I hope so. It is due on April 17, 2017. I don't know what the renewal privileges are with the Library of Parliament, so I may have to return it for a day and sign it out again. It does have the old school tie.
I'm a big fan of libraries. If people have seen my Facebook page, whenever possible I try to go to local libraries and look at the opportunities there.
As a bit of a side note, Mr. Chair—I'll be very brief—libraries typically only allow you to have a library card if you're a resident within that jurisdiction. Living in Perth County on the Perth side, my library did entitle me to a Wellington County library card, which has several more branches than the four in Perth County. Thankfully, the good people at the Wellington County library did me a great service. They gave me a Wellington County library card, so I can now use their resources as well, which include virtual reality machines with green screens and a number of different services that the library offers there. I just wanted to do a quick plug for the good folks at the Wellington County library.
I want to discuss a little bit this document that was brought forward. It effectively lays out the challenges that face us as parliamentarians in discussing proposed changes to the Standing Orders by the executive branch of a government party. It asks about the proper role of Parliament and the proper role of the House of Commons.
It's instructive. In the introduction, what Walter Baker lays out is a challenge and this is important. He started out by saying:
The House of Commons does not govern. It is not the purpose of this position paper to suggest that it should. But what precise role should the House of Commons play?
I think it is important right at the start to recognize what I've gone back to before, which is the separation between the executive and the legislative branches. It is very true that the legislative branch, as the name implies, legislates, but it does fall to the executive to govern. This is the dilemma that Walter Baker faced in this discussion paper. What role should the legislative branch play and what role should the House of Commons play in undertaking its duties?
He went on to say:
It is possible, consistent with the basic forms of the Constitution, to reduce its role to one of expressing formal confidence in the program of the government, and semi-automatically approving subsequent requests for legislative, taxing, and spending authority. Only in a minority House would such approval be open to genuine negotiation.
As a starting point, he presents the extreme. He presents the proposal or the opportunity in which the House of Commons would effectively become simply a formal expression of the confidence of the House of Commons.
If we want to go into a little more depth about the confidence convention, we could go back to the McGrath report. However, I think the late Senator Forsey's discussion on the confidence convention is far more instructive. Perhaps we could discuss that a little further, but at this point in time, it's not relevant to the specific point at hand.
Walter Baker presents the extreme example of how Parliament and the House of Commons could proceed if a government so chose. I'm not saying that's specifically where the government intends to go. I will give them the benefit of the doubt on that. There are some proposals in the discussion paper that could be seen as going in that direction, but that's not exactly it either.
I want to go back to the other side of that. He's presented the one side of the extreme, but let's go a little further on, where he stated:
In keeping with the basic principles of parliamentary government, it is also possible to see in the House of Commons a more aggressive representative of Canadian voters. The House would assume a role which would make it worthy, more than the cynical clichés—“rubber stamp”, “flock of sheep”, “trained seals”—which have dogged its deliberations for decades if not centuries. No, the House of Commons should not govern, but it should poke and pry without hindrance into the activities of those who do. If the House of Commons exists to represent the people of Canada, and to legitimize the rule of the executive, it must receive the necessary tools to pursue that mandate.
I think this is important. Here's a government House leader—in a minority parliament, nonetheless, and as we find out shortly after this, a very precarious minority parliament at that—saying, “Yes, we could go to the extreme and basically neuter the opposition, turn the opposition into a rubber stamp of simply a formal expression of confidence, but we're not going that direction. We're actually proposing a discussion in which we could give the opposition and all parliamentarians, all members of the House of Commons, the tools they need to preserve that mandate, to “poke and pry without hindrance into the activities of those who do [govern].”
Again, I think this is instructive for where we go. I'm not saying that this document is all sunshine and lollipops, because it's not. There are examples in here where the government proposes to make things a little more efficient, in terms of the operation of government. There are also concessions, as well, to private members, to individual parliamentarians in the government caucus, in the official opposition, and in the third and fourth parties at the time as well. It really is a discussion.
Baker went on to say:
Under existing rules, the House is much more than a rubber stamp, but it is much less than it could be. A common cliché is, “The executive proposes, and Parliament disposes”. That is too narrow a conception for a modern democracy. The House of Commons should not be restricted to answering “yes” or “no” to government proposals. Parliamentarians should be able to effectively put the questions “Why?” and “Why not?” The proposed changes in the House of Commons procedures are intended to encourage Members of Parliament to put those questions, and others necessary to judge the competence of the government of the day.
Again, this is a government House leader, the gentleman who is instructed and mandated to carry through government orders, to carry through government legislation—in a minority context, I might add. Here he is saying that we need to give more tools to individual parliamentarians, that we want to encourage them to ask the probing questions to get to the heart of the matters that are before them.
Frankly, there are some ideas in here that would have been terribly controversial and probably opposed by many of Mr. Baker's colleagues within cabinet in having to navigate in this type of system.
Again, I go back to who Mr. Baker was. He was a parliamentarian at heart. He was truly a gentleman, an individual, a public servant in the truest sense of the word, who saw the opportunity to make a better Parliament, to make a better House of Commons.
He continued:
It is sometimes suggested that proponents of parliamentary reform wish to curtail partisan confrontation in the House and its committees, and produce a form of collegial government. That is not the purpose of the reforms suggested below. It is hoped that some of the more sterile manifestations of party competition will fade away, but the real purpose of reform is to sharpen the focus of partisanship, not displace it. Party government is an essential part of parliamentary government.
I think this is really important for us, as parliamentarians, to understand. I'm a partisan. I think we're all partisans. We all run under political banners. We all run as political animals, if you will. But that doesn't mean that we can't be collegial, that we can't show a degree of comradeship, because after all, we are all members of the same House of Commons.
It is often said that we should eliminate partisanship, and I think the other place is going to find the unique challenges of an other place that doesn't have party affiliations. They'll have to have that discussion in their place.
What Baker really highlights here is that you're not going to get rid of partisanship. Indeed, when I used to teach at King's University College, I often said to students that if there was no partisanship in a legislature or in the House of Commons, it would develop naturally. Groupings would form. There would be some form of grouping to replace a non-partisan House. There are some examples—but they are few—of situations in which parties do not exist. From a Canadian perspective, that would be Nunavut, where there are no parties. The executive is chosen from among the elected MLAs, and then the premier, executive members, and speaker are chosen from them. However, in a sense there is still the adversarial set-up of those systems, because you do end up in a situation where there is a government, as executive, and an opposition as well. The opposition effectively becomes those who do not sit in the government benches, once they've been assigned by the House itself.
Again, going back to the issue at hand here—