All right.
I don't fault the House leader for doing things this way. Taken on its own, and without the omnibus motion and the artificial deadline imposed by that motion, it's not bad in many respects.
I am a bit puzzled why some of the things are in there, because we did discuss them at previous meetings of this committee and rejected them. The most obvious item is the proposal to abolish Friday sittings. We indicated we didn't support that. That was actually reported back by this committee, so it seems odd that we're being asked to consider it again.
There are others that haven't been discussed, including, for example, electronic voting. The electronic voting issue was discussed, as noted here, by the McGrath committee. It was discussed and a report was actually issued on electronic voting—true fact—by the committee on standing order improvements set up by the Chrétien government. It was a special committee, as I mentioned. It issued six reports.
I have not had a chance to read those reports—although, obviously, I would want to do this. We would all want to do that. We'd probably want to enter them into evidence. Six reports, one of which was on electronic voting the time, were issued. Things have changed. Systems have changed for electronic voting. I'm guessing they're more reliable than they were in the past, and as the government House leader's report observes, we are moving to the West Block.
The House of Commons will be there, I think, by the end of this Parliament. I'm not certain of that, but, if not, it will be where we open the next Parliament. So as one is installing desks, one could put in electronic voting systems. There is an obvious logic to that from an infrastructure cost point of view, and so on.
There are things in there that on their face strike me as reasonable. By the way, I don't want to launder the details of that proposal, but that's one kind of electronic voting. You can also vote without actually going to the chamber. That's how they do it in the U.S. Congress. I don't like that. I think we should be in the House. I won't say we have no lessons to learn from the American representatives, but that is not one of the lessons we have to learn from them, or if we do, we have to learn the merits of doing things while actually being in the Commons for what it's worth.
There are a number of things in here, and I'm not belittling the report. I did say I didn't really agree with the arrangement of three themes. Theme one is management of the House, of which the subsidiary headings include the issue of sittings, including Fridays, and then electronic voting. Those are just different topics. They're not two subsets of the same thing, but different topics going back to the omnibus point I was making earlier about the House calendar, whether we should start sitting earlier in January, earlier in September, whatever, and the nature of routine proceedings.
There would be another review of private members' business, which involves a number of technical changes. Let's go through private members' business to make the point about the difficulty of trying to do all these things within the very tight deadline suggested by Mr. Simms' motion.
Remember I said it was theme one of three themes. Within the rubric of management of the House, we have the subsidiary headings of the sittings, electronic voting, the House calendar, routine proceedings, private members' business, and prorogation.
Prorogation is obviously also an entirely different topic and not a simple matter, because it involves moving from the House and its privileges to the nature of the crown, and what the Constitution, particularly the unwritten part of the Constitution, the conventions, say about prorogation. I think prorogation is a very important issue. I spent a lot of time reading about it in the midst of the crisis that led to prorogation in 2008. Given the tiny number of people who know anything about this at all, I regard myself to be in the upper one per cent of the Canadian population in my knowledge of prorogation, at the risk of sounding a bit self-promoting in that regard. We could spend an entire Parliament dealing with the issue of prorogation in itself. It might be a good topic for us to look at.
We'd look at conventions. We'd have to look at how what we report affects conventions. Conventions are the practices that are seen as being particularly weighty in public opinion, the things that it is outrageous to violate, even though there is no law to that effect. Those take form in a particular way, and if you want to change a convention or affect it, or systematize it—which I think is really what we're trying to do here, to systematize it—you have to act in a certain manner.
A committee report can be very valuable in that regard. A committee report that just mentions this thing in passing as part of a rush would be very unhelpful. One of the things that happens in scholarly disputes is the issue of does a convention exist here, is there still that usage or has a convention eroded and one that previously existed does not exist. You'd have to bring yourself up to date with some very significant scholarship on this. Albert Venn Dicey, the great 19th century English writer, wrote Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, the classic text that created the term “convention”.
Lord Bryce, who would be named the British ambassador to the United States, in his book The American Commonwealth, in which he wrote about the American political system for a British audience, pointed out to his British audience that although the Americans thought they had a purely written constitution, they had conventions too, and he listed examples of the conventions that existed. Conventions are restrictions on a power that nominally exists, an unwritten restriction, or at least an uncodified restriction, not written down in the statute of the Constitution, the violation of which would result in profound sanctions.
One that existed at that time was that the president, who in theory could serve unlimited consecutive terms, would serve no more than two, following the precedent set by George Washington. That convention prevailed until 1940 when Franklin Roosevelt ran for a third term and was not punished for it. Voters voted him in, but sometime within the Eisenhower presidency Congress and then three-fourths of the states passed identical resolutions amending the constitution so that couldn't happen again. No president can serve more than two terms. It is not a slight against Franklin Roosevelt to say that a lesser man with an equal temptation could use that office and the perpetual holding of that office in ways that the framers of the Constitution, and obviously the majority of Americans in the 1950s when that amendment was passed, did not think were appropriate. And so a convention was codified to ensure that it could not be overridden again.
It's all about conventions when it comes to prorogation, and it was not clear what the conventions were. So I'm not saying that prorogation shouldn't be here. I think it's a really great topic to study. I'm just saying that it can't be studied as one of a three-part list, part one of which has six subsidiary parts, one of which is something that is so vast that you have to get into.... I didn't mention Ivor Jennings, another great scholar we could look at. If we did study prorogation, the amount of work would prevent us from having time for anything else. And we've got to do this by June 20th?
We have to come up with witnesses, according to Mr. Simms' motion, if we adopt it today, by Tuesday of next week.
In terms of the chief authorities on conventionality and on the way in which prorogation is handled and historically has been handled in Commonwealth countries, these precedents are taken very seriously by our main scholars. They could not be located within seven days. In some cases, we would have to find out who these people are. How do we know? We're not specialists.
That's just for prorogation. I'm only mentioning it because it's the one that my eyes stopped upon as I went down this list. It's not because it is the standout, but maybe it is the standout.
On private members' business, here is what is written. The House leader's report or discussion paper frequently cites the McGrath committee. It reads:
A principle objective of the McGrath Committee report was to find ways to give Members a more meaningful role in the legislative process. A well-functioning House depends on the extent to which Members feel like they are involved and contribute to the legislative process.
That's the first paragraph. You can't object to that, except to say that for making members “feel” like they're involved, I would say that it's more about the extent to which members are actually involved, but that's okay. That's a minor thing.
Here's the next paragraph. I want you to keep track of all the different potential ways in which we could change private members' business. There aren't bullet points here, but I'm going to number them. I'm quoting again:
A key way to empower Members is through Private Members' Business. Possible changes to Private Members' Business could be examined to achieve that objective.
Some examples include:
...adding another rubric for Private Members' Business each week; examining the possibility of allowing Members' to exchange places on the List for the Consideration of Private Members' Business under certain conditions; and ways to manage Senate Public Bills that delay the replenishment of Private Members' Business, possibly by having a separate rubric for these bills.
There you go. There are three separate subsidiary pieces of business under private members' business. Our three-part program of adjustment to our rules, which turns out to include, in the case of theme one, six separate substantive subheadings, now involves a third level of subheadings. It's starting to look like a statute: section 1, subsection 1(a), sub-subsection 1(a)(i), etc. It's kind of looking like that.
There is a lot of substance here, and we're supposed to find the experts who can deal with this within seven days and to have all of discussions done and a report back by June 2.
Let me tell you about the experience of the electoral reform committee of which I was a member, with its December 1 deadline. That did not mean we had open discussions and were getting new and fresh ideas up until November 30. That is not what happened. We had to take a considerable amount of time towards the end to go through it. We could go and look it up, but there was a three-week period or so during which we simply could not add new material and have it translated. The professional staff, the analysts, and the clerks were, as is typical here, of superb quality, very hard-working, and very long-suffering.