Procedure and House Affairs Committee on March 21st, 2017

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

Presenting a discussion paper and laying some cards out there and putting ideas on the table—are those things perceived as threats? Or is that being maybe upfront and more transparent as to some of the ideas that might be in the House leader's mind? And could Mr. Simms' motion, some ideas he shares, not be called being transparent?

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Yes. I think I did say to you that things really went a little differently when the motion came out a couple of hours later, again, in the absence of any discussion.

Remember how we got here. I've said this much publicly because it's as far as I can go. I can't go any further. When we were in camera doing the work of the Chief Electoral Officer, and Mr. Simms' motion was there in front of us, and the government said it wanted to move a motion to go public.... We were in camera. I said, can you give us a heads-up as to what's going on? No.

So now we're going out in public. We know this motion is there. All of a sudden, we figure it out that it does look as though this is some kind of an attack. Sure enough, the motion is coming just like that. When we, the official opposition, did put the amendment that it only be by consensus, the next thing we know, you go to the nuclear option and we go from a filibuster contained to a committee twice a week for a total of four hours into 24 hours seven days a week on the brink of a constituency week. That is not the same approach or the same feelings Mr. LeBlanc left us with by the time he was done.

Yes, you could call it transparency. You could have held it off to the Monday and made it all a sneak attack, but you had to cover it with some kind of what could be looked at as fair play. That way you could point to a procedure and say that you were fair-minded, you did this and this, and you.... Boy, to then link that document with the process you've all but foisted on us and say, “aren't we great for transparency?” is a bit of a stretch.

Again, if it had been just a discussion paper, had it come up at the meeting.... Was it a Tuesday? I'm trying to remember. I think it was a Tuesday, the first committee meeting back from the constituency week, and had you said, “look, you know that discussion paper...”. Or normally what would happen is that, in many cases, Mr. Chan, who often takes the lead on some of the issues for the government, would quickly be coming before the meeting—or even contacting Tyler—and asking if it could be arranged for him to talk to Dave for 10 minutes before the meeting starts, and the same thing with Mr. Richards. That's pretty common. Arnold would do that regularly.

It's to give us a heads-up so that we wouldn't get our backs up and suddenly go, “wait a minute. What's this?”, and start building up whatever defensive walls we have, recognizing that in a battle, we are the weaker partner. We are the weaker participants. It did matter.

What really threw me was when Mr. Chan would not give me the reason why we were going to go public. I'm never opposed to going public unless it's on personnel matters, or all the legal reasons why we should, and what we've agreed on with our own motion here. But when you won't tell us why, and we know there's a discussion paper that was dropped out there and there's a motion that dictates how the report is going to be reviewed and done and puts a deadline on it, and you refuse to even give a simple indication in camera that “we're going to deal with Scotty's motion, Dave”, or just.... There was nothing.

He was just looking at me. He was feeling a little bit embarrassed, I think, and would not or could not say a word about why he was making this motion. Let me tell you this. Any time the government makes a motion and doesn't give you the reason why it's making a motion, there's a good reason for the opposition to suddenly get suspicious. Otherwise, they're not doing their job right.

[Todd Doherty, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

Mr. Chair, just to that point....

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Mr. Doherty.

[Todd Doherty, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

Just to that point, Mr. Christopherson, I think the other part for us as well is that if this truly was a discussion paper, which is what it has been touted as, and we were all equals in the House, then why is it released to the media? Why are we having this discussion through the media, and then a couple of days later the motion was—

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

It was a couple of hours.

[Todd Doherty, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

A couple of hours later the motion was tabled. That's where the trust factor is. What parliamentary trick or parlour trick are we looking at right now, right? That's what really gets things up in arms. We make this big announcement. We have media, a presser, and everybody is there while we're laying out this discussion paper. It's not really a discussion paper. Essentially, you are laying out the government's position on how you're going to reform the House. Then, hours later, Mr. Simms tables the motion to study it and make recommendations.

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

Which the government has in the committee....

[Todd Doherty, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

Sorry, Chair. I just wanted to give him a break.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Okay.

Mr. Christopherson.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

I appreciate that, Chair.

I enjoyed the exchange, but I do hope that it makes it a little easier for the member to understand where we're coming from, the process that led us to this point, and then the overreaction on the part of the government when they refused to adjourn. I hadn't seen that since Bill C-23 with Harper, when we thought I was going to do a two-hour filibuster, adjourn, and then come back the next day. They said, “No, you're not leaving.” Suddenly, not only was I in a filibuster, but I was in a filibuster that I wasn't even prepared for. It's a real sneak attack by a majority government that has all the marbles anyway to conduct themselves in that fashion, but then, for the government to do exactly that, in only the second time I've ever seen it, whoa.

I want to end in terms of responding to Ruby by saying that it is possible, in a different.... I'm not guaranteeing anything. I'm just saying that I think it is plausible, even possible, that had there been a different approach, we may still have the same disagreements, but we wouldn't be here at five minutes to eleven on a Wednesday night, spinning our wheels, which is really where we are. It's quite possible, because a different approach got a different result on at least two other occasions, and it wasn't like we didn't do work: we got two good reports. Both of them, I think, were only the first steps. There's more work to be done.

Again, you can take in context what previous parliaments said about this very issue, which was that they couldn't get everything through that they wanted to either, but for everything that they did put in, everyone agreed to it. They said, “It made Parliament work better and we urge you to follow that same sort of model.” It's not black and white, but when you add it all up, I don't think it's too difficult to understand how the opposition benches found ourselves where we are now. I would remind the honourable member, in my last comment on this before I return to my prepared remarks, that we could still do it.

The letter that I've spent maybe a couple of hours on is another attempt by the opposition to offer the government an exit strategy from their own mess. The only reason we're bothering is that we care about these things. If it had been a piece of legislation where you were going in a direction that we didn't agree with, whether you ran on it or not, we would just leave you there twisting.

That would be your problem, not ours. We'd say that we don't agree with you ideologically and we're not about to change, and it would be cut, dried, done, and over, but here we are, making a suggestion, and it's not a suggestion loaded in favour of the opposition. It's the process that Mr. Chrétien followed when he wanted to change the rules.

I won't go into the details, Chair—that wouldn't be right—but Mr. Richards and I have had numerous off-line private discussions with Mr. Simms. I think it's fair to say that for the most part we were the ones making recommendations and Mr. Simms was considering them. We would have a little back-and-forth and, at an appropriate time, he would say, “Okay, I hear what's being said.” Then he would have to go and talk to the folks who he would have to talk to, just like Mr. Richards and I would have to do before we could conclude a final, absolute agreement.

It's hard to make us out as the ones who are being the most difficult. I'm not saying that I'm not being difficult. I am being difficult.

[An hon. member]

You're not.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

I am, deliberately—

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

—as opposed to my usual natural character.

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

You have no choice.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Yes, with no choice.

We'd like to get back on track. Again, I would offer on behalf of my caucus, on behalf of my House leader and leader—I have certain latitudes here—that I am prepared to enter into discussions with the government, as is my House leader, at any time the government would like, to try to find a resolve. We don't want a win, really; we'd rather have a resolve, because a resolve is a win for all of us. It gets us back to where we were. I leave that as a standing request.

Again, how unfair are we being when the letter that both our House leaders signed this afternoon and issued to your government House leader was a proposal to get us out of this mess, a proposal that Mr. Chrétien used? How much more bending over backwards do you want us to do here when we didn't create the problem?

We're still trying to be friendly, but it is maddening when I can't figure out the politics of it, their original politics of getting it through, of them saying, “They'll start to run out of steam after a few days, the media will turn on them, they're obstructionist, and by the time we come back from constituency week it should be over, we'll get what we want, we'll forget about all of this, and that gives us the power to be as ready as we feel we need to be for the October 2019 general election.” That might make sense if it worked, but once it didn't work, you'd think somebody would have called it and said, “That didn't work, and in fact things are pretty bad right now, so what are we going to do?”

Again, that's what I thought you were going to do during the constituency week. You had a whole week. We were ready. We were ready to go 24-7. We had our rosters lined up—they still are—our volunteers lined up, our staffing lined up, and our speaking notes lined up. We were ready to go. I won't say we were happy about it, but we were ready, and we were ready to give up our constituency time to do it, which is a heck of a price.

I don't know what they did. They sure didn't think. They had nothing to offer. We rolled around to Monday. On Monday at noon, we reconvened. Again, I took my deep breath, ready to start.

You took a deeper breath and went quicker, Chair, and suspended the meeting. You gave us until Wednesday at 4 o'clock, building in time for negotiations to happen and a deal to be reached, and then for us go to our respective caucuses, come back here for 4 o'clock, and have it all sewn up and done. The very next day, at 11 o'clock on Thursday—which would be tomorrow—we could have been under way. We had one meeting. You took a whole week, did nothing, prepared nothing, thought through nothing, suspended the committee so you could do something, met with the House leaders once, which went south fast, and here we be.

That's what's maddening. I don't get the politics. I do not understand how the government thinks that this serves them well, especially when it's a file.... I'll tell you, Jack would say they have such a big circle around this stain that it's unbelievable that they're doing this. It's true. That's what he used to say. You don't do anything that reflects on something you've done badly. He called it “circling the stain”. Not only does this not make any sense, it especially doesn't make sense on this file, of all the files.

Is there a file going worse? I suppose, but you'd have to give it some thought. At best, they might be a tie, because this is acute politics. Believe it or not, there are more and more people who, when they become aware of this, start to watch and start to follow it because they're curious. This matters. They know this matters. How can that be helpful to the government? When we return tomorrow in another hour, I'm going to start bringing to the attention of government members how well this is playing, how well it's being received, and what is being said. That's not going to be helpful, not one bit.

Anyway, that's my response to those interjections.

I believe that I was still working my way through this document. Yes, I was, because I was talking about the chambers. Again, to refresh all our memories, our report said:

At this time, the Committee does not have any recommendations to make regarding implementing a parallel debating chamber for the House; it may revisit this topic in a future study.

Again, this was an interesting lesson in parliamentary democracy, because this is something the mother ship uses in London. I had no idea, and I don't think very many other members did, until it came up at the committee. First of all, it was surprising. Who ever heard of two chambers? The chamber is sacrosanct. There is only one chamber. You have a lot of other things, but only one chamber.

It turns out that they have two that run parallel. What's it for? Efficiency, so that more things can be done. In particular, Chair, they focused a lot.... I stand to be corrected. We didn't do a lot of study on it, and I did no further independent study because we weren't going any further, but the concept was fascinating.

To the best of my knowledge, a lot of the work they do there is around private members' business. I mentioned earlier how difficult it is to find time in the House; I was on the House management committee. In order to accommodate that, because they have all those members and they have that tiny chamber and they can't all go in there.... There is not even standing room for all the members.

If I remember correctly, when we got that tour, Alexandra, wasn't it Churchill, when they wanted to build a bigger one, who said no, that he wanted it replicated like the old one? It would be the old way. You go there and it's a pretty small chamber. They have some 600 members. They don't all fit in even when they stand.

What is it, Alexandra...?

[Alexandra Mendes, Liberal, Brossard—Saint-Lambert, QC]

They have 650 and they can seat only 280.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

There you go. She has the numbers right at her fingertips. That's beautiful.

[Alexandra Mendes, Liberal, Brossard—Saint-Lambert, QC]

I pay attention.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Yes, you do. I know. That's why you're dangerous. I have to keep an eye on you, you know.

They identified this growing problem that not only could they not physically fit in the House, but that if they had time constraints like ours, they obviously wouldn't have enough time for members. They asked themselves what they could do to change things that they could all agree on, and that would give backbenchers, say, more of an opportunity to talk about the issues, to present things to the House, or to speak longer. They came up with this novel idea of a parallel House.

It has much reduced powers compared to the House, only a shadow of the powers, but it is recognized as “the Chamber”, and debate that happens there is considered as formal and as important as anything that happens in the House of Commons. We played with that a bit to see where it got us, but for a whole bunch of reasons, especially since it was a whole new concept, it was clear that we weren't.... As for what it would have done, I suspect that we probably could have come up with one or two suggestions in that area to be looked at and thus laid the framework for further discussions for the House leaders to talk about. We would have been very careful about creating a second chamber. We would have erred on the side of caution, but we probably could have found a framework that we could have agreed on. We could have launched it from our dock and sent it off to possibly have life as it was looked at further.

We still might. I don't recall any caucus saying—I can't go too far with this because it was in camera—that it was a horrible idea, that they were formally and ideologically opposed to this, and that they knew they were going to be against any further recommendations. I don't think there was any of that. I think it was a matter of us taking the time it would have taken to learn enough, consider all the variables, and try to come up with some uses that we might agree on, which we would ask our House leaders to reflect further on. It would have taken so much time that it would have affected our timeliness. Remember that at the time we were being very respectful of the government's time frame. I know it sounds shocking that the opposition, especially the likes of me, would be respectful of what the government wanted—

[An hon. member]

Say it isn't so.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

—but we were, because that's what this committee does. That's the kind of work we do. Any approach different from that, in my experience, is not worthy of anyone who has the privilege of taking one of these seats. It wasn't a big discussion. It's not like the opposition wanted a whole lot of thanks for being so open-minded or that we were running.... This was a matter of course. There's a lot of work here. For anybody who's been around for a while, there's more than enough politics. If you want your headline and your clip, you're going to get your chance. Just wait long enough, it'll come. It's like public accounts; you don't need to go searching for stuff. There's enough legitimate work there that you're holding someone to account. That part of it is going to be taken care of. That was not a factor. It was such a different world compared to where we are now.

Again, we said, and it's reflected.... If this report were only the government's, you wouldn't dare say that “it may revisit this”. You wouldn't use that kind of language because it wasn't a co-operative report. It would have been written very much as what the government wanted, with no niceties involved anymore. If the government is using their majority to ram a report through this committee, then it's going to be pretty sterile, and it's probably going to say very starkly exactly what the government means and very clearly what they don't mean. It's going to go boom, boom, boom, and that's it.

Instead, even when we don't agree, even when we've acknowledged that we weren't able to find common cause in the first go-round, we say things like we “may revisit this...in a future study”. It's not a throwaway line meant to make it go away. We meant it. I could be wrong, but I think Mr. Graham shared the same sort of keen interest in this idea of a dual chamber. When you start to stand back, again, some of the things the government wants to achieve are very notable.

One of the things they talk about consistently is giving ordinary members, backbenchers—meaning non-cabinet members—an opportunity to have their say, to be more engaged, to be more meaningful. I'm all for that. How do we go about that, though? There may be something still here in this notion of a parallel debating chamber. Maybe, but we're never going to get to it with this attitude, with government there and opposition over here. It's a good thing we've got the “two swords' length”.

[An hon. member]

[Inaudible—Editor]

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

What's that?