Procedure and House Affairs Committee on March 21st, 2017

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

You can do that, but you have to have unanimous consent.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

It takes unanimous consent to table? Short of saying no, I'm unclear. Help me.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

To not proceed with this debate that we're in right now you would need unanimous consent.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

The clerk is saying no, Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

You can adjourn the debate with the consent of the committee, which you didn't get. Then, to present a substantive motion, which was your next attempt, you need unanimous consent, which you don't have.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Chair, I'm going to relinquish the floor to my friend, Mr. Reid.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Mr. Reid, you're next on the speaking list.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

I was going to a point of order for further guidance from you and the clerk. What about the possibility...? I think everybody knows what my objective is, which is to get us to Thursday before we take up this debate again.

I'm wondering if I were to propose an amendment to Mr. Simms's motion, which states that the debate be suspended and taken up again on Thursday, would that be permissible or is that also just a workaround that is not permitted under the rules?

Effectively the amendment would be adopted. The main motion would be held up until such time as we come back. Would that work or not?

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

That wouldn't work either because once you got the amendment, even if it passed, then you would still need to vote on the entire motion to put that amendment into effect.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

I see. Okay. That's helpful to me.

In that case, I do have some things to say with regard to the main motion.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Banff—Airdrie, AB]

I have a point of order first, Mr. Chair, if I may.

Clearly, there has been an indication here that both opposition parties are not comfortable with proceeding with this motion until they've at least had a chance to talk to their caucuses. Obviously, some very significant reservations and concerns have been expressed by both me and Mr. Christopherson about the motion. Obviously, attempts have been made to adjourn the debate. I think it's fairly clear that this motion will not be coming to a final vote today.

I see our Elections Canada officials sitting at the end of the table. There are probably other things they could be doing other than watching. Maybe they want to stay and watch the debate, I don't know, but maybe you could ask for unanimous consent to let them be dismissed, so they don't have to sit here.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

That's a good point.

Does anyone object to allowing our...?

Thank you very much for coming. I congratulated you in the House yesterday for all your work on the two very important reports we did, which, as I said in the House, are going to change elections and make them much smoother. Thank you for that.

Hopefully, we'll see you soon.

[Anne Lawson, General Counsel and Senior Director, Elections Canada]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

I'm sorry for your coming all this way and not getting a chance to provide input.

We'll carry on with Mr. Reid.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'm going to try to go through this systematically, if I may.

Mr. Simms' notice of motion was received by the clerk of this committee on the Friday before the break week, so in a sense it was received by us some 10 days ago. In practice, many of us were unavailable. I was on another continent, actually. It was submitted for the minimum allowable time under the parliamentary rules before this debate came up.

It was given to the clerk at 3:11 p.m. on the Friday before a break week, which is to say.... Everybody understands what that means. In a way, it was designed to be as obscure as possible. It was released and given to the clerk....

Forgive me; I don't know. Did you receive it in both official languages?

[The Clerk of the Committee, Mr. Andrew Lauzon]

Yes.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Okay, so it was translated.

I don't think I'm being unkind to Mr. Simms when I say that he is not as fluent in French as he is in English; let's just say that. Hence it had to be done by somebody other than Mr. Simms.

I don't mean to be unkind.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

I took it as such.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

All right.

[An hon. member]

It was probably somebody in the PMO.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

You're right.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

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.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

I understand why now.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

The spats covered the laces. You can't get spats anymore. As someone who is an afficionado of steampunk, Mr. Chair, and is trying to acquire an entire Victorian outfit for.... Top hats are easy to find. Spats are hard to find. Clean spats are impossible to find.

Anyway, on the sides of buses, just to defray the cost of running the omnibus, they would put up illustrations, ads. I guess you remember some of these things from looking at these illustrations. Pears soap is advertised on the side; they are still around. There's Bovril, a kind of little gelatin cube, and so on.

What you saw when an omnibus went by were all these completely unrelated things, advertisements, stuck to the outside. An omnibus was a metaphor for a whole bunch of unrelated things, all being dragged along in the same direction by a vehicle whose purpose was ultimately entirely different. Thus we have omnibus bills, and in this case, you can see why I say this is an omnibus motion.

There is no small degree of irony in the fact that this omnibus motion is dealing with inter alia, the issue of omnibus bills and how to deal with omnibus bills, something that the government has said it wants to deal with. It wants to change the way these things are done. I'm not in a position yet to confirm the depth of commitment to that promise but certainly this is not a positive start. I would chastise or reprimand Mr. Simms if I thought he was actually the author of this thing, but I don't.

I do chastise the government for creating an omnibus motion to deal with a series of subjects that, while they are united in being Standing Orders of the House, are not united in any other way. We are a corporate entity of the House of Commons with a history, and the history, of course, includes the rules we apply to ourselves, a history that goes back centuries. It doesn't just go back to Confederation. Our Standing Orders and our practices go back, of course, to 1867, but they were not created de novo at that point. They were taken from the Standing Orders of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada, and therefore, go back to 1840, at which point they were not created de novo.

In fact, those Standing Orders were taken from the two prior assemblies of Upper and Lower Canada. The Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada and the Legislative Assembly of Upper Canada both of which had held their first elections in 1792 and their first actual meetings in 1793, and adopted the Standing Orders at that time. Those Standing Orders were not created de novo at that point. They came from the House of Commons in Britain. There are Standing Orders adopted in the House of Commons in Britain that survive in an unchanged or almost unchanged form to this very day in our Standing Orders.

Not only that, if you look at the congressional rules, the ones that cover the House of Representatives in the United States, you'll see that they have some identical rules to ours. This happened because the Americans adopted a set of rules designed by Thomas Jefferson, after struggling without a set of well-established rules for their first years as a republic. He presented a set of rules that he had adopted from the House of Commons in the United Kingdom. So, we, the Brits, the Americans, and I should add virtually every other country in the Commonwealth, also every American state, because they have a similar lineage there, and every Canadian province, every Australian state, all have a set of rules and practices that have a common lineage, which is why we can have precedence that goes between these jurisdictions.

We have a long and distinguished heritage. We do not change these things in one shot as an omnibus measure. It may be that it's happened somewhere. I don't know. It's an obscure piece of history. I do know that in our own history we take very seriously the need to do these things bit by bit. I do not mean to suggest that at any given point in time the previous existing Standing Orders are fully acceptable, but I do mean to suggest that we deal with these issues one at a time.

There is on the wall of the legislative assembly chamber in Quebec—this would be the National Assembly chamber now, but it was originally the legislative assembly chamber—a beautiful mural, quite an impressive painting of the very first meeting of the legislative assembly, it's ancestor, the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada, in either January 23 or 26, 1793. I can't remember which of the two dates. The reason that date stands out in my mind, despite the slight imprecision, is that by a curious coincidence that debate in the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada took place on the very same day that King Louis XVI was beheaded in Paris.

What happened in that debate was that the Standing Orders of the House of Commons, which had been adopted and put in place for the legislative assembly of Quebec, had a very obvious flaw. They were only in English. I don't know if they even stated the language of debate, but it was clear that the language of debate was to be English. This had to be resolved, so the very first debate was over the Standing Orders, and changing them, and allowing the use of either French or English in debates of the legislative assembly. That event is recorded.

The Standing Orders are important, and dealing with them piecemeal, one at a time, is the right way to go about them. We are a precedent-based collegiate body. What we do is done not be revolution but by evolution, a step at a time, not by omnibus measures, not by trying to do all at once, which is what this does.

In section d) the motion states, “The Committee complete its study and report its findings and recommendations back to the House no later than June 2, 2017”. We would, in fact, deal with all the subject matter, every Standing Order, and have it done by June 2, 2017. I haven't worked out the number of days between now and then, but it is not a large number of days.

I could talk of what a rush that is. I will talk of what a rush that is, but as a starting point this says there will be nothing left. It will all be taken care of. If we don't have enough witness testimony, it doesn't matter; we'll be sending our report back. This is a problem.

Here's the clever rhetoric I was working up to. That's closure, clearly. We're ending debate. It's all over. We're done. In Britain, they call it the guillotine.

Do you see how clever that is? I linked back to the guillotining of Louis XVI on the same day.

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

That was very clever.