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.