Further to the same point of order, this will forever live in Hansard. I'm sure it will be the subject of a Ph.D. thesis in 20 or 30 years.
That's all I wanted to say about the overall discussion of the amendment. I don't know why members of the government would oppose the amendment if at the same time they are suggesting that they agree with it in spirit.
We are going to continue to have this debate, I think, on the basis of the presumption that if the government is opposing the amendment, it's because they don't want to do what the amendment says. If there comes a point when government members conclude that this is an amendment that reflects what they want to do, then actually, numerically, it would only take one government member to come to that conclusion, and then we would have the ability to proceed. I draw the attention of members to that.
Nonetheless, in the absence of support for the amendment from any member of the government, we will proceed with arguments in favour of the amendment, which I hope will further elucidate why the amendment is important.
I was speaking earlier about the discussion paper, the whereabouts of which have escaped me. Oh, here it is. I was speaking earlier about the issues that are raised by the discussion paper.
To build very quickly to the point where I was, because I want to really make this point in a clear way, we were speaking about theme 3 of the discussion paper, which is on page 7. It speaks of management of committees. It speaks about concerns about members “resorting to tactics”, whatever that means, but then it goes on to the possibility of an option for committees. I'll just read the section:
An option would be to make one independent Member an ex-officio member of committees with all privileges except for the ability to vote, or to constitute quorum. This would allow independent Members to participate in in camera proceedings, question witnesses, and travel with committees.
There are some issues there, which I've talked about, such as how the independent members would be selected and how to reconcile the fact that members who are independent would have a potential opportunity to self-select for committees, whereas that opportunity would not exist for members of the government or of other parties, who typically end up on committees as a result of assignment by the whip and not as the result of voluntarily electing to be on those committees.
This is used as a jumping-off point for immediately trying to make arguments for indirectly adding a government member—a non-voting member, but a government member—to every committee.
With regard to this discussion of good faith with respect to the process and the amendment, it is this kind of flow that makes us look and say, “Okay, well, the opposition is probably just moving forward with this on the basis of an evaluation of their own interest.” That's the concern that we have here.
The section I am talking about specifically deals with parliamentary secretaries. It says:
The Government committed to ensuring that Parliamentary Secretaries would not be voting members on committees that fall within their Minister’s mandate. That commitment does not, however, mean that Parliamentary Secretaries should not have a role on committees. Parliamentary Secretaries could be given the same rights on committees as is proposed for independent members.
That is what is being proposed by this discussion paper, and I think this suggestion is quite insidious. The present rules involve the whips allocating positions on committees to specific members and doing so in whatever way they see fit. That's all well and good, and it is up to the individual parties, when they are in government, to decide whether or not parliamentary secretaries sit on committees.
The practice at times has been for them to sit on committees. During the tenure of the previous government, parliamentary secretaries did sit as members of committees, and there is a whole discussion to be had about advantages and disadvantages of that. A possible advantage is that it provides some linkage between the committee and the government. A possible disadvantage, though, is that it could have the impact of compromising the ability of members to act independently, although what can often happen is committee members act at the behest of government anyway, so the removal of parliamentary secretaries from committees isn't a solution, unless it is accompanied by a genuine response that gives the committee the ability to be master of its own domain. That can never be fully a matter of the rules; it has to be a matter of the culture and the will of the people involved.
Of course, in this Parliament we see some degree of variability where some committees exercise some greater degree of independence than others, depending on the disposition of the people involved.
That's the context we had. Different things can be done with parliamentary secretaries. Some may have a substantive impact, but some possible changes may well just be window dressing. In other words, you can have the removal of parliamentary secretaries and have some degree of inappropriate influence, however defined, exerted by the government.
I'm told there was a time, by the way, when parliamentary secretaries would not be members of the committee but potentially would take on a role similar to that of officials. The parliamentary secretary would appear with officials at a certain time or during clause-by-clause study, but instead of sitting with the other MPs, the parliamentary secretary would sit with the officials.