then we can see how seriously we can take the government at their word they they are taking the opposition's views into consideration at committee and therefore see whether there is a need to put in writing that this needs to happen.
This is something the government seems to be refusing to do, which would make one suspicious, to say the least. If they really were intending to make sure there was cooperation and some kind of agreement with the opposition on what should be put forward and what should not be, why would they be hesitant to formalize it? It seems a little odd to me that they would be hesitant to formalize it, in that scenario.
We already are starting from a place of suspicion, of course, and understandably so, but anyway....
There is, of course, the talk—actually, interestingly enough, the very first thing that's listed in the document and that I see is one of the recommendations being made—about the idea of looking at the Friday sittings.
To be fair, this document makes an argument that if those sittings aren't going to be eliminated, maybe we could reapportion them in some other way, or have a fuller day, and these kinds of things. Those are reasonable conversations to have.
I think, though, that to try to get rid of a question period every week...? No, that's not reasonable, obviously. What that is actually about is very transparent, which is to try to make sure that the Prime Minister has one less day and the government one less day on which to have to be accountable to Canadians. There is no other argument you could make for this.
That's the first thing we see in the discussion paper. The second thing is the talk about electronic voting. I see some talk about it in the document.
That could be considered. Again I want to draw the distinction I made in relation to that committee report earlier, in which it was clear that this committee felt we shouldn't move forward with getting rid of the Friday sittings. It also said it wouldn't make a recommendation at this time but might revisit the idea of electronic and proxy voting.
There's a distinction there. This is an attempt by the government to bring back for discussion something that this committee, first of all, said they weren't going to make a recommendation on but might reconsider. I can understand why it might be reasonable for it to be brought back for discussion, but for the committee to say that this is not a good idea and we're not going to recommend going forward with it, and for the government to then bring it forward is a different story.
The discussion paper goes on to talk about the House calendar; it talks about changing the months and stuff that we sit in. I'm not going to get into giving a position on these items per se but will just summarize the effect they might have, for example, without really offering a firm position on them per se.
I don't want anyone to take anything I say as a position on the thing, formed on behalf of the opposition or anything like that. It's more a general comment on them and what the effect would be, or how they compare to what's in the...because obviously there's a lot of debate for us to have yet. I'm hoping the debate will actually mean something. That's what the discussion we're having today is all about today.
There is, then, some talk about changing some of the sitting months and things such as that. There is the idea of a greater degree of flexibility built into how many sittings the House has in a given year. Then it gets into the question of motions. What they're trying to do here is to eliminate the capacity to move certain motions. They're saying that's because there's a possibility that the opposition would deprive the House of the ability to deliberate on the intended item for debate during government orders. I think that's the accusation they're trying to make.
I don't see anything in here that would make any kind of corresponding change to the ability of the government to move closure or time allocation, except where they try to do something in here that would allow for proactive closure and things like that. This is what it essentially is. I'll get to that in a minute.
Again, they are taking some powers away from what are typically used by the opposition parties, but there's no corresponding change to similar types of powers of the government. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that it happens to be the opposition ones that are being contemplated, but the government ones they want to keep. In fact, they want to add to them. That's what they're saying.
There's some talk in here about adding to private members' business each week, allowing more consideration for members to change their places, and those types of changes to private members' business. I won't comment on that at this point.
Then it talks about prorogation and some options that could be looked at there in how that might be dealt with in terms of the government giving its rationale for why it would do that.
Then we get into proactive use. Rather than having to impose closure they're going to use programming; they'll do it right up front. Why have to get messy about it? That's the impression I have of that one.
It talks about reforms to question period, about the Prime Minister's question time. Everyone has interpreted that. The only person I've heard interpret it any other way was Mr. Simms just now.