This is the one.
I thank my colleagues for their care in this.
I turn now, with your permission, Mr. Chair, to the question of unanimity. The substance of what is being proposed here, the substance of the words, the majority of the words, is the new paragraph (e), which is all about making sure that you must have unanimity to move forward.
The practice in the House has been not to move forward without substantial consent. There's this debate about what constitutes consensus. First of all, there's majority. If you have majority, near majority is not consensus. It's something more than that, but what is it? In certain circumstances, when you have to actually quantify it in law, it can be two-thirds.
For example, if you want to change the fundamental rules of corporate governance of a corporation, you need to get the consent of two-thirds—a supermajority—of each of the classes of shareholders. If you have classes A through F preferred shares, you have to get two-thirds of the holders of each of those classes of preferred shares. I have some experience with that, and it can be a time-consuming enterprise to put together. There's that kind of thing.
You can have three-quarters. You can have some other number. In our Constitution, we have the 7/50 formula, but the point is that consensus is something more.
So what is it? We've put down unanimity here, and I suppose one could argue that unanimity is too much. But in practice on something like this, I think it's reasonable to expect that we are not acting as individual agents, dividing with our colleagues from the same party. We are acting as agents for our respective parties.
I'm here as a Conservative member of Parliament. Mr. Chan and Mr. Simms are here as agents for the Liberal Party. Mr. Christopherson is here as an agent for the New Democratic Party. Since there's only one of him, the practical result is that if we want to make sure that all parties are involved, we have to say that the consent of all members is required, thus the reference to unanimity.
I have a question about when you go to the House and you need unanimity there. Would, for example, Elizabeth May on her own be able to say no and stop everything? That's not part of this motion. It is a reasonable question to ask. I suspect that if you took an inclusive approach, she'd be on board too. I think the things that she would find objectionable would very likely also be found objectionable by other opposition members if they were proposed. While I think the things that she would ultimately like—I shouldn't be speaking for Elizabeth, but I think I'm accurate in saying this—as proactive changes might be things that wouldn't be acceptable to the rest of the House. They might involve additional privileges for members who are not part of a recognized party. The Bloc Québécois during the hearings on the electoral form emphasized this. They didn't have party status, and they felt that the lack of a research budget had hurt their ability to act. They would have liked to see us change that. They didn't want to change the Standing Orders to something; they just wanted a change.
That's fair enough. We have unanimity down here. I could see an argument being made that we should set a lower consensus bar, but—and here I really am very tightly addressing the proposed amendment—the amendment requires unanimity in this committee. I actually think there is sufficient material and we will have no trouble finding standing order changes for which there is unanimous approval. The logical way is to start and say, as we have always done until now, “What is the low-hanging fruit? Where do we see the likelihood for such unanimity to emerge? Let's focus on those things; let's not focus on the others.”
Before I go through and try to point out some of those items and distinguish them from some of the others, which would be less likely to be the object of a consensus, let me first.... I'm just trying to think of what would make the most sense. I'll go through these and point out some of the things I think could be items that are likely to have consensus.
The paper starts with a bit of history, as these papers tend to do. It explains the justification of using three themes. As I mentioned, I am not necessarily supportive of the three themes, but we bounce up as the very first subsidiary item.... There are six subsidiary items under theme 1, which is “Management of the House”, and the first of these is what is called “sittings”, which means the days on which the House sits. The statement is made that.... I'm actually not sure that this is a factually correct statement, to be honest, but it says:
Among the provinces and most international legislatures, Canada is unique in regularly sitting five days a week. Most legislatures have either the Monday or the Friday as a constituency day. The exception is the United Kingdom, which tends to sit on 13 or 14 Fridays out of 36 sitting weeks (i.e., 38 per cent of Fridays). In terms of provincial legislatures, Nova Scotia sometimes sits five days a week. As a result, the House of Commons sits many more days and hours each year than provincial and territorial legislatures. While the House does sit five days a week, certain procedural and time limitations on Fridays make these sittings less effective than other days.
I might disagree with that. It's a less effective day for getting business through—there are certain things you can't do—but it is actually effective at what it does. At any rate, let's go back to the text.
All recorded divisions on bills are automatically deferred on Fridays, which means in some cases, the business that is taken up on Fridays cannot resume on Mondays. Additionally, Friday sittings provide for no more than 2.5 hours for Government Orders and committees do not meet.
The argument here is that we shouldn't have the House sit at all. This is not an area where we are likely to get consensus. I'm surprised that it's here again, because we had it come up in the past and it met with considerable opposition. Yesterday, it was the lead-off point for a number of the questioners in the House of Commons in question period. Their questions were, “Canadians work five days a week, so why shouldn't we?” Of course, constituency work takes place on Fridays and on weekends, and it is real work, but the work of the House of Commons, our legislative work, ought not to be subsidiary to our work as members of Parliament.
It was as recently as the 1950s and 1960s that members of Parliament started introducing constituency offices. They didn't have constituency offices before that. People elected them to go to Ottawa to deal with legislation on their behalf. The member would typically take the train, if you go back to the days before the airplane. They would go to Ottawa, stay for the sitting life of the Parliament, and come back. If you were far enough away, even a week off was not very helpful to you in the days when it took several days of train travel to get to the west coast, for example. You would just not visit your constituency at that time, so we developed the pattern. I shouldn't say we developed, but we retained the inherited pattern that the British had of long breaks over the summer and long breaks at Christmas, and then a compressed period of sittings.
I think we're moving away from that bit by bit. The schedule that was agreed to at the House leaders' meeting last autumn, which involves the one-off, one-on period, so the week-on,week-off arrangement that we now have, is a move we all agreed to, maybe against our better wisdom, I don't know. We all agreed to the move, which had the effect of causing us to very significantly....
I will just make the obvious comment that this would not have happened in the 19th century, or indeed in the first three-quarters of the 20th century, when it was too difficult to get back to some areas.
Take one of your predecessors, Mr. Chair. There was a Speaker of the House whose name, if I'm not incorrect, was George Black, from Yukon. When he was a member of the House back in the thirties and forties, getting back from Ottawa to the Yukon could not have been something that happened quickly enough to get a week in—the turnaround time. It's still not convenient for you. I know this from the adjustments you've made to your schedule, notwithstanding the vast improvements in transportation technology.
People came to Ottawa with that expectation. Now, effectively, you can see our adjusting bit by bit the same number of sitting weeks. Let's spread them out differently so that we have a week on, a week off, then a week on, a week off. Then I think it's two weeks on, two weeks off through the period of February, March, and April, after which we get down to the old-fashioned four on, one off, four on. I think that is the remainder of our parliamentary calendar to the summer.
The first thing to observe about this is that it was agreed to through informal negotiation, which led to a one-time-only 2017 suspension of the sittings that would have prevailed. We put them in place. In fact, this particular part of the Standing Orders are designed to be subject to constant revision to accommodate that. Every year there is a very substantial debate at the House leaders' meeting in which party allegiances break down and people are aligned by province, based on when their kids' school break is, as to when our sitting weeks and non-sitting weeks will be. It's the Ontarians against the British Columbians against the Quebeckers against the Albertans, based on everybody wanting to make sure they can have a vacation when their kids are off school.
That shows, number one, the virtue of doing things informally, and number two, the virtue of flexibility and doing things informally at the House leaders' meeting, flexibility as to the ability to adjust from one year to the next and actually build that flexibility into the rules. Number three is the virtue of not trying to do things in an omnibus manner.
All of that is there to be seen . All of that is relevant to the search for unanimity. because although in those meetings we don't all agree, we manage to come to a consensus every time. I've never seen the House sittings and the way they work imposed by a majority, by one party, or by the government imposing itself, and saying that we're going to do it this way. We've never needed to. We've always managed to find a consensus solution on something that is genuinely contentious and on which emotions run high.
Partly what happens is that the House leaders use the parties as their mediating bodies to go back to enforce a certain discipline upon the various caucuses. But whatever the mechanism, that works better than doing it through formal changes.
All right. Working us back now to the Fridays, Friday sittings don't provide much time for government orders, and committees don't meet. Those are absolutely true facts. This situation lets people get back to their ridings. It is a reflection of how we have adjusted our behaviour to permit MPs who are from further away to trade duty days. This is an informal system that has sprung up in every caucus so that they can be away from the House.
I actually am from near the Ottawa area. When there's no traffic, it takes an hour to get from here to my front door out in Perth. It feels like a million miles away, but it's actually a one-hour drive away, when there's no traffic. When there's traffic, it's a different story. I regularly take the Friday duty days of other MPs. I will sit for them on Friday, and they will sit for me at some other time, freeing me up from, among other things, committee work here.
That is a sign that things are working. This is presented as not working, but actually it's working well. You get 2.5 hours of government business on a Friday, which is 2.5 hours more than zero. You can have committees meet on Fridays, if they choose to do so. I was on one just last autumn that did that. It also met in unusual locations and at unusual hours. This committee has met at various times, although admittedly not on a Friday. It's a flex day.
I could go on and on about the history of weekends. Weekends used to.... Saturday was considered a half-day. Students would go for a half-day of school on Saturday. It was a half-holiday, they called it. Nobody got a two-day weekend. Before that you'd get the half-holiday. The week was that on six days you laboured and one day was the Sabbath. That's the Biblical way of doing things. Before that, in the ancient Roman empire, they had an eight-day week, with only one day per weekend. That really sucked.
The paper goes on to suggest options. It says:
One option would be to reapportion the time on Friday sittings to other days, and another option would be to make them more like other sitting days. It should be recognized that the important work of Members takes place both in the House and in their constituencies.
Now, it's true that constituency work is important, but as I say, a century ago people understood that they looked to their MP to go to Ottawa to vote in a certain way, according to the platform of the party to which that individual belonged.
I do want them to represent their constituency, but their representation would normally take the form of making sure, if a lot of cattle producers were in my riding and a lot of people in the fishing industry were in Mr. Simms' riding, that I did not sacrifice the interests—in, say, trade negotiations—of our cattle producers to our fish producers. His constituents would send him here with the same understanding in reverse.
They didn't, however, say, “I need a passport. I'll go to the MP's office to help me out with that.” They didn't say, “I'm having a problem. My Canada pension plan cheque is an incorrect amount. I want the intervention of my member of Parliament” or “The flag on our service club is wearing out. I'm going to get a Canadian flag”.
We can do all those things, and while those things are important, they are not actually our primary responsibility. I'm constantly trading time with people who say, “I have to get back to my riding for this event. It's absolutely critical.” When push comes to shove and it's an important vote, nobody expects you to be at a high school graduation or a 100th birthday party or a bar mitzvah or a Santa Claus parade. They expect you to be in the House. Which constituent would have been happy seeing their member of Parliament at a Santa Claus parade, important as it might be, instead of voting on, for example, the assisted dying bill?
Maybe that's a bad example because that was in June and Santa Claus parades are in December, but you see my point. In the end, even the people who say, “You have to come to our event” are more upset when you're not doing your duty in the House. That's our primary duty.
I am editorializing on concerns that I have with regard to the way in which this is laid out to show that this might very well be an item on which we would not be getting a consensus.
I'll just finish the last part here. Should Friday sittings be reapportioned, it would be important to reallocate any lost time to the remaining four days including time lost for opposition or for question time and private members' business. This could be accomplished by having the House meet earlier on certain days. Alternatively, if Friday sittings are retained, they should look like any other sitting day with the possible exception of having two hours of private members' business at the end of the day to allow some members to leave earlier to travel to their ridings. Somehow, maybe that's an option that we could actually get consensus on. In all fairness, I speak as someone who doesn't have a long travel day on Friday, and perhaps that could achieve success.
All right. I'm going to pass over with your permission, Mr. Chair, to electronic voting. I think there's a real potential for a consensus but I did deal with that earlier, and I'm anxious to be respectful of the other members who have all been listening intently and will not want me to repeat myself.