This is interesting.
The way in which Mr. Graham has described this proposal would be to render the House of Commons even more like a television studio than it already is. The idea would be that there are red dots and you look at this camera or that camera. Of course, that's not really the tradition or the convention. You would normally be looking at other members and engaging them in conversation, or looking at the person to whom you're speaking.
The introduction of cameras was about showing the public what was going on in the House. One of the things people didn't necessarily expect was how much the presence of cameras would change the way in which debates unfolded. It was this deliberative body which was open to the public. The written records were obviously published. Journalists would attend the sessions and write about them. Members of the general public would attend as well. With the introduction of cameras, it has become one in which members are sensitive to always being on camera, and there is a greater emphasis on look, presentation, and form as opposed to substance.
This is a good example of how, when you talk about modernization and change, the kinds of things you might think are just part of the modern world, they actually can have distorting effects on the way in which that institution works. To quote Kevin Lamoureux, “distortative effects” result from those changes.
Mr. Graham's proposal is interesting, but I worry about the impact of this additional initiative that would further change the way in which the House of Commons works in terms of the extent to which it's a television studio versus effectively a deliberative body. I don't think it's realistic or desirable to go back and remove the cameras, but I think we should be sensitive to changes that may have an effect and may not be the ones we are going for. It speaks to the need for that wider engagement of members of Parliament from all parties in the discussion. There may be things that are not even of a partisan or strategic nature, which members of the opposition, members who are more experienced, perhaps, or not, may be aware of which may not necessarily reflect the concerns of members of the government.
One of the problems with having decisions made unilaterally, especially by a new government of predominantly brand new MPs, is that you don't draw into that experience that comes from a larger number of veteran members in other parties. I think it's still the case that the longest serving current member of Parliament is a member of an unrecognized party, a member of the Bloc. It is generally going to be the case that there will be more veterans on the opposition benches than on the government benches. If you have a party that was recently in power and then has gone to the opposition, you are going to have some new members, but you're likely to have a lot of returning members. Whereas, when a party substantially grows its caucus, as has happened with this government—this government was in a third party position, and it went from being the third party to being government—a vast majority of members of Parliament on the government side, and I think the vast majority of ministers, certainly the government House leader, are new members of Parliament.
Part of the importance of engaging the opposition, and you see it in the example of cameras and what their effect would be, is actually tapping into the experience and institutional knowledge that exist in this place. If the House leader were effectively allowed to make these changes unilaterally, it would be the government but with the ability of the leadership team to add and remove members to and from the committee at will. That process, as we see with this discussion paper, would be highly directed by the House leader. Effectively, you have someone who has, to this point, been a member of Parliament for less than two years, who wants to fundamentally dictate the terms of the so-called modernization, the changes, perhaps the revolution, that they wish to see to the Standing Orders. That's quite a striking point that we would see that level, that type, and that magnitude of change undertaken without engaging the experience that exists in all parts of the House.
I don't mean to suggest that new members can't have valid points about the Standing Orders. I'm a new member myself, obviously. I've been a member for as long as the government House leader has been. New members may see things from a different perspective and be willing to put forward ideas for certain kinds of changes that maybe those who have been here for a very long time are less likely to see as necessary.
There is a balance that needs to be struck between hearing the voices of new members and hearing the voices of members who have been here for a longer period of time and who have a level of context and experience that informs the approach that they take. It's that balance that is achieved by this amendment. It is an amendment that speaks to the question of balance between government and opposition, but I would argue to a range of different kinds of balances that need to exist in the deliberative process that's unfolding. It's a balance between government and opposition, between major parties and minor parties, between recognized and unrecognized parties, between those on the front bench and those who are not part of the front bench, whether in government or in general throughout the House. This would be a balance between newer members and experienced members, members who have different kinds of experience.
Of course, some of the members here look at the Standing Orders from the experience of having been former political staff. I was a political staffer at one time, and you do see the Standing Orders in a bit of a different way when you are navigating them. In my case, I was involved in a number of different positions with different aspects of the Standing Orders. In one case it was question period preparation, and in another case it was working with parliamentary committees.
There are obviously things about the mechanisms of this House that staff experience which may be less part of the reality of members of Parliament. This is because we often rely on our staff to support us when we have specific questions to ask, or when there are specific kinds of motions that might need to be brought forward in that context.
It's about the multiplicity of voices that we can ensure are engaged if we have the widest number of voices included with different kinds of experience. We have members who have been former political staffers. We have members who look at this place with a relatively fresh set of eyes. You might have people who look at the Standing Orders from the perspective of operating procedures that they've seen in private sector work places, in terms of processes that we follow, hours, sitting processes, and balance of work, how this place squares with the way things operate in the private sector.
We have members, and Mr. Christopherson is one of them, who came to this place from other legislatures, and who have experience at the provincial level. In some cases we have people who have been involved at the municipal level. The kind of perspective they bring to a discussion of the Standing Orders is going to be different still. It's going to be informed by the experience they had as part of a different legislature. It's all these different perspectives, these variations and experience, that inform the way members think about the kinds of questions that are in front of us. It's important that we listen and engage those voices.
I don't know if we have any members of Parliament who were former senators. We have senators who were former members of Parliament. I know we've had people who have stepped back from the Senate to run to be members of Parliament, but I don't know if we've ever had someone who has gone that way. That's another set of experiences that you draw on when you have the full range of voices involved.
The kind of study we could do at this committee on the basis of the amendment would be one in which we are assured that not only are all of these different voices heard formally, that we have lots of people who are able to speak, but then the discussion that members of Parliament have after that is one that incorporates those voices in a substantive way. If you have members from different parties who are part of that discussion and are represented in it, you necessarily will achieve a better outcome given the diversity that would come to the fore.
One issue the discussion paper addresses and one which I mentioned before but in a different context, because this was before the government's introduction of the budget implementation bill, is the issue of omnibus bills. I have a hard time understanding what the government's position is on omnibus bills. The Prime Minister in question period yesterday was trying to carve out this distinction between good omnibus bills and bad omnibus bills. A good omnibus bill, it seems, in the eyes of the Prime Minister, is one proposed by a Liberal government; a bad one is one proposed by a Conservative government. We would understand that he would have that perspective, of course. We all tend to prefer legislation proposed by our own side, but the question of the degree of “omnibus-ness”—I don't know if that is a word—is not dependent on the party that brings it forward. To me, some of the discussion in the discussion paper suggests that there is a binary.... It's either an omnibus bill or it's not an omnibus bill.
The reality is we see many different kinds of bills that come before the House that deal with different kinds of provisions that do not necessarily have to be included in the same bill but have some common thread to them. Those are bills that maybe move a step in the direction of being an omnibus bill but don't go all the way.
One bill we dealt with was on the response to the opioid crisis in Canada. This wasn't an issue on which we agreed with the NDP, but in the Conservative caucus we felt that this bill combined certain kinds of provisions that shouldn't have been combined. There were many provisions in that bill that we were very supportive of, that dealt with things like more effective enforcement, addressing pill presses. These kinds of things we thought were not only good measures but needed to be expedited. However, the legislation also included provisions that dealt with the community consultation process around putting in place what we call supervised injection sites, and what the government increasingly likes to call safe consumption sites, which is a little misleading as far as the terminology goes.
In any event, the legislation, in addition to those positive things we all agreed on, dealt with the government's proposal to remove most of the requirements around engaging with communities before constructing a supervised injection site. We looked at the bill and said there were some things in it that were not only worth supporting but were important and required the fastest possible movement through the House, but there was another part of the bill that we were totally opposed to.
The government House leader in her discussion paper talks about an omnibus bill being one where members might want to vote for a part of it but not for another part of it. That's the reality of almost all legislation that comes before the House. Someone somewhere is going to agree with part of it but not another part of it. Unless you only have legislation that has one provision in it, that makes one specific change in one clause, which would be pretty unrealistic in terms of the efficiency of the House, any time you have legislation that makes multiple policy changes, you're going to have members who will like some parts of it and not other parts of it.
Yesterday I talked about the debate around Bill C-14, the government's euthanasia legislation. Aside from the fact that there were a whole host of different provisions in this legislation, there were two very distinct issues that needed to be adjudicated. Unfortunately, they were often mixed up in the public conversation. There was a question of the eligibility criteria, who was eligible to seek euthanasia, and there was a question on the safeguards, the administrative requirements that had to be met before someone could seek euthanasia. The point is these were two different questions. Someone could conceivably believe in more open eligibility criteria and fewer safeguards, but someone could also believe, let's say, in a more open, more liberal eligibility criteria while also having more safeguards in place. You have these different kinds of philosophical questions and different kinds of provisions that are wrapped up in the same piece of legislation.
Of course, in a formal sense, no one would say that Bill C-14 was an omnibus bill. It was a bill that set the terms for the legalization of euthanasia and assisted suicide. In that sense, we could accept, relatively speaking, that it was on one thing, but it was a step in the omnibus direction, at least according to the way in which omnibus bills are defined by the government's discussion paper. The government's discussion paper suggests that an omnibus bill is one in which some members might like some provisions and not others.
What happened with the legislation around the opioid crisis—I can't remember the number of the bill offhand—was that a point of order was raised seeking unanimous consent to split the bill. This was proposed by the Conservative caucus, I think by Mr. Colin Carrie, our health critic. It would have created two separate bills. One of those bills would have dealt with the provisions we all agreed on, and that bill would have moved along immediately. It may well have moved along to the end of third reading right at that point. Certainly, it would have gone all the way to committee. It would have separated off the controversial provisions.
The benefit of that approach, actually, is that it would not have slowed anything down, but would have sped up the process. It would have allowed for the immediate passage of the provisions on which we all agreed. Those provisions could have started doing their work and having a positive impact, whereas the controversial provisions could have continued to be debated.
This is particularly sensible when you consider the way in which the House and the Senate interact. If you have two separate bills that both go to the Senate, and the Senate amends one of them and not the other, then only the bill that was amended has to come back to the House, while the other, if it passes in the Senate in the same form it did in the House, goes on from there to receive royal assent. If all of those provisions are wrapped up in the same bill, then all of those provisions have to come back to the House again.
In cases where the opposition is prepared to expedite certain provisions...and as we saw with this particular bill there was a substantial public interest in the government supporting the splitting of that bill, yet they didn't. Unanimous consent was denied for that proposal.
This is telling of the government's actual views on bills that, although they may not be omnibus bills in the full sense, have a component of “omnibus-ness” to them. The government, in a reasonable case like that, was not willing to allow the splitting of a bill in a way that would have very much reflected the public interest with the timeline the public wanted to see. That did not happen because of a refusal of the request for unanimous consent. That refusal, of course, came from the government side. This is telling about the approach being taken for omnibus bills already.
I think we now have examples from this government of actual full-blown omnibus legislation. You would be very hard-pressed to identify a single, credible, philosophical distinction in terms of the degree of “omnibus-ness”, let's say, between the kinds of omnibus bills that the previous government brought in and the kinds of omnibus bills that this government is bringing in.
We have a budget implementation bill—I have my notes here on it—that changes over 20 statutes and runs to over 300 pages. The Prime Minister's defence of that is identical to what was said, I think quite correctly, about the budget implementation bills that were brought forward by the previous government. When you have a whole bunch of measures that are related to the budget, the implementation of the government's fiscal plan, then there is a common thread. These are not entirely unrelated elements. They deal with the economic plan of the government.
That's fair enough, but of course almost anything in terms of government policy has some relationship to the economy. It likely relates to questions of social values as well, but almost anything has some relationship to the economy. Immigration has an impact on the economy. Social policy, drug policy, criminal justice, all of these things have some impact on the economy, or at the very least they involve questions of government expenditure.
That is true of every policy area. The government said in the election that they were opposed to omnibus bills, and now they are redefining their opposition to say that the omnibus bills they are opposed to are only those that have provisions that have absolutely no plausible relationship to each other. That is a pretty substantial stretch in terms of what we were actually talking about with omnibus bills.
We should, in good faith, look for ways to divide bills when we can, especially if there is a willingness of the opposition to expedite certain aspects of the bill that they agree with, but it's never going to be—and I think the government realizes this by now, if they didn't already—an exact science in terms of what does or does not constitute an omnibus bill. This is what raises some questions in terms of the proposal in the discussion paper for the Speaker to split the bill, because if you ask the Speaker to do something, the Speaker being a non-partisan person within the House in the context of that function, you have to give them some criteria. On what basis would they decide to split a bill or not to split a bill? If we can't even arrive, through discussion here, at clarity about what is a bad kind or an acceptable kind of omnibus bill, then we are effectively putting the Speaker in an almost impossible position.
What is clear with respect to omnibus legislation is that the government is breaking a promise here. The government said that they would get rid of omnibus legislation, but they are moving forward with something that is clearly quite similar, not in substance, of course, but in form, to what we saw from successive governments over our recent history.
It's an important question how we should handle the issue of budgets and budget implementation bills, because they are always going to deal with a variety of measures. They're going to have to. If we want the government to bring forward a budget every year, and it should, then there will be lots of different policy areas covered in that budget. You couldn't have a budget that talked only about some things and not others. It would have to cover all the things that are within the ambit of the activities of the federal government.
When it comes to omnibus legislation and questions of reform, we can look at other kinds of potential reforms that would provide the kind of scrutiny of those documents that the public and many members want to see, without being unrealistic about what a budget has to be. It's interesting that the only substantive kind of legislation on which a number of days is prescribed for debate in the Standing Orders is the budget itself. It's either four or five days for the budget to be debated, and after that it's the end of the budget debate. That is automatically put in place.
If you think about the breadth of measures that are covered in a budget, and the number of statutes the government is going to change over the course of a year, it's likely, it seems, with the projector that we have in place here.... Sorry, I lost my train of thought.
With the number of days we have, and with the record of this government with respect to the Standing Orders and how they've unfolded, we are likely to see more changes to statutes made through the omnibus budget implementation bill than changes to statutes in all the rest of the bills that the government brings forward. It's interesting to think just how important that process is, and yet we limit it to a relatively small number of days—I can't remember exactly whether it's four or five days—and we are discussing changes to statutes that outweigh all the changes to statutes that may well happen for the rest of the year.
Maybe one change to the Standing Orders we need to look at is allocating more days to the discussion of the budget. Maybe that would address some of the concerns that members have around ensuring that there is proper scrutiny relative to the relatively long budget documents that we're seeing. That would be one possible change.
Another change we might want to consider, and one which I think would be worthwhile for all members from all parties to deliberate and pronounce on, would be a process by which all committees, or at least a larger number of committees, studied the budget. Right now, the process is that the finance committee does pre-budget consultations. The finance committee looks at the budget implementation bill. We don't have a provision for the same bill being referred to multiple committees. What if we had all of the committees of the House, or at least most of the committees, do some degree of study—