I will respond directly to the points that Mr. Simms made, but first I want to set the stage on that point by making the underlying philosophical argument I wanted to make with respect to programming. This was an argument made explicitly by Ms. O'Malley in the podcast. She made a point that made me develop, I think, what may or may not be her thinking on the same point.
I have a broader concern about programming, even then about the potential strategic implications vis-à-vis government and opposition. That's a concern, but that's not the only concern.
Ms. O'Malley pointed out in this podcast I was listening to that programming doesn't just limit the opposition, but it limits the government, obviously. In advance you say there are a certain number of days that we're going to spend debating this, and then studying it, and then debating it again, and then we have a vote. That's limiting for everybody. That's limiting for the institution. It limits flexibility. It limits the ability to respond to new information and new events that come forward.
I think the idea of programming fundamentally misunderstands what we're supposed to be doing when we study and debate a bill. I think it's most evident in a situation that Mr. Simms described. He described a situation in which a person had prepared a certain set of arguments, and they brought those arguments in and were frustrated by the fact that the argument was cut off midway through. They hadn't been able to make all the arguments they were going to make. Okay, fair enough.
Actually, the point of a debate or a discussion isn't that we all come in with our arguments, deliver them, and then move on. The point of a discussion or a debate is where, yes, both sides perhaps begin with certain propositions that they want to put on the record, that they want to put forward for the discussion, and then each side responds to each other's propositions, and then there is counter-response back and forth.
Eventually there is a resolution of certain points, agreement, perhaps just a recognition that the differences actually relate to more fundamental philosophical differences that are not reconcilable. In that process, perhaps evidence is presented in support of one set of arguments, which is then countered by another side's arguments. This process unfolds as arguments, as evidence, perhaps personal experience are all related and compared against each other and used in support of different arguments.
Either way that process, if done properly, is necessarily unpredictable because unless I know exactly the arguments that people on the other side of the question are going to bring forward, and I know exactly how I'm going to respond, and I know exactly how they are going to respond, that's the only way you could possibly predict exactly how long it's going to take.
That is true of even a simple question that one might debate. It's that much more true in discussion about legislation. Very often it happens that legislation is brought forward. It may be that the government sees the legislation as a simple matter of housekeeping, but the opposition has some fundamental objections to it, and then the discussion proceeds in a different direction than was initially anticipated. Maybe the government frames the introduction of the bill in a way that the opposition didn't expect, with new original arguments that the opposition has to then respond to. This is only in the process of debate as it happens in the House of Commons, which is the unpredictable process ideally of refutation and counter-refutation.
Unfortunately, sometimes that doesn't happen. Unfortunately, debate in the House of Commons looks more like people reading speeches and ships passing in the night, but that's not what it's supposed to be. What it's supposed to be is constructive refutation back and forth about substantive questions.
If you're doing it right, you can't predict where that debate is going to go. You can estimate, but you have to have the flexibility to say that, if, for example, Mr. Berthold brought forward a point in debate on that issue, more government speakers are needed to respond to that point because that wasn't a point that we knew would come up, or a new study has been released that says something different and we have to now evaluate and discuss that. This is particularly true in the context of committees, where committees hear from expert witnesses who may say things that are a complete surprise to members of Parliament.
Sometimes, we may find ourselves here in a little bit of a bubble. We have conversations with a certain set of people, a certain set of stakeholders. The legislation has a path. It goes to committee. All of a sudden we hear from someone from industry who says, “Hey, this bill you thought was just a slam dunk matter of housekeeping actually creates some problems for our industry.”
When I was a political staffer, I was a parliamentary secretary's assistant when Tony Clement was the minister. I was working with Mike Lake, who was the parliamentary secretary at the time. We were working on anti-spam legislation. Nobody is pro-spam, except perhaps the meat, but nobody is pro-spam in terms of the kind that you get in your email inbox. It is something that I think we as members of Parliament know quite a bit about.
When we had this issue come up at committee though, there were people who came forward and said that the way in which we were defining spam for the purposes of this legislation raised some questions about people who are engaged in certain kinds of marketing, even people who may have been given a referral. It could be that someone may just be reaching out to an individual on the basis of a referral, but this legislation would catch them in the net of spam, when really, I think what the legislation most intended to target were those who are sending emails out to hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps with a malicious intent, such as spyware, phishing, and these kinds of things.
That's just an example of something where, if you had programming in that case, you might have had the government say, “Okay, this is really simple. We're going to have two committee meetings. We're going to have one day at report stage and one day at third reading. It's just going to sail through.” Perhaps opposition parties would have agreed. They would have said, “Well, of course, it's a simple matter.”
Then, all of a sudden, you end up at committee, and you have witnesses who say, “You know what? Agree or disagree, it's actually not that simple.” Then you think, “Well, okay, what do we do here? We've had one meeting, and two meetings have been allotted. We would like to be able to call more witnesses who can clarify whether the concern raised by this particular industry group is representative of the entire industry. Are they correct? Are there things we can clarify in this legislation? We need more meetings.”
It's not just a matter in that case of the government using this against the opposition, although that's a definite concern. It's a matter of the institution in that case having potentially imposed limitations upon itself which prevent the effective deliberation of that legislation.
What do you do in that case? Either you just push it through or you push it through on the basis of limited information. You try to make some kind of amendments or perhaps you defeat the bill and force the government to reintroduce it and program it differently. That's not very productive. That's not a good use of the House's time.
There has to be a recognition in the way we structure the House, that of course we want to have discussions about how much time is spent discussing particular matters and that there are certain issues that may be more time-sensitive than others.
The amount of time that is required for debate in the House, as well as for study, is going to vary and change throughout the process in response to the kinds of arguments that you're having. You don't necessarily know how long it's going to take you to resolve a conversation, especially about something as complex as a bill, before that process is actually complete.
This is, I think, a point that members need to think about with respect to programming. Again, it's not just about government versus opposition; it's about whether the institution has the breathing room to do the kind of work that Canadians expect us to do, which is to conduct detailed studies of legislation.
That was the underlying point I wanted to make at this juncture on the issue of programming, but to respond more specifically to Mr. Simms' points, I always think we need to be careful about comparisons between the British system and the Canadian system. We have countries, societies, and political institutions that, on their face, are very similar. However, there are very dramatic differences in political culture that inform the way those institutions behave in practice and the way people within those institutions behave in practice.
This hit home for me in a particular way when I was a master's student in the U.K. This was right after the coalition between David Cameron and Nick Clegg was created. It was interesting that here we had minority governments that did not automatically seek coalitions. It was presumed they would work with opposition parties on a case-by-case basis. The presumption on the other side of the pond, so to speak, was that immediately there would be a movement toward a coalition. You might say this is a way in which British political culture has been influenced by observing debates and political configurations in continental Europe, where there is a prevalence of PR systems and more use of coalitions, so coalitions were seen as more of the normal thing in light of the experience of proximate countries.
One of the biggest differences—and this reflects a lot of different aspects of their system—is the greater presumption of members of Parliament acting independently from their party or their leader. In our system, for a long time we have had political parties as mass membership movements that elect leaders. That leader then has to have a relationship with the parliamentary caucus. That leader may not have been the choice of the parliamentary caucus. I will resist the temptation to talk about some examples closer to home in that respect and what's happening.