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.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
Did you say the third party is always on the left? When the Conservatives had only two seats, they were the third or fourth party.
Liberal
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
Yes, you're right. I was in the Reform Party, which was a third party on the right, so you're correct. In the context of Canada's minority governments, however, we've had ones under Mackenzie King in the 1920s and then again under Diefenbaker in the fifties and sixties, and then again under Clark.
Have I missed anybody else in between? I don't think so.
Liberal
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
Oh, yes, that's right. Pearson, of course, and the entire 1960s was minorities....
Liberal
Conservative
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
That's right. There were four minority governments in a row, or maybe three. There was 1962-63—
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
Yes, so there were three. Pearson was able to get his budgets through. Actually, in terms of the progressive nature of the Pearson government, most of the foundational social programs we have today—the welfare state programs of today—were, if you look at them, introduced in that period, rather than in the subsequent period under Pierre Trudeau, who dealt with...I think I'd be right in saying that his legislation was primarily progressive or to the left of centre in areas that were social in orientation. They were dealing with the changing of the sodomy law; getting rid of capital punishment; official languages policy, obviously; and the charter of rights. These are all very much—
Liberal
Arnold Chan Liberal Scarborough—Agincourt, ON
You're arguing vociferously for the benefits of minority Parliaments.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
I think that sort of summarizes things.
Like Finnegans Wake, this brings us back by circumlocution to Minister Chagger's comments. Minister Chagger's comments, I think, while not unreasonable, are incorrect, and for the following reason.
She says the Liberals made a number of campaign commitments with regard to the Standing Orders and no one else should be able to have a veto over them. I have to admit, I think agree. I think she has a point. But I went to the Liberal election platform, “Real Change: A New Plan for a Strong Middle Class”. This was the platform the Liberal Party put out during the last election. Like all platforms, it deals with everything from soup to nuts. The things at the front end that are emphasized are economic security for the middle class, the middle-class tax cut, ending unfair tax breaks, opportunities for young Canadians, and retirement issues.
It then moves on to other issues of a similar top-of-mind nature: housing—you'll see where I'm going with this in a second—post-secondary education, a health accord with the provinces, and fighting poverty. That's obviously an area in which the federal government is to some degree constrained by the federal nature of our system. There is more middle-class stuff: jobs and skills training, stronger and greener communities, public transit, agriculture, unions, labour-sponsored funds, supporting caregivers, employment insurance, child care and healthier kids, Canada's north, and helping educators.
Now we're getting closer to what's being discussed. “Open and Transparent Government” is the name of a chapter. This deals with, among other things, access to information, personal information, open data, and open Parliament, which is the first thing we hit that might potentially, at first glance, relate to standing order changes.
This is on page 25: “The Liberal Party was the first to require its members to proactively disclose travel and hospitality expenses.” I actually didn't know that, but apparently that's true.
This does give me a chance to point out that for several years over the past years I've had the lowest travel expenses of any member of Parliament. I'm very proud of that fact, although, thanks to the electoral reform committee, that won't be true for 2016.
The chapter continues:
It is time for all Parliamentarians to do the same. We will make government more accountable by requiring all Parliamentarians to disclose their expenses in a common and detailed manner, each quarter.
We will end the secrecy surrounding the Board of Internal Economy–the group responsible for regulating spending by Members of Parliament. Except in rare cases requiring confidentiality, meetings of this group will be open to the public.
That's not a standing order change—that's not how it's done—but I guess you could in theory try to link the Standing Orders to this. That's a possibility. I'm not sure if Minister Chagger had this in mind when she made her comment, but I feel confident in saying that if there were standing order changes contemplated that dealt with the disclosure of parliamentary expenses, I don't think we'd have trouble getting consensus on that.
Regarding the entirety of “the secrecy surrounding the Board of Internal Economy”, my guess is that, in practice, we would want.... I think everybody agrees that maybe it's more secret than it needs to be, but I think there are some things that have to be discussed confidentially, such as accusations that are not yet grounded against individuals. For example, I think the Board of Internal Economy dealt with the accusations of sexual impropriety, at least in the initial stages, that arose in the last Parliament. Obviously, you want that kind of thing to be confidential. I believe it also deals with issues related to litigation that involve members of Parliament. That stuff, I think everybody agrees, has to stay secret.
I can see a situation in which you might consider using the Standing Orders as one way of moving it towards something that more closely approximates the in camera proceedings of our committees, that is to say, where there is still some form of reporting back from the board on those items that need not be kept secret. In a general sense, letting in greater sunlight in its proceedings might be reasonable.
They then deal extensively with matters that relate to our mandate as a committee. Open and fair elections are part of the platform, starting on page 26. This includes government advertising, banning partisan government ads, a number of ways of increasing political fairness in elections, and political financing, including the closing of political financing loopholes.
Mr. Stewart asked earlier about what might be found in the legislation Minister Gould is preparing for us. I suspect that we will find some of the answers here, or at least a hint as to an answer here. On page 27, it says:
When fixed election date legislation was introduced, it left a loophole that allows unlimited spending in the period before an election is called. That creates an uneven playing field.
We will review the limits on how much political parties can spend during elections, and ensure that spending between elections is subject to limits as well.
It seems reasonable to guess that the legislation Minister Gould proposes might well contain provisions enacting that promise.
They're proposing an independent commission to organize leaders' debates.
On electoral reform, it says:
We will make every vote count.
We are committed to ensuring that 2015 will be the last federal election conducted under the first-past-the-post voting system.
We will convene an all-party...committee to review a wide variety of reforms, such as ranked ballots, proportional representation, mandatory voting, and online voting. This committee will deliver its recommendations to Parliament. Within 18 months of forming government, we will introduce legislation to enact electoral reform.
It would more or less be almost exactly right now that legislation would have been introduced. We know the whole history here. Everybody on this committee knows what happened. That committee was struck. It reported back and made a recommendation, which the government decided not to take.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
Yes, quite right, Mr. Chair.
There have been endless comments on this, but the relevance here is that this was an area where the government could legitimately have said that the lack of consensus—the argument was that there wasn't a consensus on which to form an electoral system—allows them to move forward unilaterally. The committee on which I served actually made exactly that recommendation.
In fact, I was the one who introduced the idea to the committee, that it make a recommendation that the government make the choice as to the form of the electoral system, as long as it has a Gallagher index of five. There were three viable systems that could have been implemented. Given the fact that there was no consensus on which of the three was the right one to move forward with, the government, exercising its authority as the executive branch, could have chosen the one that seemed best from its point of view, based on other considerations that it and the committee deemed important, such as maintaining local representation and keeping excessive party discipline out of the picture. It could have moved forward, and it could have produced something that would then be subject to the people's veto in the form of a referendum.
I just mention this by way of saying that there was a really good example of an attempt to give the government the ability to follow through on a very concrete promise it had made, while at the same time seeking out a consensus. We actually had a consensus, all four opposition parties, something that doesn't happen very often. It didn't come easily.
I know my party had many people saying they thought this was a bad idea as we moved toward that. I don't know the internal workings of the Bloc, I have to admit, but I know that the New Democrats had similar concerns. Nathan Cullen, who bravely led them towards the idea of referendum, which is not part of the New Democrats' culture or their traditional policy apparatus, went toward it somewhat reluctantly in order to get proportionality on the table. I do know from talking to Ms. May directly—she has a caucus of one, so you can just ask her what the caucus is thinking—that she went along with the referendum very reluctantly. She really doesn't like referenda, but she recognized that it was the stumbling block toward proportionality.
Anyway, none of these, so far, require changes to the Standing Orders. Encouraging more first-time voters to participate, making it easier to punish those who break the elections law.... It's something this committee has to deal with. That's part of the Elections Act review that we are engaged in.
Then we come to pages 29 through 32 which deal with what's called “Giving Canadians a Voice in Ottawa”. The subheading reads, “For Parliament to work best, its members must be free to do what they have been elected to do: represent their communities in Parliament and hold the government to account. Government must always stay focused on serving Canadians and solving their problems.”
Just to help everybody understand what we're talking about, it has a photograph of the House of Commons. This is all about House of Commons and Senate reform. As a matter of fact, the very first heading here is “Senate Reform”. We can skip over that one, because clearly changes to the Standing Orders do not deal with that.
Let me get to “Question Period”. The promise is, “We will reform Question Period so that all members, including the Prime Minister, are held to greater account.” The detailed wording of the promise then says, “As the head of government, the Prime Minister represents all Canadians and should be directly accountable to all Canadians.” Here is the key part: “We will introduce a Prime Minister’s Question Period to improve that level of direct accountability.”
This appears to imply a change to the Standing Orders. In fact, the need for unilateral changes to the Standing Orders was presented as being predicated on a number of promises, of which this was the marquee promise, being placed in the Liberal election platform.
However, as the Prime Minister's conduct last Wednesday demonstrates, you don't have to change the Standing Orders to get a Prime Minister's question time on Wednesday, or on any other day of the week. He was also back on Friday, and in principle could have kept answering all the questions, all of them. He always has that prerogative. The House leader, who directs who will answer which question, could have been informed, as she was on Wednesday, that no one else would be answering any of the questions and that they would all be going to the Prime Minister. No change to the Standing Orders is necessary in order to have a Prime Minister's question time.
In fact, if you actually look at the structure of question period and how it has evolved over time, one of the great surprises is that much less about question period is written into the Standing Orders than you might think. I won't be dealing with this in my remarks right now, but I may return to it at a later time. Much more is dealt with through practices that have evolved. We all stick to them and we all treat them as being practices of great importance and gravity, even though they are not in the Standing Orders.
This is a natural process in any deliberative body, including in this committee. It's one of the reasons, Mr. Chair, that we've seen the striking phenomenon of this committee. We are to some degree in uncharted territory as we go from one suspension of the same meeting to another, and then we hold hearings.
We have a situation in which we are debating a single amendment to a single motion, which precludes the giving of the floor to anybody other than the person holding the floor at that time. We have developed a practice such that, with the unanimous consent of the committee, we can cede the floor temporarily to another member of the committee who can then ask questions or deal with the subject matter at hand.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
That's right. It has a name, the Simms procedure, after our colleague Scott Simms, who pioneered it. This all revolves around the long-standing rule that nothing becomes a precedent if it's done by unanimous consent, and you can do anything by unanimous consent.
We all agreed on one occasion to allow Mr. Simms, who was the first person to intervene this way. It's a useful tool. We've kept it up to the point where Ms. Sahota last Thursday or Friday—I can't remember which now—wanted to ask Mr. Richards a question. He was reluctant to cede the floor temporarily until he could confirm that her question was indeed in conformity with the Simms procedure, and it required Mr. Christopherson to intervene and establish that information.
In other words, we have developed our own set of practices right here in the space of a series of meetings that have been going on for only three weeks, that allow us to function and re-establish effectively the rules of a normal form of parliamentary debate, even though the formal rules actually don't leave any room for it. On the one hand, this is a testament to the ingenuity of a system that no one actually designed, our parliamentary system, of which we are a tiny branch way up high in that tree that has its roots down in the first parliament that met in medieval England. But we are doing the very same thing and we are being pioneers in our own way.
This all goes back to the Prime Minister's question period and the rules around our question period, which are primarily conventional. They are conventions that are so deeply rooted that we don't have to write them down until someone tries to violate them, at which time either they are just unanimously punished by everybody...outraged that they would do whatever it is they've done, or we say that we'd better write down a particular rule. Conventions can remain unwritten, as they have on question period, until someone changes them, or they can be written down, but they need not be written down.
I guess it will be an open question tomorrow whether the Prime Minister once again takes all the questions. It will be somewhat different from last Wednesday in that we are having a very esteemed guest speaking to the House of Commons, which is something that perhaps occurs only two or three times in the life of the Parliament. The last person to do so was the president of the United States. It's not just every day one has an occurrence of this sort, and that may change the nature of question period. We'll find out.
At any rate, what the Prime Minister demonstrated very dramatically is that you don't need changes to the Standing Orders to achieve this promise, which relates us back to Minister Chagger's assertion that we cannot let the opposition have a veto over a government election promise. No veto has been exercised, because no promise requiring a change to the Standing Orders was actually made.
For the next item, I'm quoting once again from the Liberal election platform. Right at the very top of page 30, it says, “We will also empower the Speaker to challenge and sanction members during Question Period, and allow more time for questions and answers.”
I pause there to say that in terms of sanctioning members during question period, again, that is something that requires no changes to the Standing Orders. There are a number of powers at the disposal of the Speaker from which previous Speakers have chosen to refrain. My own parliamentary career goes back to my years as a staffer, to the late 20th century. In that period the Speaker would, from time to time, name members who had been acting in a particularly disruptive manner. Once named, the member would not be allowed to enter the House until such time as the member had appeared before the bar of the House to essentially plead forgiveness.
We don't even think of the bar of the House, but members actually pass it. It's that metal bar we pass as we come in.
Once you've been sanctioned, once you've been named, the privilege of being referred to by your riding has been stripped from you, and you are now outside the House and must seek its collective will to re-enter. That power was there, and it hasn't been removed.
What happened was that Speaker Milliken, our longest serving Speaker—and for what it's worth, he's a constituent of mine; he lives in my riding of Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, in the rural part of Kingston, the very beautiful rural part of Kingston I represent—developed the practice of never naming a member. He exercised a milder, but I thought more effective, power. Speaker Scheer followed this example.
If a member was being particularly disruptive, heckling to excess.... We all heckle a bit, but there is heckling and there is really disruptive heckling, and it's the disruption that's the problem, or being disrespectful of other members or of the House as a whole.
I remember Speaker Milliken saying this so clearly vis-à-vis a member from Saskatchewan, whose name was Jim Pankiw. You've been here as long as I have, Mr. Chair. You will remember Jim Pankiw from northern Saskatchewan.
He was being disruptive in some respect or other—I can't remember what it was—and the Speaker stood up, cutting off the member's microphone, and then before returning to the business of the House, he said, “The member may find it difficult to catch the Speaker's eye the next time he tries”, which was his way of signalling Mr. Pankiw and also the table officers. At the time, it was the Canadian Alliance table officers in the lobby. He was saying, “Take your member aside and explain to him that he can stand up, and I'll just pretend he's not there, and therefore, you can't put him up in question period. I'll simply ignore him as if he's not there, so you have to restructure things.” He was essentially kicked out of the House for many purposes. He couldn't even present petitions as long as that applied.
That gave Mr. Pankiw the option, which he exercised at some point—I don't know how long it took—of going up to the Speaker, either approaching him in the House or more likely approaching him by going to his office and having a sit-down chat about this kind of behaviour being unacceptable, and he got to do it without the humiliation of going before the bar of the House and without wasting the time of the entire House.
Do you see what I'm getting at? There is a very powerful tool that is already present in the hands of the Speaker, which our current Speaker has not had to exercise, although he has hinted that he might. A hint is enough. Everybody wants to play, so getting compliance from us requires merely the thought that we won't be allowed to play the game. Speaker Regan has only had to hint at it. Speaker Milliken actually had to act on it a few times, but this worked much more effectively than the method employed by the prior Speaker of actually naming people.
Once you actually get taken out of the House, you can make a big deal about saying, “I'm the people's voice.” Being dragged kicking and screaming from the House is actually a very useful publicity gaming device.
A friend of mine, who is a Newfoundlander, told me about the antics of Andy Wells, who went on to become mayor of Saint John's, if memory serves. He was in the House of Assembly in Newfoundland. He'd get kicked out regularly, and he would be dragged from the chamber, yelling as loud as he could, “The people will not be silenced”, and that became his stock-in-trade. I can think of other members who have done the same thing.
I would simply submit that the powers to challenge and sanction members during question period don't require changes to the Standing Orders. They're already there. The blunderbuss approach of kicking someone out exists. It isn't used, because there is a scalpel available, and that has been used by successive Speakers. They've been able to cut ever more finely with it and maintain discipline.
I have to say something else in this vein, Mr. Chair. I used to be in the media. I used to write articles for Western Report. I would file from Ottawa for Western Report, which was published out of Alberta. I also wrote for the National Post, but that was different. They were editorial pieces.
For Western Report, I had to write articles. There was a deadline. You had to produce x number of words every week. They had a certain amount of column inches, as they called them, to fill, whether you had a story or not. That's weekly, let alone daily, and the deadlines associated with print are not nearly as brutal as those associated with electronic media where you have exactly x number of minutes or seconds to fill, and if you have more to say and write about than the time will allow, that's too bad. If you have less, that's even worse.
Truly it's a Procrustean bed, and faced with this problem.... I'm an editorialist, and I must produce an intelligent and thoughtful opinion that is between 800 and 900 words long every three days, twice a week, once a week, or whatever it is. I'm not sure what it is. It depends on the publication, I guess, but that's me. If I were Chantal Hébert, Andrew Coyne, or any of the other columnists out there, this is what I'd have to do. It is hard to come up with something every time, so what reporters do....
I'll come to this. This is relevant, Mr. Chair. I just have to give the background information.
Reporters produce stories that are called evergreens. An evergreen story is not linked to any particular time, but it could be dropped in when you don't have anything to fill in the space. Christmas holidays are a problem and that is when evergreen stories help out.
In the summer there is what we call the silly season. The silly season is when we're out of serious stories because people who generate serious news are on holidays. That's the time of year when the reliable story for the local reporter is about how the bylaw officers have shut down some lemonade stand run by kids trying to raise money to help out third world hunger or something like that. You just know, a line of stories like I'll go out and find, or you can pre-write stories. It's just like Steve Martin in the movie L.A. Story where he's a weatherman who pre-writes his news forecasts because the weather is the same every day in Los Angeles.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
The relevance is as follows. The most reliable story you can write as a commentator is to bemoan the loss of the golden age of civility in Parliaments past. What a shame it is that we are sliding toward less and less decorum in the House, less and less respect, and so on.
I want to say, number one, as a historian.... That's my profession; I'm an historian. I've written books on Canadian history and have read through early debates of the House of Commons. I can say emphatically, as a historian, we're all sober here. We don't physically assault each other. We don't rush the Chair. We don't climb over the furniture. Hence we are way ahead of our 19th century colleagues. Whenever the golden age is being referred to, it was not the golden age of Sir John A. Macdonald, and it wasn't the period that came after him through the 20th century. Now I'm old enough that I can actually be a bit of a piece of history myself. It wasn't the age of the third Chrétien government when I arrived here, or the minority government that followed it, or the two minorities with a change of administration that followed that. We've actually been getting more civil.
Now I wish that, in the interests of scientific research, I had brought into the House a decibel meter for each question period. I would have to have moved it around, as it's quieter along the edges than it is in the middle but, my goodness, we have become so much more civil, measured simply by volume, than we were when I first arrived here. We have improved so much—
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
That was part of the mandate of the present government, for sure, but it was something that appeared to be happening, as what an economist would call a secular change. It is a long-term change. Regardless, if the tide comes in and goes out, any individual wave as the tide is coming in may be lower on the shoreline than it was a minute before, a second before, but not lower than the average of waves rolling in and out an hour ago. It's a secular trend, as they call it, and the secular trend is toward greater civility. The very fact that we constantly find the current level of civility insufficient indicates that there is less and less room for incivility, or catcalling, or whatever, to be practised, so it shrinks and shrinks.
The irony here is that if nobody were complaining about it, the situation would probably get worse. However, in saying that, there is no need for Standing Order changes to bring greater civility. It's happening all around us and the tools are already there.
Now we go to the next promise, which was allowing more time for questions and answers. Here, Mr. Chair, I want to just tell you about a treasure hunt that I went on. I went through the Standing Orders looking for a discussion of the length of questions and it's not a matter of the Standing Orders. It's a practice that's developed. It's that agreement.
I'll go through it in more detail later. It's a fascinating and very relevant story that can serve as a guide to us in this committee, as we try to find ways in the committee, and also in the House as a whole, of moving toward what could be a helpful change. Certainly, it is something that the government has promised to do. It is there in their election platform.
I should mention that one thing that's unclear is the statement, “allow more time for questions and answers”. That is actually an imprecise promise. It could mean, as I see it, one of several things. It could mean longer questions and answers. Currently, they are 35 seconds per question and answer in question period. It could be that what was intended was to move that upward, say to 45 seconds or to a minute, as is done in other legislatures in the Westminster tradition. That's one thing it could mean. What might have been meant—perhaps this came up in one of the Prime Minister's speeches during the election—was to move to a longer question period, so that we'd go from 45 minutes daily to an hour daily or something like that. I don't know. Certainly, that's conceivably what was meant. It could involve some kind of structural shift to the nature of how questions are asked.
We have questions. Everybody knows how this works. Everybody who has been in opposition knows how this works. If you hear an answer to an oral question you've asked that you deem, in your own sole discretion, to be unsatisfactory or inadequate, you fill out a form. You ask the pages to give you the form. The form indicates that you weren't satisfied with the answer from Minister X, so you would like to have the chance to ask further questions as part of the adjournment proceedings. That is governed by a standing order. A standing order dictates how that is done and the nature of the form. Moreover, the standing order indicates how long the questions and answers are. I think it was in the 38th Parliament...it was the first one I served in and the first one you served in back in 2000. During that period, a change was made, in addition to a four-minute question and a four-minute answer, to allow for a one-minute supplemental question and answer. This was designed to catch up on any loose ends that had not been dealt with or that had raised a new question.
To be honest, I'm not sure this works perfectly. It seems to me that we get more heat than light in that final one-minute, back-and-forth session, but it does produce positive results some of the time. At any rate, there was a standing order that existed, that was changed in 2000 by the Special Committee on the Modernization and Improvement of the Procedures of the House of Commons that was set up under the Chrétien government.
This was one of the recommendations made unanimously by that committee, and I was the very first person to ask a question under that new procedure with the one-minute question and answer. I can contemplate the possibility of a standing order change being required if we're talking about changing either the length of question period or about doing something that involves questions in adjournment proceedings, or that involves questions such as the ones we have periodically when the minister will come and answer questions for an evening sitting of the House.
That also required a change to the Standing Orders. Some officials come along to assist with more technical questions that may arise. They usually sit at a little desk that looks about the size of a card table. Three of them sit there to assist the minister in answering any question.
We then all sit as a committee of the whole. Members don't have to sit in their own seats. Because it's a committee, we can even bring food into the Commons, a rule that I tested once by bringing in an apple and placing it quite prominently on my desk to see whether it would be—
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
That brings to mind the point Mr. Graham was making, that maybe the House leadership—the whips and the House leaders—shouldn't have to sit in their seats at any time, because they're always moving around.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
I had not thought of that. It's an interesting point. I'd think, though, that they would want to have a place to sit down. I would think the House leader wants to be able to lean over and talk with the Prime Minister or the Leader of the Opposition, as the case may be.
