—thank you—a minority report, a dissenting report. Those are actually two different things, but for the purposes of this we'll call it as one.
When you say “the Committee recommends” in the eleventh report, I'm going to agree. I was part of this report, from beginning to end, and everything that's in here.... This is not inconclusive. This is 10 and a half pages of recommendations.
I'm going to point out later, Chair, that where they couldn't come to an agreement, because there was such good will they said, “But we're going to look at this further. There are some other things we want to consider. We're going to come back to this. This is still an important issue.” What that meant was that there wasn't all-party agreement. It could be one opposition party or both, but the fact that there wasn't agreement meant it wasn't going in this report. That's how we agreed to approach it.
This report—which you chaired, Chair, and presented to the House, where it was accepted—will likely, and has already started to, effect change in the House. But it starts with everybody's agreement. That's a whole lot different from things we disagree on, which is most things. When we do agree, it's kind of given that we move it along. If we don't have any disagreement, let's move it along and get it implemented. We're all in agreement.
But what the government wants is for us to just set aside the fact that in the past, on these kinds of reviews, it was only when everyone agreed. They wanted us to set that aside and start having discussions. As we have discussions, there would be some things we agree on that would go in the report, and it would start to look like this one. If it ended there, and if that was all they were going to do—if they said, “We're not going to deal with these issues; we're not controversial,” or whatever, and they just carved those out in a way that we all agreed with—then again you would have a report that contained the recommendations of everyone.
But what the government wants is that, when we have a vote on a recommendation, if the motion carries.... The government has the majority of members on the committee. As long as they support a motion, it carries, 10 times out of 10. We don't have the numbers. The math is not there. In minority, it was a different world. A majority would be reached by different permutations of the parties and the members. But in this case, what the government wants is that this committee review everything and make decisions wherein the government majority wins 10 times out of 10. They win every single vote. No matter how good our arguments are, they win the vote, and that's the only thing that goes in the report. If the Conservatives move a motion and it fails, it's not in the report. If I move a motion, no matter how good my arguments are, if the government decides they don't want it, it's not in the report.
At the end of the day, it's called “the committee report”, because majority rules—basic democracy. But given the fact that we are in our various camps here, it's not just one against another to reach a majority; it's actually groups of us in our caucuses. We would end up with a report that the official opposition doesn't support and that the third party doesn't support. Only the government does. Yet the government would have the ability to hold up that report and say on their legislation, if it followed the recommendations—which it would, because why would the government members vote against something that wasn't going to find its way to legislation...? The government is controlling both procedures, the procedures of creating legislation and what happens here at the committee, which they also promised they weren't going to do. Members were going to be independent.
Let me tell you, I'm not going to name names, but if there were independent votes of the Liberal backbenches, I'm not so sure we'd be where we are in the process. That, however, is speculation on my part.
The ability to hold that report up matters. When the average citizen hears a government say that it respects committees and gives committees more resources to do work, and says that it is going to consider the work of committees important and that their input is considered by government, that citizen is going to consider the promise kept. The government holds up the report and says that the report says such-and-such, and look at that, our legislation says almost the same thing. Isn't that wonderful? Parliament is working so well. We have a majority report out of the committee, they did what we wanted them to do, they did it by the deadline we wanted them to meet, and we managed to pay so much respect and attention to their report that, lo and behold, if you look at our legislation, it reflects the hard work of that committee.
The problem is that such a procedure leaves the impression that we all agreed. Nobody then says, oh, sorry, I do have to say that there were two dissenting reports from the two opposition parties, that really the only people who supported the report were Liberals, but we just thought that, to be fair-minded, we would say that.
That's not going to happen. I didn't do it when I was a minister; I don't expect anybody else to. If I got a committee report that supported what I wanted to do, that's all I needed. As to the details of how it got there and who voted for it, when I'm a minister that's not my concern. My concern is that I need to have a committee report. I get one, and it says exactly what I was hoping it would say: surprise, surprise when you're in a big majority government.
I get this, and that's why it matters. The government could claim after the fact, when they're justifying stuff they have put into legislation, that it goes all the way back to the hard, non-partisan work that the committee did and that this just reflects their work, and they're so proud that they made committees relevant and were able to turn that t into legislation. The impression, without the government having to spin anything, is that the opposition is onside with these changes, because there's a majority report that says the committee believes such-and-such.
That's why it matters. That's why I suspect, Chair, that the only way they're going to get out of this mess...unless they're smart enough to take up the opposition on this idea or some other process that provides an off-ramp, that is not an off-ramp to surrender for the government but rather an off-ramp that leads to a process that will ultimately give them the deliberations, if not the answers, they were looking for. Ergo, while we still have the right to hold up the government through filibuster, that's why. I emphasize again, we're doing this 24-7, not because the opposition has set it up that way, but because the government made this a 24-7 filibuster. As a result of that, everything that happens in the House, and if things find their way into other committees, is all a result of the government.
But if they have to bring that final motion in...let's say they withdraw everything here and just throw their arms in the air and say we're going to the House, we're going to bring in a motion, and we're going to pick the things we really want.
You got that Wednesday thing, by the way, without a rule change. That needs to be emphasized. You got exactly what you wanted. You wanted a Wednesday Prime Minister question period. Your Prime Minister was clever enough to answer all the questions, therefore de facto creating a Wednesday Prime Minister's question period. We didn't have to change a single rule, and you didn't have to ram through a single change.