The government House leader discussion paper was released at 1:00 p.m. on Friday. That is an approximate time, to be fair, but assuming complete accuracy, that was 131 minutes prior to the motion of Mr. Simms. The government House leader's paper is pretty meaty. I think it's eight pages long.
I would argue that it is somewhat implausible that.... Although Scott can correct me if he chooses to do so, I would argue that on its face it is somewhat implausible that Mr. Simms received the paper, read it, put together the motion—it's a very thorough and well-worded motion with five subsidiary items, one of which has three sub-subsidiary items, so two enumerated lists in it—and had it translated and submitted to the clerk all within two hours and 11 minutes.
There appears to be complete consensus on the Liberal side that this is the right way to go, so he either got the consent of his colleagues afterwards, without this being coordinated by the House leader's office or the PMO or.... I could go on and on this way. You get the point that clearly this is a coordinated effort. There is nothing wrong with coordination, for goodness' sake.
I think it is problematic to say, as someone in Mr. Simms's office did to The Hill Times—not Mr. Simms himself—that this was an entirely independent effort. That is not a plausible narrative, and I'm glad that Scott didn't say that because it is obviously not the way things really were.
Anyway, the motion has two primary characteristics. I'm referring to the motion now and not to Ms. Chagger's discussion paper on the House rules. I'll come to the discussion paper in time.
The motion has two primary characteristics, as far as I can see. First of all, it is an omnibus motion. That is to say, it takes all of the Standing Orders and puts them into a single motion, rather like an omnibus bill. We will divide it up into three overarching themes. Actually, to be honest, these are not the themes I would have divided things up into if it had been me writing this. I don't think these are the three natural divisions. They are nonetheless, “Management of Debate, Management of the House and its sittings”, and “Management of Committees”. By definition, it's already omnibus, but there are other things I think don't fit easily into those headings that are within the Standing Orders.
It deals with everything in the House leader's discussion paper, and also the take-note debate, which is required under the Standing Orders to occur within a set period of time following a general election. That took place, in practice, on October 6. That is a debate, I regret to say, in which I was not personally able to take part because I was travelling with a parliamentary committee on electoral reform. I can't remember where we were. I think we might have been in Iqaluit. We certainly weren't here, and for what it's worth, my input, therefore, did not make it in. That's nobody's fault. That's just one of those unfortunate results of parliamentary scheduling—the vagaries of parliamentary scheduling.
However, you see that it's omnibus in several senses. I don't know whether you know what an omnibus is or was. An omnibus was a tract vehicle originally pulled by a horse. It was the answer to a streetcar in places like London, and you would go along a track. In order to help pay for the cost of running the omnibus, people had tickets, just like they do on a streetcar in Toronto today, or any other city that has streetcars or a bus. In fact, with regard to buses, the kind that you get on here in Ottawa, the name comes from omnibuses.
On the side of omnibuses would be ads. If you looked back at the Victorian etchings, illustrations, things that were in the Illustrated London News or The Edinburgh Review in, say, 1850, you would see illustrations of omnibuses. People complained about the traffic problems in those days. Horses have their own form of exhaust, and they complained about that. It wasn't always removed as promptly as it should be.
Crossing the streets in long dresses was a problem. Gentlemen in those days wore spats. Do you ever wonder why people don't wear spats anymore? Okay, the reason is because we don't get poop on our shoes when we cross the street. That's what spats were for. Shoe shines would clean off the leather portions of your shoes but where the laces were, you can understand why that would be problematic.