Procedure and House Affairs Committee on March 21st, 2017

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Pursuant to an emerging convention of this committee who want to achieve through consensus, I am happy to allow Mr. Simms to make a number of comments and then we'll return to me having the floor and the ordinary list of speakers.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

I appreciate where he's coming from.

I know through the use of social media we have gone through this, and in a lot of cases, a lot of people put it out there.

I commend Ms. Rempel for her use of social media, because I remember a while ago she suffered from abuse on social media, and I was impressed when she read it online. She was quite vehement in what she said and I appreciate where she's coming from.

I would just like to read what was put on my Facebook page, because I, too, receive messages. This particular person, Jamie, last name unsaid, said:

Canada knows who you are! We know what you're doing. Canada knows how to find you. Don't do this. We won't stand for this, you have to know that. You can't be that stupid. Stop now! You smug, greedy bastard, or thousands of angry Canadians are going to start picketing your home 24 hours a day, daily, from now on. We'll make sure you and your family don't sleep a wink ever again, because Canada is fun that way, you dick!

That's it. End of sentence.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Banff—Airdrie, AB]

On a point of order, Mr. Chair, we obviously all receive those kinds of terrible comments. I certainly hope the Prime Minister's Office is listening to these as well, because the Prime Minister is eliciting these kinds of comments to his members of Parliament. It's not right or fair to them that it's happening.

However, on a point of order again, Mr. Chair, while I can, and while we have this spirit of co-operation, I would ask that we receive unanimous consent to begin as soon as possible to televise the hearings of this meeting.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

I think we've already had that request and there was no consent.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Banff—Airdrie, AB]

I appreciate that, but I'm certainly hoping that Liberal members will have thought better of having refused it. Obviously this is all about trying to ensure that they are held accountable to Canadians, and for them to want to hide from the view of television cameras while they're trying to prevent accountability for themselves is really shameful.

I hope they've thought better of it and maybe we could get unanimous consent to begin to televise this meeting.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Mr. Genuis, you're on again.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Banff—Airdrie, AB]

Mr. Chair, were you going to seek the unanimous consent?

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

We don't have it, so we are already—

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Banff—Airdrie, AB]

Who is refusing unanimous consent?

Liberal members are holding their hands high. I just want to be sure that is the case. It's really unfortunate, obviously, that Liberal members would refuse that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Mr. Genuis, you're on.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

It seems we do have diversity of opinion among Liberal members on the issue of televising the meeting, which is perhaps some progress here. Maybe over time we'll be able to work toward passing the amendment and move forward.

I will at some point share a few more comments. I did want to come back to what I was talking about when we were interrupted by the budget in the early afternoon, namely the specific changes proposed in the discussion paper put forward by the government House leader.

I think I was on some of the issues around programming. Right now we have a procedure of time allocation, which allows the government to move a motion with notice to allocate a set, limited number of days for debate to continue. The government is able to move that motion. What follows the moving of that motion is a period of half an hour of questions directed to the mover of that motion. Similar to question period, some of those questions may be posed by members of the government, but generally speaking those questions are posed by members of the opposition.

The government puts this forward, there's a half-hour period for questions and answers, then there are the bells, then we have a vote on the allocation of time, and then the discussion proceeds. The use of time allocation is never ideal. The ideal way for us to proceed is through discussion, agreement, and consensus among the different actors within our system. That's how normally it's supposed to go.

More and more we're seeing the use of time allocation by this government. At least in the current structure, if I'm not mistaken, there is a sense in which the use of time allocation, per the Standing Orders, occurs only when agreement cannot be reached. The Standing Orders obviously cannot prescribe goodwill in the context of negotiations among House leaders; they cannot necessarily prescribe the degree to which a good faith effort is made to get on the same page, but they do require that there be at least some sort of effort to get on the same page before the time allocation process is undertaken.

Members have every reason to encourage their government to use time allocation as little as possible, because it may well be disruptive to the other normal operations of the House—not to say that it may not be appropriate in certain circumstances, and maybe, depending on the inclination of a particular opposition, it's more necessary in certain environments than others.

Each time it's used, time allocation does provoke some degree of a public conversation around its use, which calibrates the discussion a little. That's one of the things about the current procedure: it does entail this balance, this tension within it.

We now have an alternative system proposed by the government. I think, more honestly, they would say they're going to use time allocation all the time for everything. That's certainly what it looks like to me, but I think they would like to go through this rebranding exercise. This is the sort of rebranding exercise whereby the government automatically time allocates everything, and everybody accepts it.

Sorry, but that isn't going to happen; the opposition is going to say they need some say on how much time is spent discussing particular issues. There's no surprise there. The opposition is going to expect to be able to determine which bills are a priority. If the government says we're going to have six days of debate on Rouge Park, and one day on euthanasia, at that point the opposition is going to say, no, they have a slightly different sense about which bill requires more discussion and which bill, at a particular stage, is in need of less immediate discussion. It's not the sort of thing we would expect the government to do unilaterally.

In the framework established by the motion in the absence of the amendment, however, the government would simply be able to institute their new set of proposals about how the House would work. That would totally undermine the ability of the opposition to be effective as part of the conversation; it would totally undermine the opposition's ability to counter the government over the period of time they want to do so.

I can imagine a situation in which the government might propose legislation that would be particularly relevant to my home province, Alberta, something on which many of the MPs from Alberta would want to speak to and represent the concerns of their communities. If the government felt this were not a priority and was not going to allocate a certain number of days for it, that would create a real problem for members who seek to reflect the specific priorities of the constituents that we are all sent here to represent.

We have a responsibility to represent the concerns and priorities of our constituents whom we've been sent here to represent, and yes, that includes being able to speak on matters of particular concern to us, when we want to, on specific bills. Of course, it can be limited by the decision of government to move time allocation, but it is something that the government must, at least, be held accountable for in each individual instance.

My ability to give speeches in the House of Commons has been limited by the use of time allocation by this government.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

I have a point of order.

Just for the sake of giving you a break here—I'm not going to read from Facebook again, I swear—I want to comment on this one. This is the one I was waiting for, about programming, because I want to add to the debate about....

Well, anyway, can I—?

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

You can as per our normal procedure, yes.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

Okay, thank you very much.

I looked into the element of programming. As Scott Reid pointed out a while ago, they called it “guillotining”, which is their succinct word for time allocation that calls it exactly what it is. For actual guillotining, you knew what was coming, but in the case of Parliament, you did not know what was coming. It was guillotining in that particular manner.

They started doing what was called “programming”. It was only to provide a good prediction. When I was in Great Britain last week, at Westminster, I spoke to the former House leader for the Labour Party. The reason she explored the concept of programming is that when she was in opposition, Margaret Thatcher put out a bill—

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Hear, hear!

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

God love 'er.

She had a whole concept with a bill to be brought to the House that was essentially going to cut social welfare payments. She wanted to argue this, this, and that. She had three elements set up for argument. She had planned it in such a manner. Halfway through what she felt was the most important part, it was guillotined, and she lost her chance. Basically, she said, she spent too much time on one part, which was not as important as the other part. When she assumed office, she still thought it was a good idea to do, so she thrust this upon the Conservatives. They were initially pretty angry, but a former Conservative MP at the time, from 1997 to 2015, named Andrew Lansley, was quoted as saying:

I may be wrong about this, but I think it would have been slightly utopian to have imagined that business could proceed without any form of programming. Programming in itself in the House is not regarded as an evil thing, as long as it delivers what Members are looking for.

It is also for the House leaders, of course, which you mentioned earlier, and I respect that.

He was the leader of the House Commons, and in a government memorandum presented to the Procedure Committee, in 2013, after leaving opposition, he stated:

On the basis of the debates and votes on programming over the last 15 years, there now appears to be a clear majority view in the House that, in principle, programming is beneficial to the scrutiny of legislation.

That's why we included this in the discussion paper. We thought that because this came from both sides, it's now being used effectively.

Sir Roger Sands, a former clerk of the United Kingdom House of Commons, also endorses it. There's another quote, if I may.

Margaret Beckett,by the way, whom I mentioned, was the former leader.

Going back to the clerk, his last known public appearance was in 2014, to give evidence to the governance committee. You have the Labour side, you have the Conservative side, and now you have a former clerk himself, Sir Roger Sands, who said:

I am against an approach to procedure which results in debate being conducted as a process of arm-wrestling rather than real engagement; and I think when we had open-ended debate on legislation that was what tended to happen far too often and guillotining

—that is, time allotting—

was the way you broke through. You stopped the arm-wrestling and it was almost the only way to do it.

One of those politicians, with the Liberal Democrats, said to me when I talked to him—and I apologize if I get it wrong, but I paraphrase—that when programming came in, it introduced an element of debate for grown-ups. They were able to distribute the debate process over a period of time following second reading such that they were able to predict when it would end. In other words, they said to the government that if you're going to cut this short, you're going to do it on a timetable we know so that we can plan for it. In some cases, the House leaders did agree, but when the House leaders agreed, which we can do now, which is true, they decided to institute this programming measure by which they were going to do it, and it became much more predictable.

I'm providing that to the debate only because I thought it was something to think about. That's really the reason we put it in this discussion paper. In the study, if we get there, if I get evidence to the contrary, I think we'd all agree that we would get rid of it if we felt that it weren't useful, but I think there's strong enough evidence to look at it—not to institute it, but to look at it and study it.

We can have those witnesses, those people I just mentioned.... One of them, the former Labour person, told me that she is willing talk to the committee by video conference and tell us about their experience in 1997, when they brought it into effect.

I want to thank you for your time.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

That's sounds like consensus.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Banff—Airdrie, AB]

If only we could find a way to formalize that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

You're on, Mr. Genuis.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Okay.

Thank you, Mr. Simms, for your comments with respect to programming. Perhaps I can address the underlying question in the context of the amendment and then speak more specifically about the issues you raised.

At the end of your intervention, you alluded to putting this forward in good faith. You said that you want to provoke a discussion about this, and that this is based on evidence you've heard from some people in the context of British politics. Perhaps there are other points of view. Perhaps there are other experiences of programming. Perhaps there are members of Parliament in the U.K. or members of other legislatures who have found that this doesn't work. We could hear that evidence and take that on board.

I certainly have no problem with having that discussion take place in a framework in which we know that the ability of the opposition to be engaged in the evaluation of that evidence will be important as well, because a different evaluation of the evidence may come forward. We may hear from different MPs who represent different perspectives on that question. The opposition may conclude one thing, or we might even end up agreeing on the broader principle but have sub-disagreements about the exact operationalizing of different components of it.

This is precisely the reason we have put forward this amendment—to guarantee a framework in which we can have a conversation about these issues and know that the government will not use that as an opportunity to advance their interests at the expense of ours. The framework established by the amendment is one in which we know that we will be able to have a good, meaningful, deep, and substantive conversation about this and all of the other issues that are raised.

We cannot simply assume the good faith of the government, especially—and here I say so not to impugn the reputation of any individual members—when we have reason to believe that what the government is trying to do here is move forward with changes that reflect their interests at the expense of the opposition. Reading the discussion paper, it doesn't just put out lots of things for discussion. It makes specific arguments for things in a facially neutral way, but clearly for things that advance the interests of the government. That's throughout the discussion paper.

Of course, in any proper consensus process, it would be reasonable for the government to put forward arguments or things that they see are in their interests and for the opposition to put forward arguments for things that they see are in their interests. Everybody recognizes the reality that probably at some point the opposition will be the government and the government will be the opposition. Over time we would adjudicate that, and come to certain conclusions where we could say, well, let's try to implement a change in this way that reflects all of our interests.

Mr. Simms and others in their interventions have asked that there just be a presumption of good faith, but there hasn't thus far been a good reason for us to presume that the government isn't doing what it appears to be doing—namely, trying to create circumstances that would allow them to unilaterally move forward with this motion and with changes. All they would have to do to provide the reassurance that would allow us to proceed with the study is to accept the amendment that we are advancing in the opposition. All that would be required would be for them to say “yes” to the amendment. At that point, yes, absolutely we can have the discussion about all of the issues around programming.

Mr. Simms talks about the range of witnesses we could have. Frankly, I do think there are some issues with hearing the full range of witnesses that he has talked about in the context of the timeline. The timeline proposes that there would be a report back to the House no later than June 2. We are today at the end of March.

We have a break week coming. The House will sit for two weeks in April and three weeks in May. So effectively there would be five sitting weeks. Even if we were to immediately get consensus on the amendment and move forward, we would have those five sitting weeks, and there would have to be time for consideration and discussion of a report. There would have to be time for translation and publication as well. There would have to be time on the front end for the contacting, recruiting, and scheduling witnesses.

We're actually left with a very narrow period of time. I'm not all sure that, even with the passage of the amendment, we would have time to hear from the witnesses being envisioned. That's another issue, but I think we do need to pass this amendment to establish the principle of consensus, and then discuss how we would build a study out of this at committee, one that draws on the expertise of members of Parliament here, which would really achieve the best results that people are looking for.

On the specific issues around programming itself, I take the point—and it's a good point that Mr. Simms raises—that it is worthwhile for the opposition to know if and when the government intends to introduce time allocation. All other things being equal, I don't think Mr. Simms would have met opposition members who are enthusiastic about debate being cut off, but I think they would have said yes, of course, if we accept that the government is going to cut off debate after three days. It is better to know at the beginning of day one that they're going to do that than to find out at the end of day two that they're going to do that, as is what happens under our current procedure, that being the time when the government would then put forward the appropriate notice of motion about its intention to move forward with a time allocation motion.

Right now, we don't have the use of guillotining, time allocation, closure, or whatever you call it with all legislation. Every time the government does use that, there is a price that is paid, and there is an ongoing opportunity for negotiation.

I think a better way to approach this would be.... Actually, I think Mr. Simms indirectly points the way there, when he talks on the one hand about the principle of programming but then, on the other hand, about the practice of programming. The principle of programming—that people would know in advance how a debate were going to unfold—is a good principle if it is combined with the principle of consensus. If you have a process to establish the number of days to comprise a debate, but you have that process on the basis of a real established consensus, then yes, predictability is an asset.

In the absence of consensus, that's just closure with an extra day's notice, which doesn't address the fundamental concerns. It is a little bit more notice, but still, effectively, it's the idea that there would be the automatic introduction of closure.

Even the way in which it was set up.... If I remember his intervention correctly, Mr. Simms was talking about this from the perspective of an opposition House leader. The emphasis in that model is still on one of the parties acting as collective monoliths instead of individuals acting on behalf of their constituents. He spoke of a particular case or example in which there was a change to the social benefit package introduced by the government, and the opposition had certain points it wanted to make.

Let's not forget there might be points that the opposition wants to make, but that there are also points that individual members may want to make that reflect the particular priorities or concerns of their own constituencies.

The question here is not just about a party being able to organize itself to present the debates in the way and in the time they want, but also about the individual members having the opportunity to participate in the discussion as it unfolds.

The point was made about open-ended debate looking like arm wrestling. I don't really understand or agree with that characterization. I think open-ended debate is debate in which as many members who want to speak on an issue on behalf of their constituents can do so. With the exception of certain circumstances, the first response to a government motion and so forth, generally there are the time limits.

Of course, the way that our debate works on bills, you go from a 20-minute time limit to a 10-minute time limit after a period of time, and members in the House can't speak more than once. There's obviously sort of a natural process to which that conversation would approach an ending, and it's not practical for every member to speak on every bill. Members have to focus their attention and their expertise on certain things.

There is one feature of advanced planning that would be interesting, and that is the possibility, in the context of certain debates, of determining speech length based on the number of members who were interested in speaking to it to fit in a certain number of days. Again, that would have to be done on the basis of consensus, or you would end up disenfranchising individual members of Parliament who want to bring forward individual concerns that respect the priorities of their ridings.

I think that addresses the points Mr. Simms has raised, both with respect to the process we're operating under, and these issues around the expectation of good faith—he didn't use these words—and why we can proceed with a presumption of good faith if the government supports our amendment. We can proceed to do a great study and make some recommendations and move these institutions forward on that basis. However, we cannot accept the government having the ability to unilaterally change the rules of the game. We're concerned about what the Prime Minister would do with that power, but we're also concerned about what a future prime minister might do, the norms of the engagement, and about transgressing the consensus among members. It is important that we very much preserve that in place.

Before I go on, I do want to assent to one point that Mr. Simms made, and that is the benefit of this study's being fulsome and its engaging international perspectives. The discussion paper from the government House leader comments about the way things operate in New Zealand and the U.S. House of Representatives. There are plenty of other parliaments. We could look at how time is managed among the competing interests, especially in very large, very populous democracies. I think it would be interesting to understand how time management is organized.

I suspect that for many of the democracies around the world, we would find that whatever they call it, there has to be a level of consensus. A level of consensus built into the system is fundamental to what all of us would expect there to be in the context of a robust well-functioning parliamentary democracy in which there is proper calibration of the relationship between the executive and the legislative function. This is what is at stake with this amendment. What is at stake is preserving that proper form of responsible government in this country that we have come to expect.

I would like to go on to make a few comments about the issue of question period and some of the proposals for it in the government House leader's discussion paper, in the context of some of the discussion about Fridays. One the proposed options is to end Friday sittings, and of course it is acknowledged that time from question period and for private members' business could be allocated to discussion on other days.

Think about that proposal in the context of some of the discussion in the section on question period. One of the proposals is lengthening the time allotted for questions and answers. I'm not sure about the part for answers. I didn't know that happened in our question period, but maybe they mean lengthening the amount of time for responses.

The issue, of course, is that if you are lengthening the amount of time for question period and also the amount of time allotted for questions and answers, or responses, the net effect is that you are reducing the number of questions that will be asked and answered. Depending on the changes made to the amount of time available, there is a real risk that changes would take place that would significantly reduce the ability of members of the opposition to ask questions if we were to be in a situation in which governments were giving much more extended responses to questions that should, in reality, be answered in a clearer, simpler, and more straightforward way.

I think there is some logic to the idea that if you have advance notice of questions that are to be asked and an ability to take a certain amount of time to answer those questions—actually, I think Mr. Simms spoke a bit about this yesterday—theoretically, you might expect that you would see a question and answer period that indeed looked a little bit more like a question and answer period.

Incidentally, I remember that when I took my then girlfriend, now wife, to question period for the first time, she very innocently asked me, “Why aren't they answering the questions?” This may or may not have been when the Conservatives were in government.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

We've been married for six years, so I think anybody can do the math. I realized after I started to share the anecdote that it was going to get me into trouble.

That was a particularly abhorrent question period for us, I think. Most of the time—

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[A voice]

You were doing so well.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

—we were quite good about answering the questions.

Nonetheless, when we speak about what would happen if questions and answers were longer, and if advance notice were given, we need to look at what already happens for “late shows”, because this is precisely the formula for what we informally call “late shows”, which are now adjournment proceedings.

In speeches I've given on this subject, I've advocated that we should look at ways of strengthening “late shows”, changing the time of them—I spoke about that yesterday—by exchanging time slots for them with statements by members. This is an idea that I think needs further exploration. It's the kind of thing that would enhance the value of that process.

We don't always get answers to questions in the context of late shows, but I think we do a little bit better.

Sometimes in question period we'll ask a question about a particular minority group, for example, and the government response doesn't mention the group, and then the government respondent does some research on the question and the next time we ask it, they are ready to answer the question. So having longer questions and answers and advance notice of the questions, and changed procedures for late shows, would get around the problem of a parliamentary secretary or a minister not having any idea of the issue, and therefore fudging and talking about nothing or something completely different.

That's a problem worth getting around, although it should be said that ministers and parliamentary secretaries should know their files without advance notice. They should be prepared to answer questions about important issues that opposition members are going to ask. If an opposition member is trying to surprise a government member with something very obscure, what's going on will be obvious to the public. But if you ask a legitimate question in good faith that reflects an issue that should be on the radar of the government minister or the parliamentary secretary, there is a reasonable expectation that there would be a response, even in the absence of advance notice.

Nonetheless, advance notice and lengthening of the time for question period, as some have proposed, would get around that problem of somebody just having no idea about an issue when a question is asked. At least it would give the opposition member a little more satisfaction at that point.

On the other hand, if we were dealing with an issue, and there are some when the government is fully aware of what's going on but still doesn't want to provide an explanation, then advance notice would not help. Many times, when reading the headlines, it's very obvious what the opposition is going to ask the next day, and although formally the government has advance notice, informally it knows exactly what subjects it is going to be questioned on, and it still doesn't make a meaningful response.

We can look at prospective changes that would strengthen question period, but the biggest issue in question period is a level of political will from the government and, to some extent, from the opposition, because sometimes the opposition asks questions that aren't designed to be answered. They are of a different nature, and we can't expect responses from the government on questions that are not respondable, but very often the opposition does ask questions about specific issues. These might not just be about policy issues. They might be about ethics or the conduct of the government, but in any event they are specific and clear and pointed answerable questions on which the opposition do not receive a response.

Neither advance notice nor expanding the time windows for questions and answers would change the underlying issue in questions and answers, which is whether there is a political will to respond, an expectation that the government will respond. Part of the issue around the absence of political will is some degree of political cynicism, that the public doesn't really expect politicians to give meaningful answers in question period, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

By the way, part of this whole debate we're having around the amendment, around the motion, concerns public expectations of our democracy. When we don't work together and don't embrace the principles of consensus and fairness that we, in the opposition, have talked about, we contribute to public cynicism that makes everything we do more challenging. It makes all of our efforts to move things forward in an effective way more challenging. That's part of the context in which we're having these conversations.

With respect to question period, I don't want to come across as not believing there are reforms that can or should be made. I'm not saying that. I think some of the changes would have the effect of accentuating public pressure on members of the cabinet and parliamentary secretaries to respond. Let's be clear, though, that this is not the solution to every problem.

I think a first step towards improving question period would be something that would happen outside of question period, something that could happen tonight and that could and should happen in the context of this committee. That would be the government's agreeing that it is to work on the basis of respect for the opposition and embrace the principle of consensus embodied by this amendment. We recognize that a strong system of democratic government requires a role for both the government and opposition caucuses, because it is not the government that speaks for all Canadians; it is only Parliament that speaks for all Canadians.

I think the government could recognize that, and if they were to recognize it, this could be a first step to their recognizing it in a number of different areas across the board: treating the opposition with a greater level of respect in the context of question period by providing substantial answers to substantial questions. I think it would be a positive way forward, but it would start with their saying here, in the context of this committee, that we recognize that Her Majesty's loyal opposition is an indispensable part of our system.

I'd like to now speak to the question of omnibus legislation. This question is really interesting, of course, because we just had tabled in the House the budget. I had a chance to read the budget in the half hour before coming down here.

No, I didn't actually—