No, I have Kleenex. Thank you.
The goal here is to require unanimity in the committee, and the amendment states that this is consistent with the committee's past practices as discussed in its December 8, 2016, meeting. At our meeting on December 8, 2016, we reviewed what our practices in the past have been on this committee. We sometimes use majority consent in this committee. In other words, party line votes, and ultimately, when it's a majority government, the government gets it's way; that's how it works. However, we try wherever possible to be consensual. We single out certain things for a greater expectation of consent than other things. For some things, we just say, “It's going to be party lines. That's the way it works.” For other things, we say, “No, we have to treat this differently.” It is the nature of this committee to have more of that kind of business submitted to it, and above everything else, that includes the Standing Orders, our constitution.
The fundamental law that rules us, the rules of the game, the rules of engagement, if you will.... I mention all of this to bring around the important parallel—partly because it's so important in its merits, and partly because it's so important as a parallel, as a high-profile illustration that anyone can understand—of the electoral reform debate that took place earlier in this Parliament. This committee was not directly involved in it, although some members of this committee travelled across the country: Ms. Sahota, Mr. Richards, and myself. If you actually stop and look at what they were saying, the way the parties approached this was different in its details, but the same in this important, this foundational, respect. If you're changing the rules of the game, as you'd be if you were changing the electoral system, then you must have something more than mere majority support, especially in a situation where majority means one faction, the largest faction.
The way my party, the Conservatives, expressed that was by saying that there should be no change to the electoral system without a referendum whereby the new system is approved by the voters of Canada. They are the ones who get to establish what is legitimate and what is not legitimate. If they approve of a system, then, whatever that system happens to be, it is legitimate, assuming you have a clear majority on a clear question. That's a standard set by the Supreme Court.
The Liberal approach was to say.... They didn't say this initially, but they did by May of last year. Minister Monsef stood up in the House of Commons and said that they needed broad buy-in. She didn't define what broad buy-in was, and earlier in my remarks I indicated that I felt that was a bit of a moving target. The term “consensus” came up as a stand-in for the term “broad buy-in”, but it was never clear exactly what that meant, and that was a problem. It clearly did not mean a majority of fifty per cent plus one of committee members, fifty per cent plus one of the House. I think everybody understood that.
Looking at her remarks, and even though we confronted each other in the House of Commons, I think I always maintained a respectful approach towards Minister Monsef, who I felt was, if you will and are knowledgeable about poker, “playing a bad hand” as well as she could. I thought she was doing a creditable job, and she's also a very nice person. I enjoyed bantering with her. I compared this once to Archy and Mehitabel.
The broad buy-in she was talking about clearly also included, in that case, some form of broader consent from the Canadian people. We did an e-survey for the committee, which got 22,000 responses. People were asked about the possibility of using what's called a citizens' assembly to see whether that provided, in the minds of Canadians, a legitimate level of extra consensus.
People were generally favourable towards it, although they didn't seem to see it as the definitive indication that Canadians had bought in—when I say “people”, I mean the 22,000 respondents—I think perhaps because a citizens' assembly is really a process that occurs earlier in the drafting and development process, not later on. It's not really a ratification process. It is a design process. Having said that, it was an attempt to find consensus.
The New Democrats said that what you needed to have was the support of at least one opposition party as well as of the government. I don't think I'm being unfair to the New Democrats when I say that this was actually meant as a kind of bargaining offer—“Come to us, and if you're willing to find something that we can agree to and you Liberals agree to, we have a deal”—and not a referendum. Ultimately, they agreed, in a great generosity of spirit, to put the question of electoral reform to a referendum.
The point I'm getting at is that everybody agreed, on all sides of the House, that when you're dealing with the rules of the game, the rules of engagement, the Constitution—the de facto constitution, because the electoral system is not a strictly constitutional matter, or at least in most respects it isn't—you have to have a higher level of buy-in.
We have conventions about this. These conventions are then the practices of this committee, or the usages of the committee, if you wish. They are reflected in the way this committee has dealt with its standing orders in the past. As well, they are the way the House of Commons itself has dealt with the Standing Orders in the past. The House of Commons has normally, when dealing with a change in Standing Orders, tried to seek unanimous consent through the channel of getting the House leaders to agree among themselves, through some back-channel negotiation among themselves.
Then eventually, someone stands up—one of the House leaders—and says the words we all know: “Mr. Speaker, if you seek it, I think you will find unanimous consent for the following motion.” This is usually preceded by, “There have been consultations” or “All parties have been consulted”, or some other statement that indicates that the Speaker should take this seriously, and that there actually has been a way of finding agreement.
We're permitted to do that. It doesn't mean that the actual rules of the House are suspended for more than that vote, and there's no precedent-setting value to a unanimous consent motion, because we understand that it is the exception. But the Standing Orders themselves are the exception. They're the exception to the way the House normally works. The Standing Orders are, as I say, the rules under which we operate, under which we conduct ourselves, so they get special consideration.
The last time the House tried to significantly bite into the Standing Orders and take a real chunk to make a significant change, 14 years ago, it set up a special committee to deal with it. The special committee operated by unanimous consent. It approved nothing. There were no dissenting reports, because there was no dissent. Nothing on which there was dissent was put forward by the committee, which recognized that it had a wealth of material to work with and therefore had no need to focus on contentious items. It thus focused on items for which consent was going to be found on a unanimous basis.
In the interim, while the vote was going on in the House, Mr. Chair, I had the opportunity not to read, unfortunately, but to download the reports of the special committee chaired by Bob Kilger, the Deputy Speaker of the House at the time, whose seniority indicates the seriousness with which the House took the business of looking at the Standing Orders. The culture the committee members applied—I actually don't know because I didn't get a chance to read their discussions, nor the discussions that took place in the House as the motion was going forward. It may be that these were very limited discussions. It might be one of those things where they got unanimous consent by having House leaders talk about it. This is before my period serving as deputy House leader, so I would not have been privy to any of those discussions.
Although I was an MP at the time, June 2001, I was very, very junior and was frankly just lost a lot of the time when it came to what was going on at a technical level. A lot passed me by. Like any new MP, I was still discovering which local events were actually important and which were really important in the minds of the people who insisted that I had to be there. All MPs go through that in their first year.
At any rate, that approach, that consensual, unanimous approach, was adopted by the House in that round of hearings. That explains, to a large degree, why the legacy of those Standing Order changes that were made upon the recommendation of the committee have stood the test of time. I think at this point, 14 or 15 years is a good indication of the test of time. We live in a world in our Parliament where we have Standing Orders that in some cases have been on the books via our Parliament and the mother of parliaments in Westminster since the time of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Some of them go back that far.
The rule that prohibits the king or the king's men from preventing a member from entering the House of Commons goes back to the time of King Charles I, who was in the habit of sending thugs—and they didn't have hotels in those days, so they slept in a room over a tavern—great big guys, who could just stand at the door and make it impossible for MPs to get out if they were going to vote the wrong way. MPs would have to climb out of second-storey windows to try to get to the House of Commons to vote.