Evidence of meeting #55 for Procedure and House Affairs in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was opposition.
A video is available from Parliament.
10:35 p.m.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
I'm impressed. You got applause at the end of your speech. I don't think anybody else did. Well done.
10:35 p.m.
Some hon. members
Oh, oh!
10:35 p.m.
NDP
10:35 p.m.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
At any rate, thank you very much, Chair.
First of all, let me just put it on the record that in all likelihood, had it been just about any other member of the governing caucus who'd brought this motion in, I think the attacks would have been a lot more withering, and it would be hard for them not to be personal.
Conversely, because of the respect that everyone on all sides of the House has for Mr. Simms, as much as we are hitting his ideas and arguments as hard as we would anyone else's, it's not hard to make sure that one doesn't slip into personal acrimony and start to question his motives and his priorities as a parliamentarian.
Through you, Chair, I just want to say to my colleague that while this is an adversarial system, and we are at pitched battle right now on an idea and an issue, absolutely nothing that I have to say—I suspect this applies to everyone on this side, but certainly it does for me—will apply to Mr. Simms' integrity and the respect that I hold him in. I have nothing to think that this will change, regardless of how the course of this unfolds.
You're an honourable man, sir, and I know that you're doing the best you can. I probably know more than most, since I'm privy to offline discussions between you, me, and Mr. Richards. I could back up what I'm saying with witness testimony, if I had to.
I just want to be clear on that, Mr. Simms. My remarks are on your arguments, and absolutely not on you.
10:35 p.m.
Liberal
10:35 p.m.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Also, I'd like to join with Mr. Simms and give a shout-out to very promising young parliamentarians who don't happen to be in either one of our caucuses, which again speaks to how we do try in this place to get beyond just the adversarial aspect of this.
I have even mentioned this in the past when I spoke to Garnett afterwards about a speech he'd made. He reminded me of a young Tony Clement—and I hope this is okay, because I don't know what his politics are—back at Queen's Park, when Tony was a parliamentary secretary. Nobody knew who he was. He would be up in the middle of the night giving speeches that no one was listening to, and I was there responding with speeches that nobody was listening to.
I did say—and it's in their Hansard of that time—that there was absolutely no doubt that this was an honourable parliamentarian and was someone who was going to go on to make a huge difference. I think anybody who knows Tony—I know Tony personally, as he's been a Hamiltonian as part of his life—knows he's an honourable guy. Look at the heights he went to. I see Garnett doing the same thing.
I also have the greatest respect for you, Tom. It's not only what you've said and how you've presented it, but the way you've conducted yourself, both formally in front of the cameras and also behind the scenes. I want to say as a New Democrat to someone who's not a New Democrat that I think you have a lot to contribute to this Parliament, and we are certainly better off having you here.
Having said those things, let me comment first of all on the idea of the adversarial system.
Mr. Simms is absolutely right. It's designed that way. It's deliberate. That's why we have question period every day and congressional systems don't. It's built in. It's the whole notion of the loyal official opposition, where you proclaim your patriotism to Canada and to our Constitution and all that represents, and having said that, you then set it aside and go after the government of the day tooth and nail on the issues.
No matter how withering those attacks may be, that never speaks to whether the government has legitimacy, unless that actually happens to be the issue. It certainly doesn't speak to the notion that you're opposed to our governance, opposed to our system, and inciting revolution. It's all predicated on that respect for an adversarial system. It's meant to give us an opportunity—the whole “two swords' length”—to make sure that we find some means to pass laws in a civilized society other than heading out into the battlefield and killing one another. We all know of and have been to countries where they are literally dying to have that opportunity to have themselves and their country governed by that kind of system.
But I would say to Mr. Simms that, having done a great job of touching on what the adversarial system is, I think he makes the case even more as to why it's important to focus on what we're focusing on here. Mr. Simms went on from his broader view of the adversarial system and started talking about the substance of some of the issues that are in the discussion paper and advising whether he thought they were fair or not and where they were moderate.
That's not where we are right now.
There's also something that most of the world knows in terms of adversarial systems where there's also respect built in, and that's in most organized sports. For the most part in organized sports, you're on one team and you have opponents who are on another team. You're doing your best to defeat them, everything you humanely can to defeat them, but you certainly show respect for the organization you belong to and, most important, for the rules of engagement.
Whether it's an NHL game or a pickup alleyway game of scrub, if you haven't decided what the rules are ahead of time.... I look back now to when I was a kid and I laugh, because I know the truth is that we probably spent more time fighting about what the rules were going to be than we did actually playing the game. That was part of it, but it does point to the fact that even then we knew as kids that to make it work, even for a pickup game in the alleyway, the only way it could work was if we all agreed on what the rules were.
Once we agree on what the rules are, we can then go ahead and engage in that adversarial system. But if we don't agree on the rules, we're not going to get more than two or three seconds or minutes in any kind of play, and we're going to have chaos. That's what happens.
As kids, you'll remember saying, “That's not the rule. You can't do that.” “Well, wait a minute, I said the rule was this.” Then you stand there and have this great debate in the middle of the street for a good 10 or 15 minutes over what the rules are, until somebody yells “car”.
There is a reason for why kids do that. They get it. They get the idea that they can't have a pitched battle and determine who the victorious winner is, who the champions are, and who has the bragging rights of saying they won, if you haven't agreed ahead of time on what the rules are going to be.
With that, of course, you have to have a referee who everyone accepts, and we have that with our chair right now.
I say to the honourable member, the idea that somehow there's an easy, common-sense path to get to the substantive matters.... I have to say that Mr. Simms brought out some arguments that are persuasive and which I'd like to engage in, back and forth, to see whether we could find agreement.
Chair, you know we are currently doing that with the Chief Electoral Office—I can't get into much because we're doing it in camera—and it is known that we have what we call our low-lying fruit process. We're trying to identify those things that we either already agree on, or with some work, respecting each other, on which we can come to an agreement, an all-party agreement, unanimity. Then that goes into the report and we take on the next issue. If it happens that one of the members says, “I have a real problem with this and I'm not going to be able to easily get past it”, we know we're now in for a truncated debate and there is a possibility that no matter how hard we work we may still not find language. When we know it is going to be tough, we set that aside and say we'll come back to that and wrestle it down, and we move on to the next one.
At the end, what we try to do to be productive is to identify enough things on which we do agree, where there is all-party agreement. We put it into a report and send it off to the House for the information of the House, particularly for the government of the day, who, hopefully, if they are living up to their word that they are going to respect what committees say, will take that report and use it to help them inform the legislation that will flow from that.
Right now, we can't get to that point. The government, by virtue of opposing this motion—they haven't said one word to the contrary.... Like Mr. Simms, I haven't been here every minute, but I've certainly been here an awful lot of the time, and I've been out in the House and have listened to the House leader's scrum. I was here late last night when the House leader came by and talked to us. Not once have I heard anybody from the government say that they are prepared to do what was done in the past, which is to only move on items where we have all-party agreement. No one is saying that.
So, Chair, we're left here on the opposition benches with no alternative except to look at the motion and realize that if the government is not supporting it, then the only alternative is that the government feels that with their less than 40% of the popular vote, they have the right, morally and legally, to walk into that House and change the rules of democracy, to change the way that we make laws.
That's where we are right now. I know the government would like to turn the dial, change the channel, and have us talk about whether Fridays are on or not, whether or not the Prime Minister is going to be here on a Wednesday, and the packaging and programming and all that other stuff. They want to eagerly get to that stuff. I would just say to my friends that you may not be so eager to get there once we do, because there will be a lot of substantive debate. But at least we would be engaged in a process of trying to find common ground to make this place better, with everyone of us knowing in our hearts and in the rules that if there isn't full unanimous agreement of the committee, it won't go forward to the House. In this whole debate that we've been having this week—because we're in parliamentary la-la land and this is still Tuesday—the reason we're here is that, like the kids in the alleyway, we can't agree on what the rules are.
All we want to do is to have the rules that have always been in place, that our predecessors used. The government somehow believes that because we are talking about it and not about the “bad people”—how could it be undemocratic if sunny ways and the tribes all decide that this is the right thing for Canada? It is completely missing the fact that the only time there was a systemic review of the Standing Orders, those reports bragged about the fact that they had unanimity.
Mr. Simms, in particular, and others have very much enjoyed holding up the McGrath report and pointing to it as the Holy Grail, the bible. This is where we ought to go here. Look at what they did in here. We need to do work like that. As happens in these kinds of debates, the Speaker was a little bit selective in what he chose to read, and I'm about to do the same thing.
10:35 p.m.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
They're still there. It's not like we're making it up. We're just choosing where we want to go. That's part of debate, right?
Peter Kormos was a master at it. Peter understood fake news before anybody even heard the phrase. I knew Peter well. I served with Peter for a long time, and I fought with Peter. I partied with Peter.
10:35 p.m.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
I know; that's why I'm raising it. Somebody mentioned to me that he mentioned Peter. I served for a long time with Peter in the Ontario legislature.
I just want to, if I can—and I'll be revisiting this in a more fulsome way, because we're going to pick up again, I guess, a week from Monday.
I'm sorry?
10:35 p.m.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Sorry? Oh yes, tomorrow morning. That's an hour. It takes us that long to clear our throats. I was looking past there, to where we'll start getting back into some serious debate again and some serious hours of very riveting points.
On the McGrath report, the government likes to hold it up and say, “Come on, colleagues, see, we have to do the same kind of thing in our era.” The government says that it's up to us, that we have to pick up that mantle, do like the McGrath report did and make this a better place like they did. As for holding it up and waving it around, all right, fine, but what else does that report say?
Right after what Mr. Simms just read, which was the “Order of Reference”, after the very next two pages is the “Preface”, with the personal remarks of Mr. McGrath.
If I may, I also will add my condolences to the family on their loss. Aside from what I'm saying here, Mr. McGrath was clearly a good role model for all of us in terms of what it means to be a parliamentarian. I suspect that he would have been the kind of person who was willing to take the hits back home if necessary, if he knew that here it was the right thing to do. To me, that's always the sign of a parliamentarian who searches their heart as much as their future when they make decisions. It's a loss for all of us.
He did give us that pedestal. Under the preface, he said this:
I wish to thank my six colleagues on the committee for their patience and support. That we were able to operate by consensus without once voting on an issue is a testament to their selfless dedication to reform.
The government likes to suggest that they want to reach the loftiness of that. I suggest that they can't even reach step one until they at least recognize the respect that was in that committee room, the respect for each other regardless of whether they were members of government, the official opposition, the third, fourth, or fifth party, or independents. There was respect. All Mr. Reid's motion is seeking is to reaffirm that respect.
I have only a few minutes left. I was going to go somewhere else on this, but I want to get this on the record tonight because I think it's really important. There's another report, with more of our predecessors doing the same work. Each of us does this in our time, in our era. This is from Bob Kilger, who was the chair of the report of the Special Committee on the Modernization—there you go, there's your favourite little buzzword—and Improvement of the Procedures of the House of Commons. That was chaired by Bob Kilger, MP, in June 2003.
I'm watching the clock carefully, Chair.
I don't think it can be put any better than how they put it. Listen to this, Chair. I'm quoting:
The Committee’s order of reference—like that of its predecessor—required that...any report be adopted by unanimous agreement of all members. We believe that this is desirable for meaningful change, as parliamentary reform is best achieved where there is consensus and all-party agreement. While this may, of course, mean that change is more difficult and may take longer to achieve, in the final analysis, we believe that it results in stronger and more viable reform. The requirement for unanimity has meant that on a number of [occasions], recommendations were not possible....
They were acknowledging that the standard, the threshold of unanimity, meant that for some of the changes—even though they recognized that in principle they might be good—they couldn't make a recommendation, because they couldn't come to a unanimous all-party agreement on what that language and principle would be. That refutes entirely the government's arguments, when they put them up, about why unanimity won't work, or why we shouldn't do it, or why it's not necessary in our time but it was in theirs.
The fact is it is a lot harder. It's much easier just to have the majority government do whatever the heck they want, which is all they're trying to do here. That's very efficient.
I won't say anything more than to say to those who are students of history that just because you can make the trains run on time, it doesn't mean this is the right system to have. That's a bit extreme to say, but the point's made. It's also as close as you can get without losing automatically in debate, right? The first one who says...loses. You know what I'm saying.
Kilgour continued:
The requirement for unanimity has meant that on a number of issues, recommendations were not possible; by the same token, on some issues the members of the Committee have compromised....
That's still not a dirty word in Canadian politics. There are other places where they're making compromise out to be weakness, as failure. We've always seen it as our strength to accommodate one another, to respect one another without giving up our principles.
As Kilgour said:
...by the same token, on some issues the members of the Committee have compromised and worked toward achievable solutions that reflect our differing interests. It should be emphasized that there has been a remarkable degree of agreement, and shared concerns. While we may not always agree on the nature or causes of problems—or of the solutions—we have attempted in this report to recommend changes that we believe will improve the House and the work of its Members. All members of the Committee are committed to the institution of Parliament, and to the importance of the House of Commons as central to our democratic form of government. Obviously, the interests of government Members differ from those of opposition MPs; and, among the opposition parties, there are variances based on traditions, culture, size, and other factors. In the course of our deliberations, we have, nevertheless, had respectful and useful discussions, as we have tried to convince each other of our proposals, or argued against other propositions.
I see the chair signalling that he's wishing to bring us to a conclusion.
This is maybe a good, natural place for me to pause, Chair. I will affirm with you that it's my intention to be back here tomorrow, to pick up my speaking spot when we again meet.
10:35 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
Okay, that's all true. Thank you very much.
The buses are running for half an hour, till 11:30. We will suspend till 10 o'clock tomorrow morning in Room 253-D, and it will be televised.
10:05 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
I call this meeting to order.
We're debating the amendment to Mr. Simms' motion.
Our speaker is, again, Mr. Christopherson.
10:05 a.m.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Thank you, Chair.
Part of my punishment to the government for what they've done is that I'm going to start by singing What a Difference a Day Makes.
Well, well, well, so the government launches a thermonuclear attack on the opposition, and the bomb blows up on the launching pad. I'm of course referring to the fact that the chair is going to adjourn or suspend, probably, this discussion in a little less than one hour. Whereas the government was all bloody-minded that they were going to force us to actually capitulate at the end of the day, here we are now, a day later, and the government is blinking.
In the next 50 minutes or so that I have, Chair, I want to just take the time, because there will be a week before we come back. I wouldn't be one to suggest that there are millions of Canadians hanging on this debate, but I would say that for people who are serious about studying the politics and the give-and-take and the thrust of what happens here on Parliament Hill, there is a lot of attention on this. Those who care about democratic reform and about electoral promises are watching very carefully, both on the activist side...and, you know, there is a whole host of the academic world that pays attention to these things, too.
My intent—rather than my usual goal, which is to try to convey messaging by being at least partway entertaining—in this next period is to lay out exactly how we got here, so those who want to write about this and comment on it over the next week at least have a factual basis for understanding how we got here. It's not straightforward. Like most of what we do in politics, it's not crystal clear, and rules around here are often arcane and complex, which is why, Chair, you have the clerk to advise you on the rules, as experienced as you are. I was a chair too, and we can't know all the rules. There are just too many permutations. We have experts.
In each of our caucuses, we have experts. We have Rob Sutherland, who is just a national treasure in terms of understanding the minutiae.
It's not easy at first glance, even if you've had some experience at politics, to understand where we are, how we got here, and who the good guys are and who the bad guys are here, which is, of course, a subjective analysis at the best of times.
Let's just casually walk through how this slow-motion train wreck happened.
During the last constituency week, at some point—I think midway, or towards the end of that week—the government House leader issued a discussion paper, the infamous discussion paper, which outlines a number of areas that the government would like this committee to “discuss”. They want to have a discussion. In and of itself, that was not huge headline news, because we really didn't know what it meant. There was no comment that came with it. To the best of my knowledge, there was no contact with our House leader or our democratic reform critic. It just magically appeared one day, and Mr. Simms' magical land speed record response with his motion then followed, and he takes his bow, as he should.
That motion is a real straitjacket if there isn't an understanding going into that discussion that the only items being recommended for change in the report should be those items on which there is all-party agreement, because in the absence of that, it's not a discussion. This is just foreplay before the government just moves in with its majority and finishes things off. It'll bide its time and let the opposition talk, but we get into that straitjacket of the magical June 2, by which, if we're not done, there are supposed to be all kinds of catastrophic consequences.
It's interesting how all of a sudden out of that tight time frame, though, the government now can find a whole week during which we don't need to meet, during which we would have 24-7 opportunity. We could have done a lot of work in that time. It's interesting how the government has now decided, “Gee, we don't really want to have that focus over the next week”.
Again, the discussion paper lands. Mr. Simms' motion lands. Most people are focusing on the budget on the upcoming Wednesday, now passed. Then we go to our regular PROC meeting on Tuesday at 11 a.m.
You convened us, Chair. We came to order, and we were in camera. We were continuing our good work, our all-partisan, co-operative, progressive work, on the chief electoral report, a huge, mammoth report with major implications for our country and our future elections. We were doing good work. We arrived here Tuesday morning. Staff were there from the Chief Electoral Office. We had all our mountains of trees that were cut down in front of us, all ready to go.
The government, out of nowhere—I can't say much, but I can say what they did in camera—said they wanted to go public.
10:05 a.m.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
In and of itself, it's usually a good thing, but it was a little perplexing given that it came in the middle of our doing a process that historically, and by all-party agreement, we do in camera. All our motions and all our actions, of course, have to be done in public, but the actual deliberations, the give-and-take, the negotiations, take place in camera to give us the latitude to try to get to agreement. Anybody who has ever negotiated collective agreements understands the one thing that's a certain kiss of death—to try to negotiate in the media. At some point, you need to have a Get Smart cone of silence over it.
I keep dating myself, don't I, Chair. I just can't avoid it.
I will go this far. If I get tagged, I'll take the hit, but the reason I do it I think will be clear. We asked for a reason why—just “why”—and in this climate of goodwill and working together and co-operativeness and trying to be helpful to one another and working at a common goal, there was radio silence. No answer. Okay. We're certainly never going to oppose going in public if there's a good reason why we should. Normally, you would think, when we come into a meeting like this....
Mr. Chan has been very good in the past, as the usual lead on the government side, to talk to me and Mr. Richards ahead of time, to give us a kind of heads-up—i.e., “Hey, guys, here's what I'm thinking of doing, and here's why, just to let you know.” What that does, of course, is it settles down the suspicion. Then you enter into these things with some idea of what the government really has in mind so that you don't do your usual, which is to go apoplectic to make sure you stop them from doing something when you have no idea what their game plan is. It's a default mechanism. We all do that.
There was no explanation forthcoming, so we went public. Mr. Simms' motion is now on the floor for debate. I said earlier it was Mr. Richards' amendment that we were debating. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's Mr. Reid's amendment we're debating, correct?
10:05 a.m.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Mr. Reid then placed his amendment, which was exactly the right thing to do at exactly the right time: wait a minute—the first thing we need to decide here is what the rules of engagement are. His amendment to the motion was that we agree, basically. I won't read the legalese, but the essence of it is that we agree that we won't make any recommendations that go into the report unless there is all-party agreement for those recommendations.
Suddenly, it starts to become pretty clear that the government has no intention of supporting this amendment. That's when the first real spark of trouble showed itself. Up until then, it had been the report, the motion, but no comment or context. We didn't really know what it meant. We didn't even know if it was coming up on PROC. As I say, it was a surprise thing. I won't use the word “ambush”, but it was certainly a surprise, unexpected and not explained ahead of time. There were no niceties at all.
The veteran of this committee, Mr. Reid, on behalf of the official opposition, tables a motion that says that if we are going to get into this discussion he would like to make sure that we all understand and we are all in agreement. We get the indication the government is not going to do that. What that means, Mr. Chair, strategically, is that there is a vote coming and if we lose that vote it has serious implications. In this case, what it means is that the government would then retain the right—or rather, take the right—to use their majority to ram through the things they want to do in their discussion paper, in spite of any opposition that the united opposition benches might have.
Just because the discussion paper was issued and there are things they want to do, that doesn't, by its definition, make all those things evil. But I think it's more than fair to say that if you take a close look, anybody who knows anything about parliamentary procedure will tell you that most of these things—let's just call it a round number, 100%—benefit the government. Under the plan that the majority government alone could force those recommendations through, the final report would be called the report of the procedure and House affairs committee. The government could legitimately say, “We are only carrying out the recommendations of our independent standing committee, which took a good look at this, and here is its report.” The government keeps saying, “Well, you can attach your dissension reports underneath.” Yeah, that's a little nicety. When have you heard anybody say, “What we are doing as a government is consistent with exactly what was in the report. Oh, and by the way, to be fair-minded, I want to point out that both opposition parties did put forward dissenting reports”? That doesn't happen. It doesn't have to. That is why it's so critically important that the report reflect all our opinions and not just the majority.
Trust me, the plot thickens here; that was the easy part. So, we have the discussion paper, motion, meeting, surprise, and amendment to do the right thing, and the government indicates that they are opposed to it. This means that what we have to do strategically is to make sure this doesn't get voted on. This was moved by the official opposition. Once you get an indication that the government is going to oppose it, and they have more votes than we do, it's simple math.
The last thing that someone of Mr. Reid's experience is going to do is allow that vote to happen, where we lose, knowing we are going to lose going into it, and thereby losing our opportunity to have a unanimous all-party report reflecting all our wishes rather than just the ham-fisted demands of the government running over our rights. That's the implication. That's fine. That is when Mr. Reid made it clear that he was going to do exactly what you would do in that case.
Most of us at one time or another have had to do it. That is, you sort of advise colleagues, “Settle in for the rest of this meeting because I intend to talk out the clock. The last thing I'm going to do is let the debate collapse and have a vote come forward that I know I'm going to lose.”
Mr. Reid did the thing that we all do in that situation: he started talking. His goal was to talk from 11:00 till 1:00, which were our regularly scheduled hours. Then, under normal sort of “skirmishes”—I'll call them that as opposed to the war we're in now—under normal circumstances, what would happen, Chair, is that at one o'clock, the scheduled time to rise, the committee would adjourn.
We would all then go about our business as normal, come back at our next regularly scheduled meeting, which would be the following Thursday, again from 11:00 to 1:00. At 11:00, you would gavel us into order and then give the floor to Mr. Reid, who rightfully has the floor under our rules, in that you can't force someone to end debate until they're done. Under our rules, you carry that right into the next meeting: “What's our order of business this Thursday? Well, we're going to continue what we were talking about on Tuesday, and Mr. Reid has the floor.” That's exactly what Mr. Reid and the rest of us expected to happen.
And then, things got dirty. Now, I'm sure it's happened before. I've only seen it once before. I've had it done to me once before, and you remember it.
What happened is that at one o'clock, Mr. Reid rightfully expected that he would conclude his comments and be ready the following Thursday to pick up where he left off and continue. It would be that kind of thing, which is why I call it a “skirmish”. It would be a filibuster, but it would be within the usual time frame of when that committee meets. “That committee happens to be seized up right now because we have this issue and we're dealing with it as we go along.” It wouldn't become what this has become, because of this one—and I'm going to call it a dirty trick because it is a dirty trick—ambush. I had exactly the same thing done to me.
What happens is that you find out that, where we all thought if the meeting—and this comes as a shock to members over and over, and it did to me.... We had a document that called this meeting to order, and it said that we were going to meet from 10:00 to 11:00. Well, I guess it wouldn't in this case because here we are in parliamentary la-la land; it's Friday, but we're still on Tuesday. Anyway, the fact is that you have a piece of paper that tells you what hours you're going to meet, and 99% of the time that's when you rise. You would expect that.
I think there was a member of the official opposition who said, “Chair, I would point out that it's a couple of minutes after one o'clock. We should adjourn this meeting and this discussion and reconvene on Thursday at the regular time.” The chair said, “Actually, no, we're going to continue.” Points of order ensued, and we had a discussion with the clerk about what was going on: “It said the meeting is over at one o'clock. It's now a couple of minutes after one o'clock. The chair has an obligation to end this meeting.”
Ah, but you see, that's the interesting thing about parliamentary rules: they're not always crystal clear. What's inferred at the one o'clock rise is that at least the majority agree with that. It, in and of itself, is not an ironclad law of parliamentary physics that the committee must end at its scheduled time. The committee ends when a majority says that the committee ends. Given that we are masters of our own domain and masters of our own destiny, that right remains sovereign, unless and until collectively we decide differently, or we get overarching marching orders from the House. Other than that, we control our destiny.
So when you apply that, what it means is, if the chair knows that the majority government members are not going to vote for adjournment, he has, in this case, really no alternative but to keep the meeting going. Now if need be, he can stop things and force a showing that there is a majority who want to keep going, but when there's a majority built in, it's implied and understood, and that's the way that rule works.
It was done to me, interestingly enough, on a very similar kind of matter under that good old Bill C-23, the unfair elections act. I came in all raring to go. I came in and got my stuff. I got my speech; I'm ready to go; and I'm two hours, like Mr. Reid. I have two hours to go, and then I have a day in between where I can do my homework and get my next two hours of talking points so I can keep the floor and keep it going because, as you know, Mr. Chair, we can't repeat our arguments, and any argument we make has to at least have some kind of tenuous relationship to the motion at hand, and that is a discretion that you reserve as the chair as to whether or not something is germane to the point in front of us.
I had exactly the same thing. I had that two hours, exactly the same scenario, and the whole points of order, and, “What do you mean?” and shock on my part. I'm like, “What the heck?” Then suddenly I'm filibustering 24-7, and I have about two hours' preparation. That was deliberate. It was an ambush. Now for some of us—and I won't go long on this to my Conservative colleagues—some things leave permanent scars. My good friend Harold is laughing.
Now you might expect that kind of thing from a ham-fisted government that we had before. I'll leave it at that, Harold, okay? If you take that one, Harold, I'll cut it short. I don't want to go too far down that road because it takes the sting away from this government, and that's really where the play is, but it does need to be said that we are in this.
When I used the word “war”, it wasn't on the discussion paper, and it wasn't on the motion, and it certainly wasn't on the amendment. It was the governing Liberals using.... That was the government doing exactly what Harper did, as a vicious...legitimate.... I'm not saying we'll use points of order to stop it, so it's allowed, but that doesn't make it right, and it certainly doesn't mean it was fair play. There was never any intent for fair play. The government hoped that they would catch me flat-footed. At the time I was the only one who was keeping it going on the filibuster, so if I couldn't keep talking, that meant that the debate would collapse, and the vote would have happened, and I would have completely lost any further input into how C-23 was going to be dealt with. I won't say that I won, but we did get some concessions.
My point is that it is a sneak attack. It's an ambush. It's meant to catch members flat-footed by using an interpretation of the rules that is not done day-to-day. In fact, it's not even done usually year to year around here. Once every Parliament or so, this kind of hijinks is carried out. That is when this government decided that they were going to take this skirmish, and they were going to make it a full-blown war, and I just called it for what it is. That's what triggered us going 24-7.
It's really important for those who want to understand how we got here that this is not about the opposition going apoplectic, and all we've done is step forward, and we've hijacked the House and hijacked the committee, and that we're the ones who are forcing all of this. Not the case.
10:05 a.m.
Conservative
Blake Richards Conservative Banff—Airdrie, AB
On a point of information, this is actually a perfect opportunity for me to raise something that I want to raise as a point of information. Just for the information of committee members, there was an e-petition put up about half a day ago. Late yesterday it was put up, just before dinnertime yesterday. It's on this topic, and it might be something members would be interested in following, particularly the Liberal members, because they are being expected to do the Prime Minister's dirty work for him. I'm sure they're getting a lot of flack about that, and the only person who is benefiting from this is the Prime Minister. He's the one who wants to make life easier for himself, so this is something Liberal members might want to follow.
It's Petition e-983. I'll just note that it has been up for about half a day now, and it has about 5,000 signatures. I'm watching it, and it's growing by the minute here. There are signatures from every single province and territory all across the country.
I won't read the preamble, because that might take too much of Mr. Christopherson's time, but I will just read the part on the petition, just for the information of members:
We, the undersigned, citizens and residents of Canada, call upon the Government of Canada to adhere to longstanding Parliamentary tradition and procedure and not force any changes to the Standing Orders of the House of Commons outlined in the above mentioned discussion paper without the unanimous consent of all political Parties currently represented in the House of Commons.
As I said, there have been around 5,000 signatures in about half a day, and that is growing by the minute. It's something I think members would want to be aware of and follow, because it's obvious that Canadians from all across this country are demanding that the government not do this without the consent of all political parties.
10:05 a.m.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I thank Mr. Richards for that, because it shows there are not only the folks on the list that I mentioned but also a whole lot of others. In fact, a lot of the people who felt betrayed over the government's decision to back away from democratic reform are those in exactly the same demographic and part of the population who are very upset about what's being done here and the way the government is trying to grab power beyond what it is already legitimately entitled to. That just doesn't sit well with Canadians.
Again, that's why the politics of this thing is so crazy, Mr. Chair. You've heard me. I've been perplexed from the beginning as to, one, why the government is doing this, and, two, how on earth it thinks it's going to win. This is Canada. This is a government that ran on a whole platform of doing things differently, of doing the opposite of this sort of thing, of not doing this kind of sandbagging of the opposition members, or using parliamentary trickery, or ambushing people, and keeping them in the dark. All of that was supposed to have been swept away in the last federal election while we had a new dawn of sunshine, light, and transparency. Instead, we get political thuggery that in some ways surpasses what Harper did. That achievement, and then uniting the Conservatives and the NDP around any kind of issue, would be the two grand accomplishments of this government.
I want to come back again to why we're here, how we got here, and why, even though this is Friday, it's only Tuesday. It's because the meeting on Tuesday has still not ended; this is it. The chair has been very careful not to adjourn, which would then require a reconstituting of the committee and all the procedures we go through. The chair just suspends the meeting when we do suspend, but technically this is still Tuesday. The whole idea was that the government was going to force the opposition to die on this political hill. It did it the day before the budget, knowing that everyone was distracted by the budget; and they were. There was very little coverage of the use of this nuclear option by the government in the media, for good reason. It was focusing on the budget. That's why the government brought this in. It's no different from announcing bad news on a Friday afternoon. It starts to get reported on the weekend when many people have shifted their mind to their personal life, their weekend activities, and they don't really tune back in to the serious formal part of the world until Monday morning when they have to. This was the same sort of thing. It hoped that we wouldn't have enough material and that we would be afraid of a public backlash against us for being obstructionist. That's why the messaging of Mr. Simms and others and the House leader all along has been that they just want a discussion, that they just want to improve things, that this is about modernizing, that they have a mandate to modernize, and that that's all that's going on here.
Yet, what they wanted was for us to cave so that we would quickly get to a vote and come back again. That would force us to have that vote on the amendment that we will only make decisions by all-party agreement, and it would lose. That was its game plan, Mr. Chair. This crowd wants everybody to believe that they're so different with sunny ways, transparency, and accountability, and that we are all going to sing Kumbaya, and we are going to pass laws together, and we will do things only.... That was all just talk.
They came in here as ham-fisted and bloody-minded as Harper was on his most determined day, and used his same nuclear option. Poor Mr. Reid was just like me, practically apoplectic that now, suddenly, unexpectedly, that really is how we pass laws, by tricking and scamming one another. Suddenly what Mr. Reid prepared for, and he did an excellent job—if you go back to read that, it was a solid piece of two hours of discussion on that motion. He did his homework. He came and did his job. He had every right to believe that at the end of that discussion, at one o'clock, we would adjourn and he would go off and do the other things he does. In the interim, before he took the floor again on Thursday, he would do his homework again and make sure that he had another two hours of very relevant, germane discussion on the motion that's on the floor. That's what he had every right to expect was going to happen. Instead he got ambushed.
Now, tell me how sunny ways and ambush go together. I'm from Hamilton. I understand ambush; I understand getting along together. I understand transparency and sunny ways. This is not it.
Let me just say parenthetically, Chair, if you notice, most on the opposition benches, even when we get in full dudgeon, have been very careful not to in any way try to personalize and put ownership of this on the members of the committee, including you, Chair. No matter what niceties we have that this is Mr. Simms' motion, and Chair, you're being 100% independent and only have the interest of the committee...as much as we all know that's our narrative we also know why it is that the Standing Orders spell out that certain committees have to be chaired by opposition members. Let me just say that fact.
I'm not going any further on this, Chair. That's why I'm saying we live in this kind of suspended belief animation of what's real and what isn't, and you're in this awkward position where you are a member of the team. You were put there by the government. Mr. Preston was no different. He did the best he could to be as fair-minded and as independent as possible, but at the end of the day he was appointed there by the government. When it was time to do what needed to be done, Mr. Preston did what needed to be done, as did every other chair beforehand. The difference between a good one and a bad one is almost how much relish and delight they take in running over the rights of the opposition. Chairs who are deep in character and true parliamentarians actually will push back on their own government behind the scenes and say, that's not right, I'm not comfortable doing it, and that kind of thing will ensue.
I'm not going to go down that road, Chair. You heard what I said the other day. We both knew that it was all very nice and would fit nicely on a pedestal or on a plaque, but the real world is that you're there as a government appointee. We voted for you, but we all understand.
I'm going to do this once so I can move off, but I need to address it because I did deal with it the other day. When you made the decision last evening that we weren't going to sit next week, I'm just going to say that I understand you made that decision. We'll leave that there, but it's also what the government wanted. If anybody wants to refute that, I'm prepared to have that debate also. But the fact is that's what the government decided.
Therefore, why I opened up with my wonderful singing voice on What a Difference a Day Makes is that the government has blinked. They thought that, worst-case scenario, if the budget ruse didn't provide enough cover to slip and slam this through underneath the radar, at the very least they could hold our feet to the fire and make us go 24-7 over the weekend. Why could they see their winning that one? It just happens—purely coincidentally, I'm sure, total serendipity—that the Liberals are all going to be here this weekend because they're having a caucus retreat. My good friend Harold Albrecht knows very well how much easier it is to get volunteers to sit in on a committee when you don't have to schlep it halfway across the continent to do so, especially when you'd much prefer to be in your riding with your constituents, because during these times we don't get a lot of time there so we value it.
We would be struggling, in the opposition benches, to find volunteers to sit in a committee meeting that for the most part nobody's going to pay any attention to, and to give up time with their families and their constituents. Whereas the government, what's your majority? You have 180 members. You only need four or five. Easy-peasy. If the budget didn't give them the cover...it was very clever in the short term.
It wasn't very good in the long term, I have to tell you, but in the short term, I understand it. If the cover of the budget didn't do it, they'd get us on the weekend. The second we can't put up a speaker and the debate ends, that's when the chair can legitimately say that the debate has now closed and we will have the vote. The government will use its majority to carry it, and we will lose the right to have an equal say in what the rules are in the House of Commons.
But what happened along the way is that this was so outrageous, so egregious, so unfair, and, dare I say, so un-Canadian, that even the Conservatives and the NDP found easy common cause in fighting this evilness—and I use that term generically, not biblically. Actually, it's been quite enjoyable. I have to tell you Liberals that we now have created some networks and, regardless of how long we go forward on this, the next time we need to come together, it's going to be a lot easier. We'll be able to do it a lot more quickly. We had a great experience. There was the fun we had doing the budget thing and bringing the attention here. There was a small group of us from both caucuses meeting through the day. There was a lot of respect, a sharing of resources, and staff working together.
I never would have thought it possible that the Conservatives and the NDP could work that closely together in a respectful way and in common cause. I want to thank the government of the day. You did that, and you should feel proud, because that's not easy. There are good sunny ways in terms of this side.
From there, we were easily able to say, okay, we're in this together, because if the official opposition loses the right to have an equal say, obviously we do too, so we have common cause. We quickly got together and said, okay, let's make sure that between the two caucuses we have the weekend covered, because we know the Liberals can do it easily. Over the last 24 hours and 36 hours, we've been working together to coordinate a roster of members who would be here so that we could staff this committee for the entire 24-7 all next week, and the government could sit there and listen to the response to their abuse of our rules, wall to wall, all week.
I have to tell you, notwithstanding the fact that I want to go home to see my family and I want to be in my riding, that I was kind of relishing the idea of that kind of a pitch, because you know what? In my gut, I knew the government couldn't.... How can you win this? How? They can't. Given what's at stake and given what the government has done.... Remember, they caused this war. Normally we wouldn't be having this discussion until the Tuesday we get back, and it would be at the regularly scheduled time. We're only into this crisis 24-7 because the government wouldn't adjourn the darned committee meeting at the time it was supposed to adjourn. That was part of their ambush.
Then, last night, the government message—I'll put it that way—was, “Oh, we're not going to meet next week at all.” Now, I don't know what happened to make June 2 no longer the end of the earth or the end of the world. I guess maybe they delayed it for weather. I don't know. It certainly puts the lie to the argument that this needs to be done chop-chop. They just sold off a whole week of discussion, because when we come back a week Monday.... Are we going to come back at 10 o'clock, Chair, or at 11 on that Monday?
