Thank you. I knew you had it on the tip of your tongue.
Not only do we follow the practices of the House, but here's one where the House could follow the practices of the committee, the idea being that the.... You notice it's fewer than half the members. That rule is designed to allow the government to call a committee back or the opposition to call a committee back. In practice, in our multi-party system, it almost always means that you would have to get the agreement of more than one opposition party.
We have two parties right now with official party status that are in the opposition. We would have to get the consent of the New Democrats and the Conservatives to make that happen, but that can be done. Also, of course, the Liberals could do it on their own.
You could do something like that where you say, look, either one could call the House back. This would all assume it's not prorogued of course. Prorogation is not within our powers to stop. Prorogation is important for us to discuss, but it's something that is a crown power, and it is just not part of our Standing Orders. When we're prorogued, that's it. That's cemented externally, and you have to live with it. But when we're not prorogued, when we are merely not sitting for the summer, you could call us back. Government can really do that anyway via the Governor General, so that might have some merit.
Again, this is not a simple matter. It's not something we're going to get discussed and sorted out by early June. We could discuss it. I mean discuss them—there are actual multiple topics in here. The number of sittings could be based on demands to sit. We could change the order in which things come before the House, so urgent and important matters before the House are given their fullest consideration despite time pressures. That suggests some kind of new system for reallocating business. We could discuss allowing it to sit longer on a given day. You would have to be careful you don't design it so you get extra time for debate during which the proceedings can collapse when members are trying to get off to the airport to get back for business in their ridings. Those things take time to discuss and sort out.
These are technicalities, but everything in the Standing Orders is technicalities. It's all technicalities.
I should comment on the acrimonious proceedings leading to the summer and winter adjournments. I guess there's some acrimony. It seems to me that they are simply very time-consuming, and they go late into the evening, which is different from being acrimonious, I would assert.
There has been acrimony, for sure. We're trying to get business done. Also that is the point at which you frequently get substantial co-operation of pushing some business through. The acrimony is in seeing how much the government can push through by holding out the threat of sitting late into the night every night. It's just normal government business. It's kind of like the people who, during the electoral reform hearings—I see Erin, our very talented.... We are joined by one of the analysts for the ERRE committee.
There were some utopian people coming and saying we need to get the contention, the acrimony, out of politics, and they had a system that would do that. But you don't have a system that will do that. You might improve it in a variety of ways, but politics is by its nature the battle for political office in which there's one seat and multiple candidates. It's inherently confrontational. It's unavoidable.
That's why a large number of words, including one I used earlier, are considered unparliamentary, and that's why we have a whole bunch of other things meant to tone it down. I don't think the kind of acrimony they are describing can be avoided by giving us an extra week. I think it would have the effect of causing our acrimony to occur a week later, frankly. I disagree with that.
There is a reason for why we have the allowance for the late-night sittings in June but at no other time. You have a choice here. You can sit late into the evening or, if the government has business that's important in the government's eyes and there's a majority, the government can move a motion and extend the sitting into the summer. You won't like that, but you'll dislike it in a different way from the late-night sittings. Maybe we could agree that you'll limit the number of speakers getting up for debate. That's kind of the government's bargaining position.
The opposition parties have similar bargaining positions. They all assure each other behind closed doors that their members are raring to go and would love to stay all summer if that's what it takes. Of course, that is not how the conversations are actually transpiring in the various caucuses. We all know that it's a bit of a fiction. Like the chest-beating displays of gorillas in mating season, the fact that nobody really wants to get into a fight is not communicated directly but through indirect means. Ultimately, you come up with some kind of solution. I've never seen it not happen. It's not always a solution that makes everybody happy, but the rules are surprisingly sophisticated.
The same-sex marriage bill was a great example. When there is something that is closer to a consensus than a mere majority, as reflected in our party system, you'll have a majority of the parties in the House agreeing to something and then you can extend the sittings. That is a way of saying that we're going to allow the spirit of consensus to trump the ability of those who oppose to put up endless speakers on the list, which is something that every government feels a desire to do.
This now brings me back to the Prime Minister's motivations. He is frustrated, as every holder of executive office since the pharaohs has been, both the dreadful ones and the great ones. It is frustrating to have to go through a process that frustrates my will, but the system is designed to frustrate your will. It is designed to ensure that there must be some degree of buy-in, of what Minister Monsef, when she was the Minister of Democratic Institutions, called “broad buy-in”.
That's right, you need to get something.... If you have a majority, sometimes you can get two-thirds or three-quarters, depending on what you're talking about. It can be a majority of parties. It can be the 7/50 formula. You see patterns all over the place, in the House of Commons Standing Orders, our Constitution, our corporate law, and our internal rules of corporate governance. It's in Robert's Rules of Order. The ideas that you have for different situations are everywhere.
If we were to hunt down the history of that section.... In the annotated Standing Orders, there's typically an explanation of the history of each section. I don't know the history of that particular one, but my suspicion is that some kind of situation arose where a party was blocking progress in the House of Commons, by everybody speaking to their maximum time, and slow voting, and all that stuff.
After that crisis was over and everybody could see it was a problem, the Standing Orders were adjusted so that kind of use of process by the opposition, which used technical rules in a way that violated the spirit of the House, would be corrected. As in the law of testaments and wills, the technical rule trumps the spirit in our parliamentary Standing Orders. However, when that is used in a way that is clearly contrary to the spirit, the majority ought to be able to decide, and when it's more than a majority, a smaller minority should not be able to hold things up in such a way as to prevent moving forward.
Ultimately, a change was made when everybody was not invested in one side or the other in that particular dispute. A system was found, which, although it was used in a way that was against my party and against me in 2005, I have to concede was not wholly unreasonable. There is a lot of that kind of thing in there.
That is a bit of a discussion about the House calendar. You'll see in that discussion, which I am now wrapping up, that again, there is a lot of meat in there.
I actually said you can't discuss this on its own. It has to be discussed in conjunction with the discussion about the length of our workweek and the hours we sit every day. This, on its own, in conjunction with that, would be too much for us to discuss and complete by June 2, although it might not be too much for us if we were to set it aside to discuss and complete by the end of the Parliament or even by the end of 2017, although that seems wishful to me.
If we had a separate committee dealing with this—this is not what my motion recommends—much as there was a separate committee under the Chrétien government meeting full time with regularly scheduled meetings— it could be twice a week or whatever— I think they could get through a lot of this stuff and make the same kind of progress that committee made. If we agreed to the consensus part of it, either that committee or we—it remains in our hands, as my amendment proposes—could have the effect of dealing in a businesslike fashion with those items on which there is consensus, of which as you can see there are several—several aren't and several might be—we could make real, meaningful progress. We would leave the 42nd Parliament, or if you like, we would create the 43rd Parliament better than we found the 42nd, which is not what's going to happen if we go the way the government is proposing doing this.
Now I turn to routine proceedings. Routine proceedings are the stuff that has to get done. This is the least exciting, and frankly, probably the most important part of the House when it sits. Some people want to drive a car because they want to get from point A to point B. Other people love flipping up the hood and tinkering with the internal workings and adjusting the pistons and all that stuff. People like that are the ones who like routine proceedings. People who just want to get from point A to point B find routine proceedings a drag, but it structures the business of the House.
Now I am going to read what the government House leader has to say:
However, certain rubrics of Routine Proceedings have been used to give rise to debate. The rubric of “Motions” allows Members to move a debatable motion that could, on certain days, deprive the House of the ability to deliberate on the intended item for debate during Government Orders. This not only applies to items emanating from the Government (i.e., debate on a bill), but could also apply to items standing in the name of an Opposition Member (i.e., an Opposition Day motion). More often than not, it is either a motion to concur in a committee report or a motion of instruction to a committee. The House should examine different ways to schedule debate on such motions.
I can tell you this is one area in which the government is simply not going to find consensus. By the way, in the event that the government is successful in wearing us down, passing Mr. Simms' motion in the middle of the night, and then pushing through what is going to be a non-consensus report, then there would be a concurrence debate, voting on party lines in favour of it and emasculating the opposition. If all that happens, I predict this will be in there. It's probably illegal to bet on government business, or at any rate, we should go to the Ethics Commissioner before we engage in laying wagers. I would be willing to bet of everything here, this is the one that's going through.
The ability to take away the opposition's power to move concurrence debates as a delaying tactic is something that every majority government wants rid of. It's less of a problem in minority governments, though it happens, and for an interesting reason.
Given the debate we all had, in which everybody expressed the virtues of minority governments, I just want to say, as somebody who has lived through both, that I observe that in minority governments.... I'm not sure they are better than majorities, actually. In some ways they are and in some ways they aren't. That is a subject for a discussion over a beer.
In a minority government, the fact that you are going to be defeated on a measure anyway if you're trying to push it through means that you have to compromise with the parties earlier in the process. You have to compromise by getting one other party to sign on with you, depending on the size of the parties. When Stephen Harper had a minority government in two successive Parliaments, he had to rely on the support of the Liberals, the New Democrats, or the Bloc—any one of the three would be enough. When Paul Martin was in power, it was a similar kind of dynamic.
I think that was something else. I don't think it's us.