There is nothing wrong with making changes, but you had better have an understanding of what the original things were there for before you change them, right? Very clearly, in the language of the government, we see this progressivist fallacy, which is that the future is always better than the present, and the present is always better than past, so modernization and change are always going to be good.
I have to ask, though, in looking at some of these recent events, is a situation in which members can't make it to a vote really moving the House of Commons into the 21st century? I would argue that if we have a situation where it's harder for members to get to vote, that is a worse situation, not a better situation. If we have a situation in which government can limit debate by setting times in advance and saying that you can only talk for so long in the House and in committees, I would argue that it is a negative change. You might say that's moving us backwards. That's far from a modernization. That's a retreat, in a sense, from where we are now, if you're using that kind of progressivist language where you associate the trajectory of time always necessarily with improvement.
The kinds of changes that people have called “reform” in different times have pulled in different directions. We know roughly the history of this place, which is that at one time the emphasis on reform—originally, parliamentary reform modernization—was about strengthening the power of Parliament relative to the monarchy. That was a process of reform.
There was a period in the mid-20th century when reform, modernization, and improvement were seen as the process of making the House of Commons more efficient for the passage of legislation. This was at a time when there was a dramatic growth in what government did, in the scope of activities that were covered by the government. There was this concern among people in terms of whether or not legislatures, which had been essentially designed in a different time, could keep pace with modern government and could pass the number of laws that were necessary in light of the changing way in which government was involved in people's lives. Government was more involved, so the perception was that more laws needed to be passed. Again, flowing from that was the sense that institutions needed to be modernized so that more laws could be passed. That was perceived as reform, as improvement, and as modernization, but those were changes that enhanced the power of the executive and enhanced the speed with which legislation could flow.
Subsequent to that, there was another phase of discussion around reform. In this later phase, suddenly there was this emerging concern about the role of members of Parliament and the ability of members of Parliament to be involved in discussion. New ideas were proposed that weakened the executive, relatively, and strengthened the role of individual members of Parliament in legislation, which gave them more opportunities to check the government, to challenge legislation, to slow it down, and to influence the direction of the policy process. This was the next phase of reform.
In all cases, in the midst of the times and the circumstances in which those discussions were taking place, they were understood and presented as modernization, or as reform, but what should be very clear, of course, is that they represent opposite impulses, both in some sense legitimate, but opposite. The one impulse called “reform”, to make it easier for governments to pass legislation in keeping with the way in which the involvement of government in people's lives had changed from a earlier time, was about increasing the efficiency of the legislative process with the goal of passing more legislation and making it possible for the government to pass legislation. The other kind of change—or reform or modernization—was about giving ordinary members of Parliament more power and influence and therefore the ability to stand in the breach and say no when efforts were being made to pass legislation.
It doesn't really make sense to talk about this gradual progress in our institutions when there was a push and a pull on both sides of it. Both the push and the pull were called “reform” and “modernization” and were advanced in a way that was designed to reflect emerging realities and concerns, so maybe it doesn't actually make sense to speak of modernization. Maybe we should simply speak of ideas and about whether those ideas are good ideas or bad ideas. Maybe we should debate the merits of those ideas without trying to arbitrarily attach these labels. On the other hand, in politics, we can accept, perhaps, that people are going to try to associate positive-sounding terms such as “reform” or “modernization” with their proposals.
Actually, in the midst of the electoral reform conversation, as it's come to be known, I preferred to refer to it as “discussions about possible changes to our electoral system”, which I think was a neutral way of describing it. “Electoral reform” implies that we have these terrible retrograde institutions that desperately need to be fixed. Maybe that's the view of some people around the table about our first-past-the-post system, but my preference in terms of describing the discussion was “possible changes to our electoral system”.
Let's at least recognize that if we're not going to agree tonight, because we probably won't, we should jettison these terms like “modernization” and “reform”; I might even use them subsequently in debates when it's advantageous to my cause. Let's at least agree in principle that these are not value-neutral terms. When the government House leader says they're trying to modernize the House of Commons, that doesn't actually explain to us whether her vision of modernization is of the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s way of thinking about modernization, versus the 1990s and early 2000s way of thinking about modernization and reform.
When she doesn't tell us what kind of modernization and reform we're talking about, it contributes to our perception on this side of the House that most of what we hear from the government on these issues—at least in the context of forums like question period—is something resembling a word salad, because we don't actually know what she means by “modernization”. Although I could say, looking at the discussion paper, that it looks like what she means by modernization is a dramatic weakening of the opposition and of private members. That's how it seems to me.
Let's call it that. Let's be more blunt about what that is. Let's not paper over it in the name of bringing the House of Commons into the 21st century. Let's be clear. We're already here, right? It's 2017, as the Prime Minister is fond of saying. Well, I guess it was 2015 when he said that, but it's the current year, as we've been told, which is in the 21st century—