Mr. Whalen, I don't think that's true, incidentally.
I know that the Standing Orders propose to give the Speaker the power to split bills, but it's not in our present rules that the Speaker would split bills or decide which committee they're sent to. The decision to refer to a particular committee is actually made by the House in the context of a vote. It is moved and voted on that a particular bill be read a second time and referred to the standing committee on x, y, or z. Then it is reported by that particular standing committee back to the House for further consideration. That is the process by which these things unfold.
There's a proposal in the government House leader's discussion paper to change that process. My concern with the proposed changes is that, if you give the authority to the Speaker, you have to give the Speaker some degree of clarity about the criteria on which that division takes place. That might be clearer in terms of splitting a bill if we had governments that, outside of the budget process, just decided to propose an omnibus bill that deals with immigration, health, public safety, and something else all in one bill. If we had that happen outside of the budget process, I think there would be much more of a response from members and from the public asking, “Why are you doing this? These are clearly disparate policy areas.” Actually, the discussion around omnibus bills has always focused on budgets and the budget implementation bill, which, by their nature, have to make a lot of different changes. So, asking the Speaker to make that call about what the split would be raises some real questions.
Given that we know the issue isn't typically with omnibus bills being proposed outside of that process, I don't think we've really seen that, other than the sort of semi-omnibus bills from the government that I've talked about that deal with somewhat different issues at the same time. Generally, the bigger bills that we're talking about are those budget bills, so we could build something into our process. The Standing Orders already have specific provisions around the way in which budget debates unfold. We could have specific provisions around referring.... Every budget would go to every committee, or a certain number of committees, which would then be charged with studying the aspects of the budget that are relevant to those committees.
Given the importance of the budget, it's not unreasonable that every committee would take three or four meetings. The health committee would look at what's in the budget for health and the significance of that. The immigration committee would look at what's in the budget with respect to immigration. The justice committee would do the same, as would the foreign affairs committee, and of course the finance committee as well.
Perhaps you would require that the formal process of reporting back to the House and so forth would occur through the finance committee, but that these other committees would be required to have a certain number of meetings and to report back within a certain number of sitting days after the passage of the budget bill at second reading and be required to submit a report to the House with respect to the findings of that committee on the budget provisions. That could happen outside of the formal process for legislative debate around the budget. I think that would be one very effective way. It would not be a panacea, a sort of catch-all, final solution in terms of the question of omnibus bills, but it would be one way of ensuring that budgets, given their importance and the number of statutes they change, had the relative degree of consideration that we would want to see. I think it would go a long way to actually addressing some of the concerns around this type of legislation.
It's worth noting that the government's justification for wanting to make these changes unilaterally without the engagement of the opposition is that they made a commitment in the context of the election to do certain things. What in fact is the case is that the specific commitments that were made by the Liberal Party to Canadians during the election with respect to the Standing Orders dealt with the prime minister's questions and with omnibus bills. Those are changes that are entirely within the power of the government. They don't even require changes to the Standing Orders, as colleagues of mine have mentioned.
They also are things where there's a bit of a dissonance between what is being said and what the government has done. The Prime Minister started standing up after questions were asked, after every question. I think it was last week he did that for the first time, but this is a year and a half into his mandate as Prime Minister. The Prime Minister could have started answering questions, implemented that commitment right away, had he been so inclined. It did not require changes to the Standing Orders.
On the omnibus issue, of course, we are seeing omnibus bills from the government. That, of course, happens in the context of a discussion of the budget, and there is a need that budgets address multiple issues. There's a dissonance between the tone and implication of the discussion paper and the reality we're seeing on the ground. What we would be concerned about is if this were window dressing to say, “Well, we created provisions through which omnibus bills can be split”, but it's done in such an ambiguous way that those provisions are actually never used. That would certainly not be a serious good faith implementation of what was an election commitment.
People did ask me about the question of omnibus bills. I was always very clear that there is a legitimate case in which you have different kinds of provisions in the same bill, if they relate to the theme, if they're part of a budget, and so forth, but there's also an illegitimate use of that procedure. Obviously, in an environment where we all have an interest in describing what we're doing as legitimate and what others are doing as not legitimate, it is difficult to come up with that objective test of what should be happening and what shouldn't happen in this respect.
Having a provision for a study at a broader number of committees with respect to the budget would address some of those concerns. Of course, that would also have to happen in a context in which you didn't have time limits at committee or programming of committees. If you had programming of committees, even in interaction with this proposed new procedure for handling budget or omnibus types of initiatives, that would really undercut what was supposed to be the intent of these provisions, which is to allow for meaningful study at committees. As much as possible it's so important that we preserve the ability of committees to be the masters of their own domain, and yes, perhaps in response to direction of the House, to take a certain amount of time studying measures coming out of the budget, but also to do further study, to go deeper into aspects of those provisions if they need to.
I suspect that if, after the budget implementation bill, the motion were to be moved—I'll pick a hypothetical example—at the health committee, saying that there should be a study on the health implications of the budget measures, the government would use their majority on that committee to say, “We don't need to study this here because it's being studied at the finance committee.”
Of course, it's not practical or realistic for the finance committee to study all aspects of a budget. The budget itself is fairly long. I'm still not finished reading it fully but I'm working my way through it. The budget implementation bill is very long, and it deals with many different kinds of statutes. It is an omnibus bill by any definition. It's just a question of whether it's a legitimate use of omnibus bills.
Did you have something on procedure, Chair?