Evidence of meeting #55 for Procedure and House Affairs in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was opposition.
A video is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Jamie Schmale Conservative Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON
Good for you. That's like bathtub reading, that's incredible.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
Okay. In Standing Order 52(9), we get to that. This deals with the emergency debates. We're dealing with emergency debates in the House of Commons:
If the Speaker is satisfied that the matter is proper to be discussed, the motion shall stand over until the ordinary hour of daily adjournment on that day, provided that the Speaker, at his or her discretion, may direct that the motion shall be set down for consideration on the following sitting day at an hour specified by the Speaker.
The Speaker has discretion. The Speaker is the representative of the consensus of the House. Looking back here, the Speaker loses that discretion.
Under the heading of “Take-note Debates” is Standing Order 53.1:
(1) A Minister of the Crown, following consultation with the House Leaders of the other parties, may propose a motion at any time, to be decided without debate or amendment, setting out the subject-matter and designating a day on which a take-note debate shall take place, provided that the motion may not be proposed less than forty-eight hours before the said debate is to begin.
(2) A take-note debate ordered by the House pursuant to section (1) of this Standing Order shall begin at the ordinary hour of daily adjournment and any proceedings pursuant to Standing Order 38 shall be suspended on that day.
(3) The rules to apply to a debate under the present Standing Order shall be those applied during a Committee of the Whole except that:
It lists the distinctions between that and the standing order. Again, you see this reflected despite the fact that there was consensus against government motion number six....You see this change moving from motion number six to Minister Chagger's discussion paper. After we've all just discussed the importance of consensus and working together, we see something that was rejected a year ago was brought back. In all fairness to Minister Chagger, it hadn't been discussed in-between, so maybe this was the way of bringing it back for potential discussion because maybe this was not the point on which motion number six was rejected. There was no discussion in-between. The government didn't float any balloons, ask questions, or raise things at House leaders meetings. It just came forward now with a tight timeline, which is fitting a pattern of the government dragging its heels and then suddenly declaring this a crisis that must be dealt with instantly through a suspension of the normal practices of the House. That's problematic.
The next thing here in motion number six was, proceedings pursuant to Standing Order 38—
Conservative
Conservative
Jamie Schmale Conservative Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON
We have another vote coming up. Keep going.
Conservative
Conservative
Conservative
Jamie Schmale Conservative Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON
I know you're deep in thought. I was just trying to give you an idea of what you were looking at.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
Actually, I'm checking on a health emergency in the family and my wife is texting me. I just check every so often. That's what that is about. Thank you for that.
Liberal
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
We're at motion number six.... What I've been doing in the amendment is trying to show the importance of consensus as reflected in the practices of the committee and this House in the past and by tying these to Motion 6, the confrontational way in which it was brought up, the way in which it was withdrawn, and the statements that were made by the then House leader, Mr. LeBlanc, at that time, all of which indicate a pattern of expected future behaviour—future from the point of view of a year ago—that is not being followed through on. I'm trying to demonstrate that point.
Forgive me, I left off on proceedings pursuant to Standing Order 38 under paragraph (d):
proceedings pursuant to Standing Order 38 shall take place at 6:30 p.m. on Mondays or at the conclusion of the taking of any recorded division deferred pursuant to paragraph (e)(ii), whichever is later; at the expiry of the time provided for Private Members' Business on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, and when the debate on the matter or matters raised pursuant to Standing Order 38 has ended, the motion to adjourn the House shall be deemed to have been withdrawn and the House shall resume consideration of Government Orders;
And then there is paragraph (e):
subject to paragraph (f), when a recorded division is requested in respect of a debatable motion, including any division arising as a consequence of the application of Standing Order 61(2) or 78(3), but not including any division in relation to the Business of Supply or arising as a consequence of an Order made pursuant to Standing Order 57
(i) before 2:00 p.m. on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, it shall be deemed deferred until the conclusion of Oral Questions on that day's sitting or
(ii) after 2:00 p.m. on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, or any time on a Friday, it shall be deemed deferred until the conclusion of Oral Questions on the next sitting day that is not a Friday, and any vote deferred to Monday taken up at 6:30 p.m.
Just for those who are wondering, regarding 61(2)...Garnett knows this stuff by heart, but for the rest of us, Garnett's kids aren't here to answer the question and so I'll just tell you that 61(2) is dealing with previous questions, an item that is a procedural tool available to the opposition, so that effectively obviates that.
Next is 78(3). I'm not going to read all of 78(3), which is a page long, but this has to do with the procedure in cases where time is being allotted. It's about time allocation. Section 78 in general is about time allocation. This effectively gives additional tools to the government with relation to time allocation.
I have a little bit more on this to go on with, but I want to stop and draw the attention of members of the committee to something else that I think is very significant.
Early in his mandate, Minister LeBlanc appeared before this committee. He at the time was House leader, and as is traditional with House leaders following an election, he came before this committee and said, my job is to fulfill my mandate letter. My mandate letter dictates what I must do, he said, and my mandate letter dictates that I must work on improving and modernizing the House of Commons' Standing Orders.
His mandate letter, to the best of my knowledge—and I'm actually going to check this out—was inherited unchanged. So at least this aspect was inherited unchanged by Bardish Chagger when she became the new House leader, and so she has the same mandate.
She hasn't had a chance to talk to the committee about that. This will hopefully be resolved soon and we'll invite her, I would hope, to discuss her discussion paper.
Indeed, I would have liked to make our first order of business rather than Mr. Simms' motion. At any rate, his mandate letter effectively is the mandate that guides him and that to which we are responding.
I want to make this point about it. Not everybody in this room was here at the time, but a number of people were here when he came to this committee. He put a strong emphasis on his mandate letter and he made kind of a humorous interaction where he said it was meant to be very inspiring. I said it was so inspiring that I read it to my kids at night before they go to bed. This is where I fess up and admit that I don't actually do that; I just said it.
At any rate, we did have a discussion about it, and I said one of the things of concern to me was that this was a lot to bite off. There's a lot of meat here. Do you think it's necessary for us to deal with this as one mega-study, one mega-set of amendments, one unified whole? I didn't use the word “omnibus” at the time, but should we deal with this as one omnibus measure? I was trying, as I think MPs from a recently defeated government ought to do, to save the self-righteousness for later in the government's mandate. If you've just been dealt a defeat, you ought to be very respectful of their new mandate.
So I asked whether it was okay to deal with this on a piecemeal basis. Would that be acceptable? I mean, you're not our bosses, but we have to work together here. Your desire to change the rules, the Standing Orders, is not in conflict with our desires. We may disagree on specifics, but not on the general policy.
He indicated at that time that a piecemeal approach was okay with him. Now I recognize he's not the House leader anymore, but I took that as being the way the government was going to approach things while he was minister. After Bardish Chagger became government House leader, it continued to be the way the government, or so I thought, was approaching things. There was no indication during the debate required under our Standing Orders about the Standing Orders, the debate that took place on October 6. I wasn't present for it, but I have read through some of what transpired that day, not perhaps with as much attention as it deserves, but in all fairness to me, I did make the assumption that we'd get some kind of warning that this was going to be the next thing on our agenda, and I would have turned my reading to it.
In the interim, I've been reading about electoral reform and then more recently about other aspects of the election law, because we anticipated right up until this committee sat down at 11 o'clock this morning that we would be dealing with the Elections Act, with the report on the 42nd election and our response to it. We received from the same government at our last meeting a request from the relevant minister to make that our focus in order to give her the time to sign legislation. That was where I was going, and now we see this change.
The amendment I'm proposing allows us to return to that piecemeal approach, which is more consensual, more precedented, more likely to produce high-quality changes. It is striking how few Standing Orders have to be altered to revert to more loyal, more basic underlying values of our Parliament, which are about freedom of speech and openness, adequate discussion prior to the implementation of measures. All of that is better encapsulated in the motion I propose than in Mr. Simms' unamended motion. I'd also say it is a better reflection of what the government House leader indicated was the direction the government was willing to take when he first addressed this committee. It actually may be the only time he addressed this committee. I can't remember for sure.
Anyway, that was the right direction to go in then, and I think it's still the right direction to go in now. It does not permit the radical transformation of our system into one where we have an emasculated opposition. The system would be, if not unique in the jurisdictions that share our Westminster heritage, but certainly unique among first-tier jurisdictions: those that have large parliaments, a long history of self-government, and a profound internalization of the values pioneered or developed or evolved at Westminster and elsewhere. It would be unique as in unlike, and in opposition to the spirit that we see at Westminster itself, and in the parliaments in Canberra, Wellington, Delhi, and the other first-tier jurisdictions. I can't speak to those countries that have lapsed into dictatorship and come back out. That does not probably enhance the ability of a parliament to develop a really sound body of Standing Orders. But in the first tier, we'd be the only ones going in this direction.
There's been a lot of talk of working together. Mr. Simms, in his opening remarks, talked about the importance of working together. When I ran into her at the airport in Toronto, we did not have a long discussion, as I mentioned, and she was a little distracted, but the government House leader did say, “It's just a discussion paper. We're trying to bounce ideas out there”, something which is profoundly at odds with what's happening now. But I think she was sincere.
This doesn't correspond with anything that's happened here: the minimum period of notice; the extremely unrealistic timeline. It's hard not to get the feeling that in this government, certainly on this issue, and it's maybe true on several issues, it's as if the left and the right hands are not talking to each other. There appear to be those who want to move forward in the traditional manner, the manner, it seems to me, that was followed by the Chrétien government and others before it; and those who want to, I'm not sure what the right term is, adopt a very aggressive approach of “Let's go for an absolute victory. Let's go for the absolute transformation of our system.”
Had electoral reform gone through in the manner proposed by the Prime Minister, we would have had a preferential ballot, we would have had a radical or permanent and very negative change to our democracy, where, in practice, only one party would stand a realistic chance of forming a government in any election, and in which it could get fewer votes than its main opponent, and still form government, and in which it could get fewer than one-third of the votes and still form a majority. That's pretty radical stuff.
It's true there, and it's true here as well. So that's the maximalist approach. Let's use the minimalist and maximalist approach, or the evolutionary versus revolutionary approach. In my less-guarded moments, I say the Gladstonian approach versus the Juan Perón approach. But one is suited to our system, and one is just not reflective of the values of Canada. We are an evolutionary people, not a revolutionary people. That is notwithstanding my respect for those who have engaged in rebellion, like the rebels of 1837. But we are an evolutionary people.
We have felt that a loyalty to the practices that undergird our Constitution is the best protection for our liberties, our freedoms, and all the values that we hold dearest. That includes accepting a series of conventional limitations on actors who, in law, could go further. This is how you achieve evolutionary change as opposed to revolution.
In revolution, you overthrow the king, and depending on what country you're in, you chop off his head or.... Last week, we passed the 100th anniversary of the overthrow of the Tsar in Russia, so if you're in Russia, you shoot him, or you.... Anyway, that's revolution.
In evolution, you take the king—Henry VIII was a dictator—and you gradually reduce his powers, even though on paper, monarchs can still, for example, veto any law, to this day.
The fact is that no monarch has exercised the veto since Queen Anne. In 1708, she vetoed the Scottish Militia Bill, back when Scotland was still a separate kingdom, shortly before the Act of Union. That was the last time a monarch exercised the veto.
In Canada, that veto is exercised by the Governor General. It is never exercised in practice. If the Governor General were now to say that he's not signing a piece of legislation, even though the two Houses of Parliament had passed it, and even though on paper he has the power to withhold his signature, we all understand that what would happen is that the Prime Minister would get on the phone with the Queen and say, “I think the Governor General has lost his marbles. Could you appoint a successor?” The Queen would take the call and that's what would happen.
Some version of that happens any time a convention is breached. The more serious the breach, the more profound is the consequence, up to and including removal from office, or in the case of the government, defeat in an election. That's how we do things.
That brings us back to the point about consistency with our past practices and the need for unanimity. There is no rule that says you have to have unanimity. It is a practice, but the reason for my lengthy comments is to make the greater world aware of the fact that something unconventional in the proper sense, against convention is happening here, and that convention must be respected. It must be enforced.
If the public finds that what's happening here is unacceptable, it will indeed confirm that a convention exists, and the government will back down. The breach of a convention carries a penalty severe enough that it obviates the action that was being attempted by the actor within whose nominal power it was to take that action. That's what defines it as a convention.
Now, maybe I'm mistaken. Maybe the government is right in what I think is a calculation that I and the other members of the committee from the New Democratic Party and the Conservative Party will sputter out and lose energy somewhere in the middle of the night, and they'll be able to move the motion and get it through on a partisan vote without the world paying much attention. Then, tomorrow, there will be a budget, which of course is the real reason we're getting this motion now. I'm pretty sure the budget is going to be a bad news budget, and the negative attention on that will consume all the available negative energy.
As a matter of fact, when I saw this coming out, when I learned about Mr. Simms' motion, my reaction was, “Oh wow, it's going to be a bad news budget,” because if it were a good news budget you wouldn't want negative coverage of this to get in the way of the budget. It's the same reason that governments of all stripes release vast swaths of documents with unfavourable information in answer to order paper questions, all on the same day. Get all the bad news out there at once. It's just the way communications work.
If the government does all of this in this way, achieves the end I think it's aiming for, gets away with it, and is able to proceed to have a report before this committee on June 2, which will certainly not have anything remotely resembling a consensus, it will be a report that the Liberal members will push through over the opposition of Conservatives and New Democrats, who will write dissenting reports.
If they do that, and they go to the House, and they get it through, and they have a concurrence debate in the House and adopt it, again on a divided vote over the lamentations of the opposition, and the public puts up with it and says yes, whatever, summer's coming, then we'll have established that a convention actually doesn't exist, and that in the end it was just a practice that was not that important in public opinion. That is how you test a convention, according to Albert Venn Dicey, a great scholar, who developed the term “constitutional convention”.
I'm calculating that's not the case. I am laying out the case that this is a sufficiently deeply internalized belief among Canadians that opposition will build in a way that the government has not anticipated. Therefore, my suggestion would be...because I am not a maximalist here. Whether it's on behalf of the government's agenda or any government agenda that my party has, whether my party's in government or opposition, I'm always in favour of taking the smaller, surer bet of tactical rather than strategic victories—of modest achievements instead of massive achievements—which ultimately lead to a massively positive result. Our history of modest and incremental approaches to democracy issues have made us in Canada one of the most democratic and stable countries in the world. Our history of applying this in the law has led to us being one of the most law-abiding countries in the world. Our history of doing this in other areas has led consistently to improvement, even in the areas where our heritage is one of which we are now either uncomfortable or even ashamed.
I thinking here of our treatment of our aboriginal people, of the way in which the people on the Komagata Maru were....There was no Canadian citizenship in those days. They were British subjects, just like us. As citizens of the British Empire, they had a right to be in Canada. The Laurier government invented a law. I'm an enormous admirer of Laurier, but not of this law, which allowed them to take British subjects and ship them back to another country. We're ashamed of that, justifiably.
We're ashamed of the internment of Ukrainian and Galician Canadians in the First World War. They were loyal British subjects but they came from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, so they were rounded up and sent off to labour camps. We are ashamed, with justice, of our treatment of Japanese Canadians in World War II—loyal Canadian citizens, again British subjects because we didn't get Canadian citizenship until later, but loyal to our laws and institutions—purely on the basis of race. And we are not ashamed, but only because we're not aware, of the fact that the government of the day actually tried to deprive these people of their citizenship and kick them out of the country, even people who were born here after the war was already over. It's a profoundly racist action that is deeply shameful.
I mention all these incidents, but in each of these areas we see improvement. We see it because we act incrementally. It is not a lack of ambition to want to act incrementally, to want evolution rather than revolution.
I think of revolutions as being parallel to volcanic eruptions. The tallest mountains in the world are not volcanos. Mount Everest is not a volcano. It is the size it is because of the slow acting of plate tectonics—evolution rather than revolution. While that is purely a metaphor, it does make the point about which is the better way of doing it. Evolution and consensus go together. The wider the group of people you have to bring in, the smaller the changes you are able to make.
Bringing this back to my amendment, this is, in essence, introducing a notion that in academic terms would be referred to as Pareto optimal. Pareto optimality is a concept named after an early 20th-century Italian scholar. I've forgotten his first name—Vilfredo, I think. He said that there are different ways of achieving optimal outcomes, depending on what your standard of optimality is. You can adopt the Benthamite approach that the good of the greatest number is the optimal approach, but it may not seem optimal from the point of view of every participant in the process. If we are together on a raft that is sinking low in the water and we all agree that the solution is to throw my colleague Garnett here to the sharks, that is perhaps optimal for the rest of us. It's not optimal for Garnett. That would miss the test of Pareto optimality. Pareto optimality is where you make an adjustment so that the outcome is better for all participants and no one is worse off.
You can do this as a mathematical formula where you simply assume that everybody in the room has $100 and you have to come up with a new system for allocating wealth. You can use that kind of numerical measure, but you can also—and I think this is the more robust way of doing it when you're dealing with systems that can't easily be quantified.... They think systems that can be quantified lend themselves to Benthamite calculations. Let's redistribute income so that—and I'm not sure I believe in the myth of the 1%—the Bill Gateses and Warren Buffetts of the world pay more so that we can adequately fund our food banks or something like a welfare state or a health care system, all the different things that are involved in our system: public transportation, public policing. You can go on and on. You get the idea. It redistributes. At the end of the day, is Warren Buffett...? I'm thinking of him because Gates is the richest guy in the world, and Buffett is the second richest. Is that right? Is it beneficial from his point of view? Maybe. We can measure that numerically. Money is a proxy for value and it lets us quantify it, so it allows the state to do certain things.
When you are dealing with things that are qualitative, like our Standing Orders and the values they incorporate and reflect, it is hard to rely upon quantitative measures. We try to do these things. We keep track in the House of Commons; every party does. How much time is the Speaker allowing for questions from this party or that party? Is he being unfair to us? How come he keeps skipping over me in the rotation? You get up angrily and say, “I had a question for that speaker. Will you give me a chance?” He says, “Well...” and he provides you with an explanation based upon some attempt to quantify. He says, “I go Liberal, Conservative, NDP, and around in the rotation”—or maybe he doesn't. Maybe he says that there are more Liberals than there are New Democrats, and then he gives them more. Maybe he says, “We always start with someone who is not from the party that just spoke to the question” or “I'm making up for the last Speaker; we have an imbalance in the direction”, or something. There is some kind of attempt to quantify it. He will be struggling and he might get it wrong from time to time, with good intentions.
Now we are drifting on to matters that are much more profoundly subjective in their implications for freedom of speech and for the opposition's ability to advocate or present its policy alternatives to build enough of a case that it can change the mind even of a majority government. As we just saw with the electoral reform issue, the government could have ruthlessly pushed forward with a change to the electoral system—the preferential ballot—that reflected its interests but not the will of the House of Commons or the will of those who came before the committee as witnesses.
While I think the government should have acted on its election promise, and followed through, and had a referendum on changing its system, I do respect the choice it made compared to pushing forward in disregard of—there's no Canadian consensus on electoral systems—a population that effectively is divided between those in favour of the current system and those in favour of proportionality, with very few people being in favour of preferential.
It was within its legal powers to push forward. There is legally nothing that would stop it. To this day, actually, I think you could still do it with the time constraints that are involved. It's getting harder all the time. It did that because public opinion was not on its side. Public opinion was not on its side because of the extensive hearings that took place with the committee travelling across the country, the minister holding her own hearings, the town halls, and many MPs holding their own town halls in their own constituencies. That was not something I did, but many others did. The NDP and Conservatives both sent out questionnaires. We got back 80,000 responses. It got back, I think, 35,000.
The point I'm getting at is that it was the ability to engage the Canadian public from the position of being opposition members that caused the government to change its course. That was true on that matter. Equally I think it would be true in regard to this matter, but not if all the tools are taken away.
Now you go from a situation, which we can advocate through tried and true institutions, institutions that have served to allow, in the last Parliament, Liberal and NDP members to very effectively counter the government's agenda.
I can tell you as someone who has sat on the other side of this committee that opposition pressure was most effective in building up a strong case in the media and with the public against the Fair Elections Act to the point where one of our Liberal colleagues, the former parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Democratic Institutions, took to referring to all these as the “unfair elections act”, and people knew what he was talking about.
That shows how effective you can be. It became an election issue, and it became something that the minister has indicated in part, although not in full, that she's going to seek to repeal.
Here are things that happened in those hearings that will not happen under this motion, unless it's amended, in these hearings about the Standing Orders. It's impossible, given the timeline and given the other things on our agenda, unless we're going to go and say to the minister, “Look, you're out of luck. We're not giving you anymore feedback on the elections act.” Even then the ability of the opposition to raise the kinds of objections likely to swing public opinion is minimal given the short timeline, and while there may be another explanation, that, I would suggest, is the reason this is being promoted in this manner at this time.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
It's time for our votes, so I guess we'll suspend until 10 minutes after the votes. We can carry on with your great historical lessons and anecdotes that probably make our committee filibusters more interesting than any other committee's.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
We're reconvening after breaking for votes. At the time we suspended, Mr. Reid had the floor and was doing his introduction to his amendment. I will allow him to continue.
Could we have order, please?
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
When we were interrupted by the vote, we were discussing an amendment that I had proposed to Mr. Simms' motion. Mr. Simms' motion presumes that we will deal with all items in the government House leader's report at one shot and do so by June 2. Although it doesn't say so, I read it as implying and the Prime Minister's answers to questions in question period reinforce that this is not going to be a consensual process. It will simply be the government's using its majority to impose what it wants.
My amendment is an attempt to deal with that and to take the motion as worded and turn it into something that permits both consensus and a more realistic deadline.
When we left off, I was making the point that the motion contains language referring to the prior practices, I think that's the word used, of this committee. It says that we are repeating, forgive me, the committee's past practices. I pointed out that it's not just the past practices of the committee, but indeed, of the entire House of Commons on this matter. I thought to expand on this to more fully illustrate this point. I would return to the report of the Special Committee on the Modernization and Improvement of the Procedures in the House of Commons, which was tasked with a somewhat parallel process by the House of Commons on the initiative of the House Leader in the parliament that was elected in 2000.
When the House of Commons met early in 2001, a motion was put forward and that was the basis on which this was set up. I thought I would just go through a little bit of what they had to say to make the point about this being a tradition around this place.
In its first report, the Special Committee on the Modernization and Improvement of the Procedures in the House of Commons, first of all, noted that it was reporting pursuant to an order of reference in the House of Commons dated March 21, 2001. This was a very early initiative of the Chrétien government. That election happened on November 27. I remember it from when I was first elected, so it stands out very clearly in my mind. In 2015, the election was October 19, I believe.
Is that right, the 19th? Or 15th?
Anyway, it was about a month earlier. This will be the equivalent of having had an order of reference dated February 2016. They got off to an early start. It's very different from the approach that's being used here. Hence, there's wasn't the same panic over deadlines and the same rush towards the finish line starting in March, right before break week, with a project that is to be completely wrapped up by the beginning of June, which I had indicated really means the middle of May.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
It was October 19, 2015. Yes.
In its report, the committee talks about many subjects, but I want to start with the introduction and just read verbatim some of what they said, which makes the point about how strongly they valued the idea of seeking consensus.
Let me read. There's an enumerated list in the introduction. This is paragraph 6:
There is a feeling that individual Members of the House of Commons need to be empowered, and the role of the Speaker, as the servant of the House and its spokesperson, enhanced. A balance needs to be achieved between the Government’s interests in implementing its legislative agenda, and the Opposition’s interests in questioning and criticizing the Government.
Maybe I should have just read the second of those two sentences:
A balance needs to be achieved between the Government’s interests in implementing its legislative agenda, and the Opposition’s interests in questioning and criticizing the Government.
That balance is best achieved when both the government and opposition, which ultimately means all parties, are both at the table and capable of denying their consent and therefore preventing the measure from going forward. That goes without saying.
Paragraph 7—I won't read the whole paragraph—says in part:
We have recommended changes in those areas in which we could all agree.
When I say “all” I mean membership taken from a wider range of parties than faces us today. The partisan structure of the House of Commons in those days was different from now. The chair, Bob Kilger, was a deputy speaker so in a sense a non-partisan figure, but a Liberal. The vice-chairs were Don Boudria, Liberal government House leader, and John Reynolds, Canadian Alliance House leader. The members were Bill Blaikie, a New Democrat; Michel Gauthier, who I think was the House leader of the Bloc Québécois, the future leader of the party; Peter MacKay, the House leader for the Progressive Conservatives in those days, and later on the leader.
The committee had five different parties represented. In fact, it bears some resemblance to the structure of the ERRE committee, the Special Committee on Electoral Reform, in that its membership did not include a government majority. It's quite striking that it did not include a government majority. Therefore, its proposals literally could not go forward without the consent of a majority of the parties in the House of Commons.
In all fairness, the governing party still had an advantage in that, if the committee had presented a report that made recommendations that were unsatisfactory to the governing party, it could use its majority in the House of Commons to deny consent to the report of the committee, thereby exercising a veto. It had an absolute veto. But in practice, everybody had a veto. The structure made that very clear.
To be honest, I had not been aware that this was the structure used—even though I was around at the time—until very recently. There you are: it has exactly the same principle behind its structure as was used for the electoral reform committee, and for the same reasons. There was the voluntary ceding of control. There were also some ground rules set down that are quite striking.
Paragraph 7 says inter alia:
We have recommended changes in those areas in which we could all agree. While we do not pretend to have solved all of the problems or addressed all of the issues, we feel that we have made a good start.
Here, they agree so much with the philosophy that I hold personally:
We may not be revolutionizing Parliament, but incremental changes can be extremely useful and effective, and, in the long run, much more significant.
Incremental changes, when they accumulate one on top of the other, are ultimately more powerful than revolutionary changes—which produce counter-revolution, counter-reaction—that are not legitimate. To think of the political metaphor I used earlier, the illegitimate overthrow of the Bourbons in the French Revolution, not that the Bourbons were.... I'm no defender of the Bourbons, but the illegitimate manner in which they were overthrown led to a situation in which France, a country previously characterized by its political stability, went through, in the course of the next century and a half, a republic, followed by an empire, followed by a monarchy, followed by a second monarchy, followed by a republic, followed by an empire, and followed by another republic. I think I missed a republic in there at about 1870 around republic number three, after empire number two, and after monarchy number three, followed by two more republics.
It seems to me there's a lesson there, which indicates that we should be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and that in the long run, changes made through incremental and consensual reformation, as the committee says, are much more significant.
Paragraph 8 of the introduction makes a statement that I guess is anodyne:
All of the members of the Committee—and all of the parties—want to make the House of Commons work as well as possible.
The next part, the next few sentences, I think are much more significant:
We are all committed to the modernization of the House of Commons, and the improvement of its procedures. Where possible, reform of parliamentary institutions and procedures is best carried out by consensus, and with all-party agreement.
I would ask you to listen to this next part:
The motion establishing this Special Committee requires that any report must have the unanimous agreement of all the members of the Committee, and this has guided our deliberations.
They continue on to say:
The requirement for unanimity has meant that on a number of issues, recommendations were not possible; by the same token, on some issues the members of the Committee have compromised and worked toward achievable solutions that reflect our differing interests. There is also a remarkable degree of agreement, and shared concerns. While we may not always agree on the nature or causes of problems—or of the solutions—we have attempted in this report to recommend changes that we believe will improve the House and the work of its Members.
The really important bit here is that they recognize that the unanimity requirement meant there were certain things they weren't going to get movement on, and that realistically for the government, if we move away from the model that Mr. Simms' unamended motion suggests or advocates to the model that I think we should advocate, it does mean that certain things come out of the government's agenda. It means that we don't go to four-day weeks, for example.
Although some of the other suggestions that Ms. Chagger made in her discussion paper about how you could deal with it—making Fridays into full days and moving around the kind of business that occurs on Fridays—are possibilities, if that one is really absolutely key to the government, well, it's not compatible here. It just isn't. Also, I could point to some other things.
On the other hand, there are many things on which I think we could achieve success, and the same kind of success that was achieved by this predecessor committee a decade and a half ago.
Paragraph 10 from the report states:
Procedural reform is an on-going process. The changes recommended in this report will need to be assessed to ensure that they are working as intended and not having unforeseen consequences. We encourage the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs to undertake a review of the operation and effect of these proposals in about a year, and to continue the work of modernizing and improving the procedures and practices of the House.
They recognized that when their special committee would come to its end, its work ought to return to the procedure and House affairs committee. Thus, I think I am justified in saying that this committee is a direct predecessor to our committee. When I referred in the amendment to “our” past practice, that is “our” as in this committee's past practice, even though, in the strictest technical way, they were a different committee.
The report indicates that even though they have worked by consensus and have restricted themselves to topics that they think are unlikely to be so grand or so vast as to produce radical unforeseen consequences, they accept and nevertheless recognize in all humility that there might be unforeseen consequences, and they build in a mechanism for ensuring that these changes can be adjusted back if necessary.
That humble practice of recognizing that it might be appropriate to revert has been done on a number of occasions where Standing Orders have been changed on a temporary basis. I think that is in general a good practice, recognizing that you might make mistakes, but of course one way to avoid mistakes to keep it consensual, to eliminate the things where someone says “I am worried that we may be going outside of where we have appropriate or complete knowledge”, and to therefore have an ability to make a change that will not do things that we did not intend to have happen.
Going through it and just looking now at how they broke it down, it's interesting to look at the subject matter, because it's not grouped under the same kinds of grand thematic headings that are in Minister Chagger's discussion paper. It's grouped in an order that appears to me to primarily be in the order the items arise in the Standing Orders, in that Standing Order 35 is discussed before Standing 39 and so on.
There is a certain thematic consistency to the Standing Orders, to be sure, but it's not the order mapped out by Minister Chagger. My suspicion is that this may be a wise way of doing things, but I don't mean to diminish what she was trying to do. My concerns, as you know, are with Mr. Simms' proposed motion and not with Minister Chagger's discussion paper per se.
Next are speeches by candidates for Speaker. It was the first item that was discussed. Standing Order 3.1 was suggested.
I'm going to go through these pretty quickly. The next thing they came along and actually made changes to was Standing Order 30, which deals with the “daily routine of business”, which appears at 3 p.m. on Mondays and Wednesdays, at 10 a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and at 12 noon on Fridays. It states that:
the House shall proceed to the ordinary daily routine of business, which shall be as follows:
They then list a few things. The new thing that's introduced is that the “Introduction of Government Bills” comes after “Tabling of Documents”.
Liberal
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
Yes, I am. They go onto petitions, and so on. They go through in that order.
Mr. Chair, rather than going through all of these points right now, what I might do is return to this report at a later time. I think you can see how the first part of my comments on this report was clearly connected to the amendment, but in order to select more accurately, I might save that for a later time.
What I think I might do, if it's agreeable, is to put myself back on the speaking order a bit later for this amendment, wrap up at this point, and allow the....
Is that not...?
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
Oh, my goodness. All right. I see that the next Speaker is not actually here, so I will keep going for a second.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
The next speaker is here. It's Mr. Graham.
Oh, sorry, it's Mr. Christopherson.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
I'm sorry about that, Mr. Chair.
They moved on to different topics. We may have to go back a little bit.
There were occasions in which....
Part of what I'm trying to drive at here is this.
Conservative
Blake Richards Conservative Banff—Airdrie, AB
You're not watching a video of Scott's earlier filibusters, are you?
