Sure. It's a fascinating proposal. I'm reminded of a very famous Speaker by the name of William Lenthall. Upon King Charles I entering the House of Commons chamber and demanding that the Speaker point out to him where the five members were seated so that he could arrest them and have them charged with treason, Speaker Lenthall famously rose, bowed to the King, and said, “...I have neither eyes to see, nor tongue to speak in this place, but as the House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am....”
It very much gets to the heart of what the Speaker is. The Speaker is the servant of the House. He is the defender of the House's privileges, the defender of the House's opportunity to engage, discuss, and have fulsome debate, so that our privileges are not declined and we're able to fully participate. The proposal that's being raised, that the Speaker should have the authority to unilaterally.... And I use that word reservedly because it has a negative connotation, and I don't want to imply that any Speaker would do something in a negative context. He or she would be undertaking something on their own, and so would be entrusted with a very significant amount of power to change the course of government legislation and change the course of how something is debated within the House of Commons.
The challenge would be how that would operate in practice, how it would be determined whether something is an omnibus bill, and how the Speaker would then go about dividing that bill. Certainly, when a bill is introduced in the House of Commons, it has the benefit of an entire bureaucratic apparatus to support it. The bill is drafted by a department. It is vetted. It goes through PCO. It goes through the justice department. It's charter-proofed. It goes through a variety of steps before finally landing at the House of Commons for introduction and first reading. Certainly, in my past life before I came here, and before I even went into academia as well, I spent a year and a half at Treasury Board Secretariat. I was able to see some of the processes that are in place for the introduction of government bills, introduction of government measures. They benefit any individual piece of legislation going forward—a great deal of benefit.
To then come to the House of Commons and entrust the Speaker with the task of dividing, chopping up, and creating new legislation somewhat on the fly.... I'm not saying that he'd be doing this on a cocktail napkin in the lobby, in the Speaker's salon, but he would be required to do this on a fairly quick basis. Certainly he would have the benefit of House of Commons staff, of parliamentary counsel's office, but he would have to do this very quickly. In so doing, the Speaker would be altering the course and the context of that parliamentary piece of legislation.
Certainly there are ways around it. A government of the day could issue an edict to departments to ensure that all legislation that comes to the House is done in a form that wouldn't be considered an omnibus bill. This could be done through the cabinet processes. It could be done through a variety of different ways that wouldn't put the Speaker in what I would consider a somewhat awkward position of having to get involved in the discussion of specific legislation and of splitting specific legislation.
I think it's a challenge. That is not to say that there aren't means to get around it. As parliamentarians, we have means of dealing with these types of things. The question is how we enforce it. How do we put it into practice? Is it something that we look to the committee process to do? Do we look to, perhaps, striking a new committee that would specifically deal with that, thereby leaving it within the purview of Parliament, of parliamentarians, and not entrusting the Speaker specifically with that challenge?
Again, the Speaker is the servant of the House. The Speaker is the protector of the House's privileges. I recognize the concerns that have been raised in the past about omnibus bills. They are a legitimate tool. I don't think anyone would argue that they're somehow illegitimate. People may not agree with the use of them, and that's certainly an argument that could be made, but they are a legitimate tool that governments have used in the past and, no question, may consider using in the future.
To make the Speaker determine what may or may not be considered an omnibus bill and then go the extra step of basically redrafting legislation, and multiple pieces of legislation, I think would be putting the Speaker in a terrible position that as parliamentarians we ought not to do.
Hopefully, Blake, that was some context for you.