I did, because we couldn't continue with what was going on before. That had to come to an end. I guess a minority would have been even better than the current one, for obvious reasons. Anyway, I won't get too much into what could have been. Those tears are gone.
I will talk about what did happen, and that was that a party got elected that said they were going to respect committees once again, because Parliament used to have respect for its committees. Of everything we do here on the Hill, I consider committee work to be my favourite part. My top thing, of course, is being in my riding, which is same for all of us, but here, I love committee work. This is where stuff happens. It moves quickly. You get a chance to be far more personal in interactions and to work together.
We still have our battles from time to time, but the whole idea was that committees would now be respected and that we wouldn't see this business of moving in camera, with vicious stuff happening in camera, and then having to come back out and not being able to say anything because the rules tie your hands. We were going to have transparency and respect. I was really looking forward to that.
In some ways and in some areas, they've delivered, but right from the get-go on this committee, the first thing I had to do—I think it was even at the first meeting we had—was to mount a mini-campaign of my own to get the parliamentary secretary off the committee, whereas the government had promised that the parliamentary secretary wasn't going to be there in the first place. You can talk about a voting member but where is he now? I haven't seen him for a long time, so it looks like message received.
You know what, Chair? The government members of the day argued. They were so incensed when I accused them of needing him to ride shotgun.
Of course, I was baiting all of you and you all rose, as I would have, too, and responded with —I'm paraphrasing, no names—“Hey, I can make my own decisions, I'm an MP.” That's fair enough. Mr. Graham talked about being here before too and how that was all insulting. Anyway, we got through all of that, and lo and behold, look around: we don't have a parliamentary secretary anywhere within earshot of this committee. But they had to be chased. That was a little disappointing.
I was hoping that it was a one-off, because they have done some other things that are important. They have increased the resources for the committee, which is the first thing. Of course, the previous government was slowly strangling the ability of committees to do their work. Certainly, they never left Parliament Hill, except on the rarest of occasions. Heaven forbid that Canadians would actually get a hands-on opportunity to talk to their own government.
Mostly it was going to be about tone and respect, and then you'll remember, Chair—it wasn't that long ago—that we went through the issue of the report from the Chief Electoral Officer regarding changes that he would recommend we make to the election laws, having reviewed and learned lessons from the election we had just had in 2015. It's a regular undertaking. We do it every year.
We were actually working very well together under your leadership, Chair. It's an in camera exercise, so I can't speak in too much detail, but it's certainly fair to say that we had a great esprit de corps and that we recognized that the election laws don't belong to the government, or the official opposition, or the third party, or independents. The election laws belong to everybody.
We were working our way through it. We were following a process that we've used before here, starting in other Parliaments. You can call it the “low-lying fruit process”. All it means is that where we can agree on things readily or with a minor change to wording, we would include that in a report and move on to the next item. We would go through those as quickly as we could. As soon as we got to an item where one of the caucuses or even one of the members said that they had a real problem with an item and it was going to give them real pause for concern, we would take that signal as meaning that it was not low-lying fruit and not easily agreeable, so we needed to set it aside. We had that second track.
It meant that when we got to those, a lot of the political give and take was yet to happen, but it's amazing how many things we could agree on that would then allow us to give an interim report to the House, which would then allow the government to consider the opinion of this committee on the changes recommended by the Chief Electoral Officer.
With the government having promised that they were going to treat committees with respect and give their work serious consideration in the development of policy and legislation, everything seemed to be going fine. Then I walked in one morning—I think it was a Thursday—at 11 o'clock, and within that hour, because the House usually starts at 10 o'clock, the government had dropped Bill C-33 on the floor. Now, Bill C-33 was about election laws. In and of itself, it's not a huge issue, other than the fact that some of the changes they wanted to make in Bill C-33 were items that either we were currently seized of or hadn't dealt with yet but were on our agenda to do.
Let's wait a minute. Let's have a look at this picture. The government says they're going to respect the work of committees. They're going to consider their work important input in the development of government policy.
Oh, I've just been advised that it's scheduled for debate in the House next Thursday. That should be fun.
Take the work we're doing. The government says they're going to listen to us, and then they drop this bill, which by its very existence is insulting to this committee, and they break their promise. How can you say on the one hand that you're going to respect what committees have to say and consider what they have to say in the development of policy and legislation and then turn around and drop a bill on the floor that deals with those very issues? The committee has not even finished with it and, in some cases, hasn't even started on it. Where's the respect in that?
To some of us, that was such an egregious action that it seized up the work of the committee. At that moment, we stopped reviewing the Chief Electoral Officer's recommendations, and for this simple reason: why bother? It would seem that, foolishly, all of us, including me, members of the Conservatives, the government members, anybody else who came by, independents who dropped by the committee, the Greens—I'll give you your Greens, Madam—the Bloc, the other independents—