Procedure and House Affairs Committee on March 21st, 2017

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

[Inaudible—Editor]

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

Yes, that's right. When we say yes to doing this study, I would love for you and I to have this conversation about it and incorporate it into the study as to why I think it has to change. I'm not sure if you feel the same way. I think you might, but I shouldn't say that, and I won't know until we vote.

The other point I want to make is...directions from the PMO. I appreciate the comments from Mr. Richards—

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Actually, on a point of order, Mr. Chair, I just want to stop....

Procedurally this is unconventional. I don't mind it, but I assume I still have the floor—

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Yes.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

—and this is sort of a sub-heading of that or something.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

It's Mr. Richard's point of order.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Okay. All right, as long as we're clear about that.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

I'm speaking to the point of order.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Okay. I just wanted to make sure that was the gist of that

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

You'll get it back, though.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

He did talk about directions from the PMO, and I have had this discussion with so many of my colleagues, as I was a former critic of democratic reform. That's where it all began. My directions came from experience, much like yours. Mr. Richards talks about directions from the PMO with an incredible amount of clarity, which one can only experience through experiencing just that. The only thing he probably should have added at the end is, “and trust me, I know that”.

Anyway, I apologize. That may have been a little bit over the top because I do have a great respect for Mr. Richards, as I always have had, so I'm just jabbing back a bit. Forgive me, but I do want to engage in all that has been said here. Through this study, once we do it, I want to use the time that we have so that we can get this done, and I want to put this in the hands of the government and incorporate all our thoughts about this and reach that consensus.

I don't know if that does a—

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Banff—Airdrie, AB]

Mr. Chair, I'm not sure that I got really.... It certainly sounded to me like the intention would be to carry on with this and to try to “ram” it through as has been put so well by Mr. Christopherson. I wish I could believe that this was really about trying to get consensus and it was really about trying to bring everybody's viewpoints in.

I know it was noted earlier by Mr. Reid that he wasn't able to be there to provide input for the Standing Orders debate, for example. Of course, a number of us weren't and it was another one of the failed Liberal attempts to fool people with the electoral reform initiative that brought us away from here for that.

I don't think anyone is under any illusion as to what this is about. It's clearly about the idea of giving the Prime Minister one day a week he has to show up here to be accountable to Canadians. It's clearly about giving Liberal MPs another day off. We want to make sure that Canadians have an ability to hold this government accountable. Obviously, there is some significant concern here.

If the intention is to continue to try to ram this through, as it appears to be, and that means that they want to continue with this on Thursday, Mr. Chair, I wonder if it's just a question for you about how you intend to deal with the Elections Canada officials. I hate to put them through this show of coming here and then having to be dismissed and things like that. Obviously, that's an important study and one that we think we should be carrying on with as well. I don't know why suddenly— it seemed like not that long ago that it was such an important thing for the government and we had to really move forward with it. All of a sudden, the Standing Orders changes are trumping it.

I don't know what has happened in the interim, but somehow they've decided they want to be less accountable to Canadians and that takes priority over changing the election rules. I'm really confused as to where we're headed here and if there's something that we need to do with the Elections Canada officials to notify them of this change from the government about this desire to immediately be less accountable to Canadians.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Thank you, Mr. Richards.

[Arnold Chan, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

We're debating a point of order.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

I'm definitely sensitive to the witnesses and as this procedure unfolds, I will make sure we can give them the best information and timing that we can.

We'll go back to Mr. Reid. You have the floor.

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

Mr. Chair, before he gets going I want to make a point of order, if I could too.

During Mr. Reid's amazing words—and I learned a lot actually, so thank you for that, Mr. Reid—our friend, Elizabeth May, did some minor fact-checking and we want to correct the record a bit, Mr. Chair, if we could.

I believe that Mr. Reid said that he and the electoral reform committee were in Iqaluit on October 6, but it appears they were actually in Prince Edward Island. I think it's very important to have that record corrected. I'm sure Mr. Reid didn't intentionally mean to mislead the committee.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Thank you, Mr. Schmale.

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

I just wanted to make sure everyone knew that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Mr. Reid, you have the floor.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Thank you.

My goodness, I got a lot wrong there. I was on the wrong island

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

You were just slightly off.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

They are very similar, you know. It's easy to make that mistake.

For what it's worth, I actually ended up liking Iqaluit a lot more than I thought I would. I knew Prince Edward Island would be nice, but I had never been to Iqaluit. It was actually a pretty cool place.

Thank you to Mr. Simms for the history of the guillotine. Regrettably, from my work in the human rights subcommittee, I'm more knowledgeable about the history of the other kind of guillotine. I will add the corrections that Mr. Simms offered today to my list of useful but obscure facts.

When we left off, I had gone through the assisted dying bill and the electoral reform process and pointed out the way in which there has been a long, heel-dragging process, followed by a rush. I'm not sure—I want to emphasize—this is necessarily always the result of a dastardly master plan. I don't mean to suggest that somewhere out there there is an aspiring Bond villain plotting out these things so that we see a mechanistic repetition of the same centrally planned nefarious plot in which a single plan unwinds like clockwork.

I think that in each of these cases there has been a bit of impetuousness. I've long believed and I've often said that with regard to electoral reform, what the government appears to have tried to do was simply find policies they could use to poach New Democrat votes in the 2015 election. The electoral reform proposal was one that was taken word for word from the motion that Craig Scott had proposed and the New Democrats had introduced in the House of Commons, which was debated in December of 2014. It was literally word for word, although there was a semicolon in that motion that went on to advocate MMP, and that was where the Liberal motion stopped. The words about 2015 being the last election held under first past the post, that was word for word an NDP motion. I think its purpose was to win NDP votes, pure and simple.

I think—although I don't know this—that the Liberals did not anticipate winning a majority government. I think they thought at best they'd be a minority, or there was a good chance they'd be the main opposition party in a minority government, but at any rate, they wouldn't have to actually fulfill this. But when the election took place, I think they then said, “Here's our main chance. Maybe we can take something that was meant to be a promise of the species of universal child care.” That was a perennial Liberal promise in 1993, the election of 1997, the election of 2000, and I think it was still there in 2004. Finally it just kind of faded away. I think it was meant to be one of those things. It would draw votes over and over again, without actually having to be fulfilled.

When they found themselves in the position where they could follow through, they chose to follow through with a system that appears to me to be designed to ensure that only one alternative to the status quo would be available. That was to drag their heels for a long time—they did it for six months—and then to hold committee hearings and report back after it was too late to actually put forward any option as an alternative to the status quo other than preferential votes, which, in single-member districts, have the advantage of not requiring a redistribution.

Every form of proportional representation requires redistribution. Redistribution takes two years, so then they could say, “Gosh, if proportionality was a valid option.... Here we see the deadline we have to pass. We see it in our rearview mirror; we just drove past it. We're so sorry, but we have this sacred promise. We've repeated it hundreds of times. We have promised that 2015 will be the last election under first past the post.” Then they go ahead and introduce preferential voting. I think that was the plan.

I wrote an editorial to that effect in the Ottawa Citizen in May of last year, and then went out of my way to collect all the information I could from the Chief Electoral Officer as to whether it would be possible to achieve any of these other systems by the deadline the government had set up.

Speaking of P.E.I., I missed the committee's hearings in St. John's. I flew back to Ottawa to ask the Chief Electoral Officer some additional questions like whether the time it takes for redistribution could be expedited. I built on questions that Ms. May and others had asked in previous committee meetings. You were chairing it, Mr. Chair.

Then I flew back to P.E.I. on my own to meet the committee and to continue meeting witnesses. We were able to demonstrate that it would be possible to have electoral reform that involved changes to the layout of the seats, and therefore made proportional representation possible by 2019, while still meeting the government's deadline.

This allowed us to say we can achieve the government's bottom line; the NDP bottom line, which is PR; the Conservative bottom line, which is a referendum. We can do it all. Here's our report. Here are the backup facts. The report of the committee consists largely of those demonstrations.

The government's discussion paper was submitted on the Friday before we went away. It contains some items that I, at least initially.... These are not actual alternative standing orders. Here's the study. Column one has a standing order on... and the way it is now, Standing Order 2 shows its alternative. But they do lay out the general issues to be considered, which structured this way would take a substantial amount of time to go through.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Go ahead.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

No, I actually—

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

Take your time.