No, no.
The way in which the change happened was this. This was a change to the way in which a Speaker was elected. At one time, if I remember right—someone may correct me—the process was originally that you have runoff ballots. You have a series of ballots similar to the old leadership convention style, where people would vote, someone would be eliminated from the ballot, and then there would be further rounds of balloting. Then the movement was to a system of instant runoff voting for electing the Speaker. There were different opinions on that across different parties. It wasn't unanimous in terms of every single member of Parliament agreeing with that change, but as I recall, there was support from every party for that change as well.
We can look at the history and recognize that there is a difference in terms of a fundamental degree of change as well. When you're talking about successive ballots versus instant runoff being a change, there are some issues in the Standing Orders that deal with something so minor, but the changes proposed in this discussion paper are very dramatic in terms of the relationship between government and opposition and in terms of the roles of members of Parliament.
We would agree that the government has a right to move forward legislation, but not to change the underlying rules. I don't want to diminish this with a sports analogy, but I think a sports analogy is a reasonable way of understanding the idea of fairness in competition.
We're watching the hockey playoffs—which of course the Edmonton Oilers will be delivering a Stanley Cup in. My colleague from southern Alberta and I are looking forward to that matchup coming up. More to the point, in a hockey game people play hard. They aren't, in any way, what you might call “gentlemanly” towards their opponents in terms of giving them a wide berth when they have the puck and so forth. In a hockey game absolutely you play to win. On the other hand, there are certain things that are just beyond the rules. Giving a hard check is maybe within the rules, but doing certain kinds of checks would not be within the rules. Obviously there are boundaries prescribed by rules, but within those rules you do everything possible to succeed.
It wouldn't be right if one team could just change the rules. One team might try to implement a different strategy within the rules, they might do something that's allowed, and the other team might say, whoa, that's a novel use of the rules, how come they're doing that? But if you're within the rules, then that's fair ball, right?
I think in the last Parliament there were people who objected to the way in which Stephen Harper used the rules. Some of those people might be here in this room. You can debate the use of those rules. Some people argue that those rules—the use of time allocation, the use of prorogation—were not used in a constructive way, and some of those points have been made by my colleagues opposite. But there is a fundamental difference between playing hard within the rules and going outside the rules. The reason we have rules is to prescribe where that line is, in the midst of sometimes a very tense and a very competitive environment. When we're talking about policy and government legislation, these are things that matter deeply to our constituents. They're things that we believe in. We fight hard on those issues. We do so, however, within the rules, in a way that respects the fact that the rules exist and that it's not fair for one side to change the rules, because that would undermine the basic way in which that system is supposed to work, based on rules, based on the back and forth that occurs.
It's interesting that the government's response to this is not to really dig into the meat of our argument in response at all. It's to say, okay, we want to have a discussion...and by the way, we want to have a discussion...and let's have a discussion.
Well, let's go through what happened, how we got to this point, and why we are concerned about what the government's intending to do. We had a discussion. We had a debate in the House on possible standing order changes and we had different proposals come from different members of Parliament. We had a wide variation within individual political parties. We had different members of the Liberal caucus propose changes that are different from those the House leader is proposing. Within our Conservative caucus we had common opinions on certain questions and we had different opinions on certain questions. I have proposed some changes to the Standing Orders that are fairly novel, concerning switching the time when late shows and members' statements occur and having ministers be required to respond to late shows.
These were part of a big soup of ideas put out there on whatever day it was that we had this debate on the Standing Orders. There was interest in proceeding with these and considering changes that could get consensus. Then all of a sudden we had the government bring in this discussion paper and right away ask this committee to study them, with an immediate timeline for reporting them back.
We put forward an amendment that said, okay, fair enough: you have these ideas, but we want to make sure that there's unanimity, that's there's agreement, that there's a respect for that “rule of process” aspect that we have talked about.
What's striking about the government's response is that...but actually, it goes prior to the House leader's comments. There's a bit of a dissonance between what Mr. Simms has said and what the government House leader has said. Mr. Simms has said that of course we want to get to unanimity, that of course that is where we would like to go as a committee. Then you have the government House leader saying that they will not let the Conservatives have a veto.
Perhaps we should have Mr. Simms in the position of House leader. I would support him in that, if that were his ambition. We might see a different approach on this issue.