Procedure and House Affairs Committee on March 21st, 2017

[John Aldag, Liberal, Cloverdale—Langley City, BC]

May I take over?

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

I was building on all the different things that you have going on here. The Speaker is supposed to divide omnibus bills.

I remember where I was going.

I'm trying to illustrate here, by means of a parallel to the amendment that I proposed, how it takes a long time. I had this idea that we should be electing the Speakers this way. My primary reason was not to save the time, actually, involved in Speaker elections. It was the idea that you're more likely to get a consensus candidate under a preferential system, someone from the middle of the road. For the same reason that it doesn't work in a federal election—you'll always elect the guy in the middle of the road, which means the Liberal—the same thing happens here. You elect a person who's acceptable to all parties. That's the virtue of it.

I had to design the thing, so I came up with a concept. I actually wrote a memo to the Prime Minister, saying there was no point in my pursuing this if he wasn't going to support it, so here was my suggestion and what did he think. I dropped it off with his chief of staff, Ray Novak, and it made its way up to the PM who got around to it and eventually got back to me. Then I took it, went off, and started writing.

It went from being about as long as this paragraph I've been dwelling upon regarding the Speaker and omnibus bills, to then designing a section of Standing Orders. It's now in the Standing Orders, so you can take a look in there and see it. It's about a page long to deal with all the different things you have to deal with. It deals with multiple ballots. You still have to keep in the parts of the Standing Orders that relate to people who forget to remove their name from the ballot—we're all candidates, so you have to withdraw your name as candidate—so it deals with that.

The whole drafting process took me about a month. Frankly, I came very close to not making the deadline because of all the different unexpected wrinkles that were involved in what had appeared conceptually to be a very simple change and what ultimately looked like a relatively simple change when you saw it on paper. There was nothing straightforward about it. Then it went off to a committee, to this committee. I recused myself from my seat on the committee for the purposes of that discussion. I sat as a witness and presented why I thought it was a good idea.

The committee came back with a report. Interestingly enough, I think it was actually the first time this has happened where.... It came before this committee because it changed the Standing Orders. That's where changes to the Standing Orders go. Even if they're initiated as a matter of private member's business, they come to this committee. If it had been a private member's bill, it would have gone to some other committee. It came here and the committee did something that I don't think it's ever done before, which is that it said it was not endorsing and not rejecting; it simply heard my testimony. I can't remember if the report had some other considerations in it, but it didn't actually endorse or oppose.

Then it went to the House, and we had a vote in I think the last week of the sitting. I'd wanted to get every member from my party to vote in favour of it. That didn't happen. A significant number—I think about 25 or 26—did not, which meant we didn't have a majority large enough to push it through without the support of other parties, but it did get the support of many NDP members. I can't remember how many, but not the full caucus. They'd had a free vote on it. I think it was the only completely free vote they had in that Parliament. I think, but I'm not sure. It got the support of most, but not all, Liberal MPs. Mauril Bélanger voted against it, Mauril whom I respect enormously. The late Mauril Bélanger, as you know, had been someone who'd been a potential candidate for Speaker and he had some thoughts that were, if you will, idiosyncratic to him, but they were thoughtful and intelligent as was everything he did. He voted against it, but the rest of the Liberals voted in favour of it. It had a version of all-party support.

I was actually using this to illustrate one point, and I realize I've actually illustrated another.

The primary point was to illustrate how long it takes to get something as apparently simple as changing the manner in which the Speaker is elected through. It was not a quick process. The committee part of the process wasn't quick. The drafting part of the process, which in my case was entirely done by myself—it was entirely extra-parliamentary, there were no other parliamentarians involved in it—was not quick. It doesn't get faster when you add more chefs to the kitchen, as everybody knows. I would have had trouble doing just that within this deadline.

The second point to be made based on that story comes back to the theme of unanimity. There wasn't unanimous support in the House for this amendment. In the end, there was all-party support.

In theory, the government could have taken the approach this government appears to be taking, which is, we'll produce changes, use our majority and force them through, and have a tight deadline for it. We'll bring them into the House and have a vote on party lines. That could have happened in that case, but it didn't happen.

I think there can be merit in individual members bringing forward items for which there is not a consensus but for which there is majority support across party lines, and introducing them in the House of Commons. As I say, I've done it myself. That is so different from the approach being taken here. The amendment I propose would bring us back to a situation in which that would prevail. That is the reason for the motion.

In regard to the idea that we can rush to conclusions on things, let's talk about electronic voting. Electricity is not new. Electronic voting, conceptually anyway, has a long history. It was discussed, in the case of the Canadian House of Commons, as far back as the mid-1980s. Thirty odd years ago, the McGrath committee recommenced electronic voting. This is cited by the government House leader in her discussion paper. It recommended electronic voting. The Special Committee on the Modernization and Improvement of the Procedures of the House of Commons, in 2003, made a similar recommendation. I don't know if the recommendations were similar, but they weren't rushed into place. Creating a situation in which we could have electronic voting may have merit, I think actually a lot of merit, but again, it's not something that you can rush to a conclusion on. In fact, if you read carefully, you realize that what is being proposed here is not necessarily one form of electronic voting, it's a discussion about many different kinds of electronic voting. How we would choose one of these in a limited amount of time is difficult for me to see.

In this case, the minister makes reference to a number of sources, so it's more helpful than the discussion about dividing up omnibus bills. She says, “The United States House of Representatives has implemented an electronic voting system, as has the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly.” I don't know how the Scots and Welsh do it, but in the U.S. House of Representatives, you don't even have to turn up in the house. It's clear that she is at least considering that as a possibility because she says, “Ringing of the bells and the taking of recorded divisions is a time-consuming exercise.”

The taking of recorded divisions is overcome by the pressing of a personalized button on your desk and then going to the next vote. But ringing the bells, that's summoning you to the chamber. There seems to be an assumption we'd move to votes without having a ringing of the bells, without that 15 minutes on Mondays.... Sorry, I can't remember if it's 15 minutes on Mondays and 30 minutes the rest of the week or the other way around. At any rate, it's without that time. That seems to be assuming you could vote from wherever.

How wherever is wherever? Is it with an electronic card as they do in the States, with that little ID card you insert and then vote with?

There's more than one electronic way of voting. You need a simple push button on your desk, separately wired like a kind of scoreboard. Frankly, you need technology that is quite literally a century old. They could have done it in 1917 as well as in 2017. I'm not even sure you need electronics; you could probably do it with a system of bells. My steampunk mind is working here. In Downton Abbey they pull a cord, a bell rings, and you can see which room it came from. It's not so different from that, but it does assume you're in your seat.

There's actually a debate to be had over what you mean by electronic voting. The minister is at least hinting that she is open to both of our systems. I actually don't know, because I haven't read the reports, whether the McGrath Committee in 1985 favoured that kind of electronic voting, where you aren't even there, or electronic voting from your seat.

As for the special committee in 2003, again, I don't know. Actually, their report is online and my omnicompetent legislative assistant Dennis Laurie has put together a document with links to it, but I have not had the opportunity to find that particular recommendation—it was one of their six reports—and look through it.

But there you go—there's more than one way of doing it. Electronic voting is not necessarily a bad idea, and the House leader is entirely right that “Given that the House is to move to West Block in 2018, and while Centre Block is being refurbished, this would be an excellent opportunity to implement a system of electronic voting as a pilot.” She's right. I agree with that.

Here's a question, to give you an example. Given the time constraints we have between now and June 2—or our real deadline, which is before June 2, sometime in May—how do we determine whether we need to rush to get this through? Maybe they're at the point now where they're going to be installing the desks soon and setting up the apparatus for electronic voting depending on what we say, and it is something that needs to be rushed, or maybe not. Maybe, if we have another year, we could deal with this. I have no idea.

Do we make this an expedited item? My suspicion is that here, of all items, is one that is unlikely to produce a great deal of dissension. Here is one that just stands out as being something on which there's been consensus in the past. We had it with that all-party committee in 2003, which made all its recommendations based on unanimous consent.

Notwithstanding my colleague Mr. Christopherson's enthusiasm for circulating around the House and meeting other members during votes for the Speaker, I think he will agree with me that all-night voting sessions—where we go through one amendment after another to a piece of legislation, as we did with the back-to-work legislation in June 2011—are not a great time for kibitzing with others. You're stuck in your seat. This would reduce the amount of time there.

By the way, it would do so in a way that happens to fit in with the government's agenda of speeding things up and depriving the opposition of tools that can be used to slow things down. It might actually, nonetheless, be in a manner that we would all find reasonable and that could get all-party support. That is meaningful. There you are. There's something sitting right there that we could all agree to, and here we are instead, trying to avoid coming to an agreement.

Looking through her report, I see other areas that are more problematic. I'm looking now to question period. It seems appropriate to address it as we are just moving into question period right now, where I anticipate that the hearings of this committee will be the subject of questions. That seems like a reasonable guess.

There's a little bit of rhetoric here, but then we get on to the substance of what the government is proposing. The discussion paper says:

Question Period is where the Government is held to account for its policies and for the conduct of Ministers. The Government committed to reform Question Period so that all Ministers, including the Prime Minister, are held to greater account.

This is all rhetoric so far:

Reforms to Question Period could include instituting a Prime Minister's Questions time, as is done in Britain, and could also include lengthening the time allotted for questions and answers.

These are two separate topics. The Prime Minister's question time and changing the time allotted for questions and answers are separate items.

It goes on to deal with written questions. I want to stop there for a second and talk about the time allotted for questions and answers.

Late show questions used to take the form of a brief question and a brief answer. If memory serves, it was a four-minute question and a four-minute answer at the end of adjournment proceedings on some issue about which an MP said that he or she had not received an adequate answer. The assumption made was that the reason these adjournment proceedings exist at all is that if there were more time, issues for which they could not get a decent answer in 35 seconds, they could get a decent answer for in four minutes.

But what has happened?

This was the status quo when I arrived in 2000. The member would arrive, make his little speech about what was wrong with the government's policy and probably about how evasive the government was. Then not the minister but the parliamentary secretary would stand up and read a prepared answer.

You're a former parliamentary secretary, Mr. Chair, so you know how this works. You aren't actually designing the policy. You have to read the policy. You can't do it on the fly—and that's not a prudent practice for ministers either—and you really can't say “the government”, because you're not a member of cabinet, so all you can do is say, “Here's the response that was prepared for me.”

I do remember once getting up back in those days and asking a question to Larry McCormick. He was a great guy, a Liberal MP who was from a riding to my west and then they merged our ridings and I had to run against him. I was asking a question, and in the four-minute ask I moved from the narrow, original subject matter to something else. He said, “I came prepared to answer the question that I thought Mr. Reid was going to ask based on the question he asked in the House, and now I can't answer the stuff that I don't have notes for, because I have to answer with what's given to me.”

I thought it was a very charmingly honest answer. “I'm not the minister. I can't just invent something here. I wish he'd told me.”

Here's how we would try to adjust and improve on this. Back during that period, which I'm beginning to make sound like a golden age and I don't mean to, in the Chrétien government when the special committee was reporting on changes to the Standing Orders, it reported that we should make a change to the late show question. Instead of it being a four-minute question and a four-minute answer, it would be a four-minute question and a four-minute answer and then one minute of rebuttal or further commentary from the MP and a further minute from the parliamentary secretary, which allowed for a little bit of freedom. It's not as much time as you get in a four-minute question, but it allows you to stand up and say, “You didn't deal with this part of my question”.

The parliamentary secretary, while he was no freer than he had previously been to say, “Here's how I will use my own discretion to deal with it”, could say, “All right, let me deal with that”. It allowed for a somewhat freer discussion. I do not mean to suggest that this was utopia. The late show is still a largely scripted event, but it's better than it was previously.

I had the great honour of asking the very first question under the new rule. That rule was adopted as a one-off based on a consensus of all parties on that committee. They have something that they can go on in the time allotted. There is no panacea, and there's no single way of doing this. You could change the time. It's only length. I agree that making them shorter would be very problematic. Making them longer, perhaps....

I remember an experience that is germane. I used to live in Australia, as I think many of you may know. On one occasion in the 1990s, I was driving from Sydney to a place in the New England highlands. There's a part of New South Wales that is called New England. There's a university, the University of New England, there. That detail is very confusing. When many people think New England, they think of the northeastern part of the United States, but there is a New England in Australia.

Anyway, I was going there to go through the university's archives to look for information about the New England separatist movement. In the 1960s, there had been a movement for New England to separate from the rest of the state of New South Wales and become a separate state of Australia. The New South Wales government actually held a referendum to facilitate this, but ultimately the referendum failed, largely because of the inclusion of the city of Newcastle on the coast. This was really an inland, rural rebellion against urban-centred state government.

Anyway, I was on my way to do some research in the archives. The materials of the New England separatist movement had been put into the archives at the university, so up I went to take a look at them. You have to drive up a big escarpment and at the top of the escarpment is a big plain. As I was driving up the escarpment, the number of radio stations I had the opportunity to pick up on my car radio diminished. They diminished to the point where the only station I could pick up was the live broadcast of the debates from the Australian Senate.

It just happened to be question period in the Australian Senate, where they, as I recall, have two minutes for questions and two minutes for answers. You might think this would lead to more substantive questions and more substantive answers. I regret to say that in the particular round of questions I heard—which were about Australian natural resources policy, something completely out of my expertise, and therefore, I'm in no position to say who was right and who was wrong—a minister responding to a question started his response by saying, and there's obviously no rule in Australia about addressing the Speaker, “You are just pathetic.”

The two-minute questions and answers had not automatically translated, all other things being equal, into greater decorum, I regret to say, but that doesn't mean there isn't merit to discussing it. It means we want to look at examples like the Australians, the New Zealanders, the Brits, and so on, about the questions. It might be that questions should be different in length from supplementals. That seems like a reasonable possibility. It's one that is actually incorporated into late show questions, where a one-minute snapper round comes after the four-minute question and four-minute set piece answer.

Another possibility.... This is from a different trip, one with this committee. In 2005, we travelled to Australia and also to New Zealand. We were examining electoral reform at the time. We travelled to those two countries and had the opportunity to attend question period in the New Zealand House of Representatives. We sat up in the gallery reserved for visitors, and we were introduced in the same way that visitors are introduced to us in our House. We stood up and received applause. It was very nice.

We got to watch their question period and they have a very interesting system in which a lottery is conducted to determine the topics that will be up for debate in question period. The lottery determines what will come first. In the first round of questions.... Because they have a multi-member proportional system, they have more parties than we do. They have maybe five parties or a party status of six. I can't remember and this is historical information. It's some number greater than the number we had back in 2005. They have a different number of seats and the number of questions, as with us, is allocated differently for each party.

You have the equivalent of our leader's round where you get a larger number of questions for the main opposition party, and then a smaller number for the next opposition party, and then it goes around, but they all act on the same topic. If, as was the case when we were there, the topic is fisheries, it is not appropriate for me to stand up—In fact, I think I would be ruled out of order if I stood up—as Leader of the Opposition or as an MP, and proceed to ask a question about agriculture, but it can be anything within fisheries.

I think the way it's divided up is by departmental responsibility. I'm not sure of that, but I think that's essentially how it works. There's a first round, second round, third round, and so on.

First to go is the first opposition party. Let's say it's the Labour Party, and then you go to the National Party, and then to whoever comes next, with diminishing amounts of time. You complete the questions on fisheries, then you come back to deal with the next subject, which might be natural resources.

Okay, so it—

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Can you tie this to your amendment?

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

It does come up.

I'll give you the overarching theme that I'm getting at here. The change is complicated for me to explain because it is inherently a multi-faceted change to the status quo. It may be good or it may be bad, but it's not something that could be dealt with rapidly. It's not something that can be dealt with by merely looking at one example. I'm giving two examples from my own experience; others who have attended the sittings of other jurisdictions have different reports to give.

I'm a comparative historian by training, and this is how I approach everything. When I looked at the issue of the potential partition of Quebec upon secession, I looked at other jurisdictions and how they dealt with it, for good or ill. The illustration I gave was what seemed to be the least bad and the best solution with no separation, no need for petition, an intact Quebec, and an intact Canada, obviously.

However, there's an example of a Swiss canton from which a part succeeded. It was the Jura canton and its separation from the canton of Bern in the late 1970s. Another example, which partitioned Northern Ireland from the rest of the country of Ireland, was an example of what not to do. I went through that and there were a number of other examples that I looked at.

I think the same thing ought to happen when you're dealing with these things. It's difficult to do a comparative study of all subjects at the same time. If you're just talking question period, it is possible, but it's not possible to do it with the deadline proposed by Mr. Simms. It's possible to devote several months to it, and it might be something that would yield a meaningful improvement.

There are many complaints, some not justified, some very much justified, about the nature of our question period, although I have to say that on the whole it has been getting better. There's a secular trend for it to get better over time in terms of decorum—decorum is the main thing we focus on—compared with where it was when I first arrived here. If the stories are to be believed about what it was like in Sir John A. Macdonald's day, it was a good deal worse, including people coming in drunk and people throwing things at each other. Some Parliaments still do that. I'm told that they bring bags of shoes into the parliament in Iraq, people rushing the chair and so on. It has been better over time. It's actually a long-term secular trend.

The point to be made here, relating back to New Zealand, is that this is a complicated matter. This is a matter that cannot be dealt with in the proposed time frame. While question period is almost certainly one of the items we'd want to discuss, and is potentially, depending on the direction that the government is willing to go, one in which we can find consensus, I would submit that it is inconceivable that we would come to a consensus that does more than a very tiny amount of change if we stick with this deadline.

That's if it were the only item we were discussing on its own, but of course, it is not the only item we are discussing. There are numerous other items. That's the issue of the length of time.

I also went on to show that you could look at things like.... It's not mentioned here, but seeing as the ministers are from all over, you could look at the idea of rotating questions, as they do in New Zealand.

By the way, although I thought that was good in some respects, it did lead to some peculiarities, and it did not stop ill-tempered, ill-advised commentary. One parliamentarian, a man named Winston Peters, stood up and gave what I thought was an outrageous statement. It was quite an offensive gay-baiting statement in the question he asked. It's hard to get that stuff out of parliamentary life.

In all fairness, I don't think the minister is suggesting that what she has put forward here is utopia. She merely suggests that it's an improvement. I happen to think that utopian changes should be avoided at all costs. We are all about incrementalism in the way we deal with our Standing Orders and rules. We are evolutionists, not revolutionists. We do well to methodically work things through. I think, when it comes to this, that is the spirit that she too is imparting.

Let me turn to the Prime Minister's question time as done in Britain. I'm not sure whether Britain is the only jurisdiction that does this in the Commonwealth; I actually don't know.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Scotland does.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Does Scotland have it as well? Okay. I don't know whether they are identical or not. We would want, if we were looking at this, to take a look at that question.

There's the Prime Minister's question time, then. There are also set question times for other key government ministers.

That's something you'd want to look at; you wouldn't want to rush into it. You certainly wouldn't want to rush into it without consulting and finding out those who think it's a good idea and those who think it's a bad idea. You'd be trying to schedule in some people who are not necessarily easy to pin down in being scheduled as witnesses. You would definitely have to have hearings outside of the normal hours, as we did when we were dealing with my proposal that we change the Standing Orders to allow for a preferential ballot for the election of a Speaker.

We'd have to do this because you'd be trying to get people who are involved in the system who are busy, who have day jobs. We actually, for example, interviewed by video conference link the clerk of the House of Lords. The proposal I was putting forward was based on the way in which the Speaker of the House of Lords is elected. He was a good, impartial person. He had actually supervised the elections that take place.

Of course, when a new Parliament arrives, you don't have a new Speaker yet for the House of Commons, and under their rules it is now true of the House of Lords as well. The clerk has certain very clearly circumscribed but nonetheless critical responsibilities to undertake. He provided us with testimony, but we had to adjust to his schedule. He was not a person of leisure. He wasn't just sitting at home eating bonbons; he was working. Something similar would happen. You would have—

We got away with that, however, because it was a very limited change with a very limited witness list. I'm not sure that would be possible when dealing with the Prime Minister's question time issue. I think that would take longer.

Now we turn to—

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

Could I just jump in to ask a quick question?

I don't know whether it's the discussion or Scott's inspiring words, but does anyone else feel as though it's 1,000 degrees in here? I'm just curious.

[A voice]

Yes.

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

Yes? Okay. It's not just me, then.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Is that deliberate?

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

I was just curious whether it was just me. It might have been Scott's words.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

I think not.

[An hon. member]

Or it could have been hot air.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Thank you.

Concerning written questions—

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

I have a point of order.

I just got a copy of the amendments. Does everybody have a copy of the amendments here? Are we doing all right?

[A voice]

Yes.

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

Okay. This is the amendment that I'm looking at. It's deleting “2017” at the end of paragraph (d), and adding, immediately after paragraph (d), “(e) notwithstanding paragraph (d)”. Is that what I'm looking at here? It's paragraph (b), and then “(c) relettering paragraph (e) as paragraph (f)”.

I just want to make sure that we're still on this particular amendment before I get a chance to argue it. I have a few points to make about it, because the—

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Yes. This is just a copy of the translation.

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

Right. This is the translated copy, as I'm trying to get across to Mr. Reid.

I have a few points about it, obviously, dealing with the fact that this is a valid discussion—

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

You have to get on the list, Mr. Simms. That's debate.

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

Right.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

We go back to Mr. Reid.

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

I'm sorry, Mr. Chair. I confess that I just stepped out of the room briefly, and I'm trying to determine.... Had Mr. Simms raised a point of order seeking to clarify what the amendment is? What was going on here?

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

He wanted to make sure this piece of paper that was just distributed was the same amendment.