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”.