Procedure and House Affairs Committee on March 21st, 2017

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

I could lend you a battery. It may be a little simpler.

It actually is an issue, Mr. Chair.

Oh, I see, it's for Mr. Graham's laptop.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

I already have mine. I'm plugging in Larry's cellphone. He's seeking power. We can daisy chain.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

All right, nothing tripped. Presumably when we're over in West Block, we will have fewer of these sorts of issues.

At any rate, returning to the subject at hand, the cycle is to go through the Chief Electoral Officer's review, our recommendations on the CEO's review, and from there move to the minister then designing legislation.

The ever-vigilant Rachel Aiello, who is sitting over at the media desk right now, along with her colleague Laura Ryckewaert, has written a number of articles for The Hill Times about the progress being made on that file. It's slow progress, but that's the nature of a detailed discussion on detailed legislation.

Although there is a minister responsible, as there must be under our Constitution, this one statute, unlike all other statutes in Canada, is not dealt with by the minister and his or her public servants working on developing the first draft of legislation internally and then revealing it. Rather, we assume that essentially the people who would fulfill the role normally fulfilled by those public servants is this committee. When we act collegially and as a whole, we are collectively fulfilling the role that the minister has in terms of providing material for new elections legislation.

That wasn't the whole basis, but it was part of the basis for the objection that a number of people had—Mr. Christopherson most volubly—on the subject of Bill C-33, which popped out before we'd finished our review.

We have a process that was violated by introducing Bill C-33 in the manner in which it was introduced. That is without regard to the issue of the content of Bill C-33, to which I think Mr. Christopherson had less in the way of objection. I know certainly that was true for me. While I don't agree with everything in Bill C-33, I do think that the way in which it was introduced, too early in the process, was itself an issue.

It was introduced in December. That was too early. However, in all fairness, there's comes a point at which it is too late to put in place some of the changes that need to be made to the Canada Elections Act, because it just takes time to implement some of these systems.

That, of course, was the very same issue that existed with regard to the electoral reform legislation. It was always a question of whether we could we get a new system in place in time for the 2019 election, given the amount of time it takes to do all the different things that would have had to be done on that issue.

I'm aware that we're not discussing electoral reform legislation here. I use this merely because it is an analogy that I am very familiar with from having sat on the electoral reform committee for a number of months. I got the chance to ask the Chief Electoral Officer and also the former Chief Electoral Officer, Mr. Jean-Pierre Kingsley, quite detailed questions about the amount of time it takes to engage in various processes that would be engaged were we to change to a new electoral system. Some of the changes they pointed to, some of the ones that take the longest, are not, strictly speaking, relevant. They're not relevant at all to the kinds of changes to the Canada Elections Act being contemplated here. The longest and most complicated was undoubtedly the 20 to 24 months required to engage in a redistribution. That was the hard limit, the outer limit that they faced.

Then I asked them a series of questions at the various meetings of the electoral reform committee and also of this committee. I asked both those gentlemen about other issues that might arise: designing ballots, designing manuals, and so so. These issues, while they are less time-consuming than that of the actual electoral redistribution, are the areas in which we see direct analogies to what is going on with the proposed changes to the Canada Elections Act.

That takes some time to implement. Everything, of course, has to be prepared by Elections Canada for distribution to all 338 of our constituencies, some of which are quite remote. Any new procedure has to be worked through, and an education process has to happen—all before the writ is dropped—with one returning officer from each riding. They then, of course, during the writ period or in the immediate period leading up to it, have to educate many deputy returning officers and poll clerks, so that this can all be executed seamlessly in literally tens of thousands of polling stations across the country.

Not every procedure has to be executed at every polling station. Some are done only at, for example, the 338 locations where advance polls are counted, or the smaller number of locations at which ballots are being mailed out for those who are voting overseas and so on. There is a lot of work. It's all being done in parallel, and it all takes time.

With these considerations in mind, Minister Gould approached this committee on March 10 and asked us to try to wrap up our work by June. She actually said preferably by May 19. This is referring to our work on the Canada Elections Act. I guess it depends who you're asking, how difficult it would be to accomplish this.

Mr. Chair, in speaking of The Hill Times, you indicated that we've picked the easiest things and have already dealt with them, and we're actually getting into the more difficult work. You didn't say the following, but it implies that the more time-consuming work—in trying to get through the remaining areas of the Canada Elections Act that we haven't yet dealt with—is still to come.

My own view is that we are getting educated and are therefore building up a body of expertise that allows us as a group to move more quickly, so we might actually make some unexpected progress. Those are my public remarks, which have been published in The Hill Times.

Additionally, my private thoughts have been that we also could go through a triage process, in which we say here are the things that really need to be studied by the committee. There may be other things about which we can say, if we don't get to this, it's actually not as critical. This allows us potentially to deal in more depth with some of the areas in the Elections Act and not others, or deal with some in more detail and others in less detail.

The reason I say this is that we are confronted by deadlines that are increasingly difficult to meet. The minister recognized at the time—I don't have her remarks in front of me, but I hope to get them and bring them back to the committee and share them with you in greater precision, because what I like about her is that she is very precise in her thoughts. You have clearly defined deadlines to work towards, and that's a valuable asset when one is trying to deal with the problem we ultimately have of limited time, limited human resources, and an important area of subject matter. She actually went off, saying we have x number of items to deal with subsidiary to our review of the Elections Act. We have, ideally, from her point of view, May 19 as the deadline.

I think we'd have to concede that the May 19 deadline could not be met by this committee under any circumstances. If we were, for the sake of argument, Mr. Chair, to resolve to cease all activity on the matter of the Standing Orders and set it aside until after the review of the Canada Elections Act were done—something I actually think would be the sensible way to go—and we were to just stick with our scheduled meetings, we'd have, of course, a two-week break beginning.... I guess we'd get one meeting in on Thursday, we'd then have a two-week break, and then we would reconvene and it would be May. It does take some time, typically two meetings, to get the actual report written, as opposed to putting together the recommendations.

So getting the report written and out the door to the House by May 19.... What have we got? We'd have four meetings I think before May 19. It might be six. No, I think it's four, Mr. Chair, and two of those would be eaten up with something that is not really adding to our subject matter—designing the report. I think the May 19 deadline is already not achievable.

She also said, “but I could live with June”. I think that's what we're talking about. Getting that done by June would involve a very substantial amount of work. That is the first item we have to deal with.

A second item we have to deal with, Mr. Chair, is Bill C-33 itself, which deals with some of the same subject matter. What the minister now has to do when she's designing her legislation is to work around Bill C-33, and it's by no means certain that Bill C-33 itself exhaustively with the sections of the act it is amending.... It was designed to deal with certain problems that the government felt had been introduced to the Canada Elections Act by the previous bill that had been introduced in the wake of this committee's hearings in the last Parliament, that is to say the Fair Elections Act.

The way Minister Monsef described this was that it would be dealing with what she characterized as the unfair features of the Fair Elections Act. I think from her point of view that was a sincere characterization, because I noticed in looking at Bill C-33 that there were aspects of the Fair Elections Act that it did not repeal. That suggests to me that Minister Monsef and the whole cabinet, which I assume had to agree to this bill, felt these were fair aspects of the Fair Elections Act. This deals, for example, with a number of areas regarding overseas voters and there are other areas as well that have been left intact, but it went through in an order that is different from the order in which we're approaching things.

The new piece of legislation would, presumably, have to be crafted to take into account the areas of the Elections Act that have been dealt with in the Chief Electoral Officer's report and have become the subject matter of the reports this committee is working on, but that have not been dealt with through Bill C-33.

There's the question—which we haven't really dealt with yet—of what we do with areas that the Chief Electoral Officer's report does deal with and that have also now been dealt with by Bill C-33. That's possibly one place area where you could engage in the triage exercise and just say, look, given our limited time, given the fact that the government has already dealt with this in Bill C-33, maybe we should just excise these areas from our study. That would allow us to somewhat compress the time we need to go through the Elections Act.

Here you are, the minister has got the new law she's working on, Bill C-33, which will go before the Commons this Thursday. If I might add, Mr. Chair, this raises a point that is of some concern to me. I think the hours we are scheduled to meet on Thursday may overlap with the period when that bill is before the Commons. I'm not sure that's correct, but given that Thursday's hours have been changed—

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

At the moment, we'll be meeting from 9 to 11.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Right. And that bill is up in the House at what time? Does anybody know? Does anybody have an idea when Bill C-33 is up in the Commons on Thursday? Is it 10 a.m.?

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

I think so, yes.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Yes, I think it's at 10 a.m.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

We have routine proceedings at 10.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Yes, and question period is at 11. But it is routine proceedings.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Thursday will be per our regular Fridays.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Yes, Thursday will be like Friday.

Anyway, that is a matter of some concern to me. I think the members of this committee should, for the most part, be in the House for that proceeding. Perhaps, Mr. Chair, you can consider if we could make an adjustment to this committee's schedule on Thursday. We're only talking about having a two-hour meeting anyway.

I think of all the hours this week, this would be the time when it's most appropriate for us as a committee to be in the House. We have been breaking for question period, for example, even though the rules do not require us to do so, along with votes, which the rules do require, but I wonder if you would give some consideration to that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Yes, that makes a lot of sense actually.

If Bill C-33 comes up Thursday, I will probably suspend for the time that bill is in the House, because everyone on this committee should be in the House for that. We're the ones who will deal with that bill.

Thank you, Mr. Reid.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Thank you.

Yes, thanks for at least thinking about that. You have Bill C-33. It's got to go through second reading, and then it will get referred to this committee. It is conceivable that the bill will wind up before we've gone into the summer, and that could be an issue. I'm not saying that will happen, but it certainly is feasible.

I assume that the House is going to vote in favour of Bill C-33 at second reading, which inevitably sends it back to us, and that creates an issue, given the fact that we're talking about the Standing Orders right now.

There's a third piece of legislation from same minister that is highly relevant. Minister Gould indicated some time back—about a month back or perhaps a bit longer—that she would be producing election finance legislation to change aspects of how financing is done. We don't know all the things that are going to be included in this legislation. We do know certain things that won't be contained and certain things that will, but we don't know all the parameters of the legislation. I only know what has been reported in the media. It will not, for example, change the donation limit currently set at $1550—or $1500 set for inflation, which puts it currently a $1550.

It will deal with a requirement for the public reporting of fundraising events at which a minister is present. The logic there for the advance notification is that this does not serve... I think I'm characterizing Minister Gould's comments correctly when I say this means that fundraising events at which a person has paid, let's say for the sake of argument, $300 for a ticket, will not involve confidential access to a minister who is present. You still get access to a minister, but you wouldn't get access that the public doesn't know about until after the fact. You'd be able to know in advance.

My understanding is that the Liberal party has recently adopted this approach voluntarily, and, indeed, it looks like the attempt is to take a process that the Liberal party has adopted and codify it to make it required of all parties. Now, of course, only the Liberal party has ministers at the moment, to state the obvious, so I have a suspicion that this would also involve all members of Parliament. Anyone who is paying for attendance at any event at which the MP is present will be covered—except that they say purely local events won't covered. I don't know how they're going to do that exactly. Maybe it depends on whether the funds are going to the riding association or to the party. That's not clear to me. At any rate, last week I saw a newspaper article saying that this legislation was coming forward this spring and that the minister was in the process of consulting with the other parties about it.

I had somehow managed to get the idea in my head incorrectly that this legislation would be coming forward this autumn, not this spring. So I took the newspaper article and buttonholed the minister in the House, sat down beside her, and started chatting. It was meant to be brief chat. It wound up being a very awkward period for me because, almost immediately after I went over to sit with her, Kevin Lamoureux stood up, and I was in the camera shot. He proceeded to give a talk that was harshly critical of my House leader, so I had to sit on the floor and try to keep my head hidden behind a desk, but none of this is Minister Gould's fault. It was just bad timing on my part.

What she said was, yes indeed, she was planning on introducing that legislation this spring. She indicated that she had already consulted with one of the parties and was trying to line up a meeting with representatives of my party. I know that meeting hasn't happened yet, because I would be present at it as the relevant critic, but she then went on to lay out a bit of her timeline. She said, “You know, I don't control the times on these things exactly; it has to go to cabinet for approval.” I'm assuming that the cabinet process she has to go through is like the cabinet process that governments in the past had. It usually goes to the cabinet committee first, which meets and approves it, and then a presentation is made by the chair of the cabinet committee with the relevant minister present. Then if it gets approval, it comes back and is introduced in the House—but that happens this spring.

It could be that it will simply be introduced this spring, have first reading, and not get second reading until the summer is over. We did not get into discussing that, and I think in all fairness she doesn't know. However, in the event that it does, we could find that piece of business before this committee. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that this item of business would be before this committee this spring, and I say that for the following reason, because as a piece of legislation, it has to go through this House and then through the Senate. As you know, one of the complaints that the government has been making is that the Senate does not move with alacrity. Indeed, this has been a complaint of all governments through the entire history of our confederation. If you go back and read debates from the 1860s about what it was like before Confederation, we had the Legislative Council of the Province of Canada, and you realize that they had the same complaints about that body too. So this has been going on since time immemorial, or at least since we have had Hansard records.

There is a legitimate worry that what would happen is something such as this: if this committee and the House don't deal with this particular item until the autumn, and the House comes back in mid-September, we will deal with this item of business, this new piece of financial legislation, through the remainder of the month of September. Yet if we don't start dealing with it in this committee before September, it would be optimistic to hope to get it out of the House of Commons before the end of September. It would be hard to imagine its getting out before the October break, the Thanksgiving break. So we're talking now of mid-October when it would come back. It would go to the Senate, and the chances of it getting that legislation through so that it would get royal assent by the end of 2017 are pretty remote. That means the financial rules, which are set on the calendar year, will remain in effect for all of 2018. So I can see her wanting to get this legislation through promptly, which means that it could wind up on our agenda in June as well. That is a realistic scenario. So you now have three pieces of legislation all coming from Minister Gould to us, all of which have to be dealt with by us this spring.

I should take a step backwards and concede the point that, in terms of the recommendation we are making vis-à-vis the as-yet-unwritten legislation that will respond to the review of the Canada Elections Act, it's not a legislative process that we're talking about. It is a practice that has arisen in this place to deal with elections act reform. So we're not trying to get legislation through by the end of June; we're trying to get a study and recommendations through, which then lead to her introducing legislation in the autumn. She was quite clear about that in her March 10 meeting here. She's not talking about introducing that piece of legislation this June; she's talking about having the summer free to design, with her officials, legislation that conforms as best it can with our recommendations. However, she has the right as a minister of the crown to disagree with some of the recommendations and say either, “I think the CEO was right to recommend X, while the committee recommended not X, but Y”, or “I disagree with both of them and I'm introducing something else.”

It is very likely, and I'm certain that this is the case, as it has been the practice in the past, that she would take our reports, read them thoroughly, as I'm confident she does, and would go with her officials to meet with the Chief Electoral Officer and the officials at Elections Canada, presumably on more than one occasion, to discuss whether what she's drafting in response seems workable from their point of view. Actually, there is no Chief Electoral Officer at the moment, so it would be the acting CEO.

I can see how that would take a whole summer. That's really easy to imagine. So she comes back, the House reconvenes around the 8th, 9th, or 10th, somewhere in that range, and she could introduce that bill at first reading immediately. In fact, I'm virtually certain that this is exactly what would happen with that piece of legislation. She went through with us on March 10...a discussion of some of the things that she would try to achieve. It's clear that she was hoping to get that legislation through the House and the Senate, and to have royal assent by December 31 so this, too, could be in effect—although, in all fairness, when it comes to that legislation, actually having it in effect is not as important as having a certain message that it will come into effect. If Elections Canada can be confident that it is going to go through, the legislative process on this issue being generally non-partisan.... I think that, on a technical piece of legislation like this, it's likely to be largely non-partisan. The things we would be doing would be picking up on technical errors. We are now reviewing a piece of legislation designed by the minister and her staff in co-operation with the CEO, after we've done a review and after the CEO has done a review. Presumably, the really big bugs have been worked out of the system by that point, so hopefully we can proceed with more speed here, and in the Senate.

That would hopefully make it possible for this to move through with some speed, but we still have to deal with it. It still has to happen. We have no control whatever over how things happen in the other place. Complicating all of this a bit, as I mentioned, is the fact that we don't currently have a CEO. We do have a CEO hiring process under way. It's a public hiring process, which moves at its own speed, so there is an additional wrinkle there in terms of how fast the response of the CEO will be. Not having a permanent CEO, and then having a new CEO presumably by some point midway through this process, will not speed up the adoption by the Chief Electoral Officer and Elections Canada of the recommendations made here, which encourages us to have greater speed. Certainly, I would think that no interim CEO would be comfortable putting something into effect, knowing that it doesn't have the approval of someone who will be appointed shortly and who will be the boss. If I am on the staff of Elections Canada, I would not want that person to walk in and discover that there have been a bunch of faits accomplis that the new boss might not approve of, which have been done, in a sense, in order to push that person into losing their decision-making authority over those changes. Those are some of the practical issues that exist.

With all of this in mind, all of these problems that relate back to the Minister of Democratic Institutions and the workload that she has given us, I drafted a letter to the minister, asking her how she ought to deal with this and also encouraging her to consider dealing with some of her colleagues in the cabinet to cause them to shift the direction they are taking with regard to the high importance they are placing on reviewing the Standing Orders by a June deadline so that we can deal, in as businesslike a manner as possible, with the matters that we were dealing with and that we are going to have to deal with—the workload that was already great in margin and that has grown, depending on how you measure it, threefold since that time.

This is a letter being sent off with today's date on it. I'll just read it verbatim. I think it would be helpful for members of the committee to see exactly where I'm coming from so that they'll know what she is receiving. If they want to communicate with her—either because they agree with what I'm saying, or because they disagree—they can do so. I think that makes this germane to what we're doing here.

Dear Minister Gould,

Thank you for your invitation, sent to my office on April 3, 2017, for an in-person meeting. I appreciate your regular and continuing openness to meeting with me to discuss your portfolio and matters pertaining to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs (PROC). Both of those things are germane to my letter today.

During your last appearance before PROC, on March 9, 2017—

Mr. Chair, I have to stop here. I think I've been saying all along “March 10” for Minister Gould's appearance. It was March 9. That was a Thursday. March 10 was the date for Minister Chagger's discussion paper being introduced and Mr. Simms' motion. That's right.

I'm going to make a note to myself, because I want to return to the dates on those. I think there's a point of significance that I had not realized earlier in our discussion, which I think helps explain some of the problem we're facing here. Sometimes the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, and it can lead to problems further down the line. I think that may have occurred here through no individual fault.

Okay. To go back to the letter:

During your last appearance before [the Procedure and House Affairs committee] on March 9, 2017, you asked the committee to provide our next report on the Chief Electoral Officer's report entitled, An Electoral Framework for the 21st Century: Recommendations From the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada Following the 42nd General Election—

I then give a quote from the minister about reporting back, as follows:

—“before the House rises for the summer, preferably by May 19” so that you would “be well positioned to advance some significant reforms that would improve the electoral process for Canadians”, namely through legislation that you hope to introduce this coming autumn.

So far, PROC has spent 16 meetings to produce two reports on the Chief Electoral Officer's report. When you asked [the procedure and House affairs committee] on March 9 for a further report by May 19, [the procedure and House affairs committee] would normally have had 12 additional meetings in which to prepare that report. [Four] of those 12 meeting times have elapsed without further progress on the report having been made.

Seeing as I'm sending this letter off today, I'm going to have to change that to five. Let's see: is that right? Yes, today's meeting would be five. I'll continue:

At this time, it is uncertain how many meetings [the procedure and House affairs committee] will be able to devote to this report, or whether the committee will be able to provide you with a report at all by the date you identified.

I won't repeat my comments. I'll simply draw attention to them again, which is that I already think that we have to accept that May 19 is a lost cause, although I think June is still achievable for a report back to the minister if we do some triaging.

To go back to the letter:

This uncertainty is on account of events precipitated by your cabinet colleague, the Government House Leader, [Bardish Chagger] on and since March 10, 2017, the day after your last visit to [the procedure and House affairs committee]. ...These events have brought to a halt the committee's ability to work on the Chief Electoral Officer's report.

The letter continues:

In light of the situation presently unfolding in [the procedure and House affairs committee], I am writing to ask you whether you could give [our committee] indications on a number of questions, namely:

1. Whether the May 19 date for a report is flexible;—

I actually think the answer to that from her was that yes, it was—that it was a preferred date—but I'm hoping her response would give some indication of the degree to which there's flexibility and at what point she has what I think of as a drop-dead timeline.

For example, you mean to go and cast your ballot at a certain time. You mean to do it in the mid-afternoon and something comes up—you have to take the kids to day care and then something else comes up—but we all know that there's a point at which the polls close. That's your drop-dead deadline for voting. Well, there's a drop-dead deadline for getting this thing back to her. I'm hoping to elicit a response as to what that is. Or if she wishes to give a more nuanced response about which parts should come first—if there are going to be multiple drop-dead deadlines—that would be just fine.

That was number one. I'll continue:

2. Whether you would still accept a report before the House rises for the summer, as you indicated;

3. What alternatives you might suggest in order to provide you with feedback in time to be considered for your fall legislation;

4. Your view of how [the procedure and House affairs committee] should prioritize the business it has in front of it, or will have in front of it, to the extent that those items conflict. Those items being:

a. the CEO recommendations report;

b. Bill C-33, which...[at time of this writing] is at second reading stage in the House;

c. your planned bill this spring on [the financing of political parties]; and

d. the on-going discussion over proposed changes to the House of Common Standing Orders, based on [the] discussion paper released by the Government House Leader on March 10, 2017, and presently subject to a motion calling for a report to be completed by June 2, 2017.

As you know—

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Hold it. We have a point of order.

[Kennedy Stewart, NDP, Burnaby South, BC]

I have a point of clarification for Mr. Reid.

You mentioned earlier that there's another bill coming forward—

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Yes.

[Kennedy Stewart, NDP, Burnaby South, BC]

—about changes to the Elections Act regarding finance. I was searching for any record on that, and I couldn't find it. Could you fill me in again on the details of what that would be?

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

It has come up. There seems to have been very limited coverage. If you're looking for media coverage of it, you normally find it mentioned as a subsidiary item in articles about how—because we're a collegial committee here, I always want to put these things in non-partisan terms—it has been suggested that it's inappropriate that there be cash for access fundraisers, or at least that's how they're characterized. The minister is present. You pay something close to the maximum allowable contribution and then have the opportunity to have some face time with the minister. That's the practical impact of those. The government has been responding to it and saying it's taking action.

The Liberal Party on its own has said that it is now going to make public about 48 hours in advance, I think, where the events are occurring: the dates, times, and locations of any meetings at which this kind of interaction is taking place. That's what gets the coverage—their response—but sort of hidden in the middle of the article will be something else about the minister saying that she intends to introduce legislation to deal with this. Typically, further up in the article, it's mentioned that they won't be changing this contribution limit, which is obviously one of the ways in which it has been suggested one could deal with this issue. She mentioned in a fairly recent article about a week ago that the intention was to introduce that legislation this spring.

I was quite surprised by that. It was actually drawn to my attention by our party's chief fundraiser, who said, “Hey, what's up with this?” He phoned up and said that I was her critic so I was to find out whether that was happening. Former senator Irving Gerstein was the one who called me. I actually told him, “Irving, it's not happening in the spring, but look, I'll go and confirm it with the minister.” I went over to her desk and asked her, and she said, “Oh, yes, it's this spring.” Then she reminded me of an earlier meeting where she had told me. I had simply misheard. It hasn't received much publicity, but it is intended for this spring, absolutely.

At first I thought it seems precipitous and hasty, and then I thought it through and realized that to get this piece of legislation through so that it has royal assent by December 31, given the fact that the schedule over in the other place does not always move with alacrity, I actually can see why she would want to have it in the House and, for that matter, entirely through this House by the end of June.

There are other scenarios I can imagine. I have thought of this. In fact, I was going to raise this. It's not in the letter, but it's a good question that all of us on this committee have to think about, which is, given the amount of material we have before us, whether we're going to have to consider having this committee sit during the summer. Now, that doesn't deal with every issue. It doesn't deal with something that has to go through this committee and then back into the House by June.

If, for example, her goal, and I'm not saying this is her goal.... Well, let's take Bill C-33 as an example. I think it is her goal to have Bill C-33 through this committee, back in the House, and then through third reading in the House by the end of the spring. I haven't asked her that, but I assume that's her intention. Maybe it's the House leader I should ask.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Mr. Reid, I also suggested that after the filibuster we could just keep meeting during these hours and we would get everything done.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Do you mean if we meet during the summer?

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

We would just meet during these hours, every day until the end of June, like we are now, and we would get all our work done.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

I see what you're saying.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

From nine in the morning until midnight.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

That would also work. You're right. I had not thought of suggesting that to the minister.

Before you go too far down that road, Mr. Chair, I should point out, for what it's worth, that I have observed that it's possible for someone who is not deeply and intimately familiar with the inner workings of the Canada Elections Act to come in here and speak for seven hours. In fact, I've noticed that on several occasions. That would be less true when we're dealing with.... I think we would all have to cognizant in great detail and focusing at something close to peak efficiency. I might gently nudge you in the direction of perhaps having us cut off at my bedtime, which, given my advanced years, is closer to 10 than it is to midnight.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Your advanced years?