—but that would be the opposite of what he did.
He didn't do that. He came in and was very respectful. What I am pointing out, Chair, over and over, because it is so important, is that at the cornerstone of everything here is respect. It's respect for the tradition of how we've done things in this place. It's respect for what those who came before us went through and how they dealt with these kinds of changes. More than anything, it's respect for each other as members of Parliament, worthy of having an equal say in the rules as to how we make laws in this great country.
And we were treated that way. It didn't say for the “Liberal” members, although it benefited Liberals. It also benefited Conservatives and New Democrats. More importantly, it benefited the multitude of people around us, aside from our personal staff, who don't have a partisanship. Their job is just to help us do what we do, even when we do silly things like this.
In the very next paragraph, Chair, after the reference to Mr. LeBlanc's mandate letter, it says this—and these are our words, all of us. Again, this is the committee report. It could easily be just the government, with two dissenting reports attached, and I would still be correct in saying “the committee report”, but in this case I am emphasizing the fact that it is a unanimous consensus report that we all agree on and we all supported.
Doesn't that sound like a better world to be in than the one we're in here? This is more where I was in 2012, 2013, 2014, leading up to the election in 2015.
Here's what we said in our report, Chair, after we referenced Mr. LeBlanc's mandate:
In its approach to this study, the Committee attached importance to reporting back to the House in a timely manner any findings and recommendations that could result in improvements to the inclusivity and work-life balance for members, along with seeking improvements to the predictability, efficiency and modernization of the institution, all while taking into consideration the impact of changes on members’ constituents.
Now, what I find particularly interesting is that we as a committee chose to make a reference to “improvements to the predictability, efficiency and modernization of the institution”. That's exactly what the government says when it talks about its discussion paper, that it's all about predictability, efficiency and modernization, which are some of its favourite buzzwords. In the election, it used to be “accountability”, but not so much anymore.
I find so interesting the parallels of what we were asked to do, how we did it, what our end product was, looking at the eleventh report, versus what we have now. Again, I can't go into it, because I would be repeating, but it is fair for me to make a reference that this process, unlike the other one in which a discussion paper was dropped in the public domain towards the end of a constituency week with no fanfare, no attachment, and not even a heads-up to the other House leaders that it was coming or a follow-up discussion about what it means, followed—I believe Mr. Reid has done the math—within a couple of hours, by Mr. Simms, in the same fashion, dropping his motion into the public domain.
When we get to committee, obviously the first thing we want to do is establish how the decisions are going to be made. We're back to the alleyway to playing scrub again. How are we going to pick the teams?
The government has one file with a number of different pieces and two completely different processes. When the government follows the process that's consistent with what they ran on, and they treat the committee with the respect that they said they would, what happens? What usually happens when you offer respect? You get it back. And that's what happened. Mr. LeBlanc came in, read his mandate, asked us to undertake certain work, very respectfully, and within a matter of days we were on it.
In this process, however, we had something dropped in the middle of a constituency week without any context, with a motion from a committee member a couple of hours later indicating, all but dictating, what the government wanted to do with the discussion paper. The first thing that Mr. Reid does, as the critic for the official opposition, given the opportunity to have the floor, is put a motion that says, hey, before we do anything, we'd like a guarantee from the government that we're only going to do this by all-party agreement, that it will be by consensus, that we will agree to that.
It should have taken 60 seconds for the government to say, yes, of course that's how we're going to do it. We'd have had a quick vote. It would have been done and recorded. We'd have moved on, and be working toward a final product, just as this same committee did with the eleventh report.
Not only that, but as Mr. Reid began to get the idea that the government wasn't going to support this, he started to settle in to fill out the balance of the meeting with what we call, and I've referenced this before, “running the clock”, which means exactly what it does in sports. You just keep doing what you're doing so the clock runs out and others can't do anything else in that time: run the clock.
That's what Mr. Reid thought he now had to do. That was bad enough, having now realized that the government was not going to agree that, as in the past, it would be by consensus, but when the allotted one o'clock adjournment of the meeting came along, lo and behold, Mr. Reid found out that the government had a further surprise for us—a sneak attack. Mr. Reid may have been ready for up to two hours of time to talk in order to have one of those little battles I talked about at committee that happen from time to time, and that don't impact everything else that's going on. That's what we thought was going on there.
Then we got to one or two minutes after one o'clock. Somebody asked you, Chair, if we shouldn't be adjourned, to which you indicated there was not majority support for rising, and therefore the meeting would continue. That was two weeks ago Tuesday, and we're still on that date.
All of this has been because the government won't agree to what is the usual practice in a major review of Standing Orders—that is, if we don't all agree, it doesn't go in the report and it doesn't go to the House.
What a difference. It's the same government, but a different House leader. I was a House leader once for the third party at Queen's Park. You get to make a lot of decisions when you're the House leader, but if there are some decisions with your political life to make on your own, you'd better be checking from on high before you go telling the government House leader what deal you're about to cut. I get that it's not just the personality, and I'm not trying to make it about that, but I am pointing to the difference in what happened and the approach. I can't go too far on this, because we were not only in camera, we were, like, pens down. We were having a totally 100% informal, set this aside....
We had the minister in here the other day, and a few of us thought, okay, here's our chance, we have the minister in here. Do you remember how it unfolded, Chair? You'll stop me if I'm telling tales out of school that I shouldn't be from a confidential meeting, but we agreed to just set everything down and have a quick chat with the minister to see if she could help, because she was in a position to do something that could get us out of the logjam.
I cannot go into the cut and thrust. I won't attempt to. I won't play any games like that. I'll just say that it was not productive. I only say that—and that's all I'm going to say about it—as a comparison to what happened when Mr. LeBlanc came in when he was in public and we could have done anything we wanted to embarrass him. We had the cameras going. It was all there to us. But we didn't do that. That's not what we did.
I am so glad that we have this report to point to, to show the Canadian people the difference between how we deal with two parts of the same subject, one with respect and collegiality, which is what they ran on, and the other was just borderline political thuggery. We're still in the middle of that fight. What the heck happened? What happened in such a short period of time?
Maybe it's time to bring Mr. LeBlanc back, at least into the discussions at the House leader's office or something, because this is nuts. This is not where we need to be. This is not where we were the last time. For the life of me, I really don't know why we're here and why we aren't sitting down and finding a way out of this that we can all respect, because they are our collective rules of the House, not the government's. You can run on something, but that doesn't necessarily mean that word for word.... I mean, would you run on a platform that said, “MPs will never be able to speak again after we form government”? If you somehow still formed government, do you think you'd have the right to implement that? It would be an interesting debate. It would probably get about as far as this thing's going, I don't know.
I know that's silly, but this whole thing is so silly, it really is, and non-productive. I don't get where it goes. This is the underlying thing. I usually can figure out to some degree what the heck is going on. I have no idea, except I know that the government wants their way or the highway. We know from past experience how well that works, we know what kind of Parliament we end up with, and we know how Canadians feel about that.
Moving on, Chair, under discussion on page 2 in that report, we state—remember that “we” when I read this, because this is our report that we issued to the House—the following:
The right of the House to establish its own rules and manage its internal affairs is among the most important rights claimed over centuries of parliamentary tradition and possessed by the House of Commons. The House can set and change its work practices, rules and procedures, along with the resources and benefits provided to members, in order to ensure that these retain as their purpose to enable and support members in carrying out their functions as representatives and legislators.
That was us describing our collective ownership of our rules and procedures.
We didn't say in our report—