Procedure and House Affairs Committee on March 21st, 2017

[An hon. member]

I can grab one.

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

I could do that, but I just believe in being transparent and open, something I wish the government would do in the way it deals with these Standing Orders.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

That's fine.

Okay, we're going to—

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

Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case, unless you've had a change of heart over there. Has anyone sort of—

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

I think we should suspend over—

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

We're going to suspend.

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

We could have a conversation about that instead if you'd like.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

We will suspend for 10 minutes.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

I'll bring us out of suspension.

I know that Gérard Deltell would really like us to get to him on the list, but seeing as there are six people before him, and each of the last two have taken nine hours, we may not get to him.

[An hon. member]

That will be in about nine days, I think.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Yes, about nine days, Gérard.

[An hon. member]

I'd like to be put on the speaking list.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

You'd like to get on that list too? Okay. You'll be about 10 days from now.

Mr. Kmiec.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you for that short health break.

I'll just give a few more comments from constituents of mine. This is something I have done a few times now in the House during a late debate. I'm one of those members who asked repeatedly for an emergency debate on the jobs crisis in Alberta. That opportunity exists for members of Parliament to represent their constituents and request something that typically is not given. We did get a take-note debate out of it. Again, that's an opportunity that the government and the opposition have to demonstrate an interest in a particular subject. That agreement was struck by consensus on which day it would be. The government was.... I won't say they were generous, but they saw the wisdom of having a debate on the jobs crisis in the energy sector, and eventually yielded.

At that time, I read many comments left for me by my constituents regarding the difficult time they were having finding jobs. It was one of those opportunities when I, as a parliamentarian, had to represent them.

Just as I did then, I want to read a few more comments left by Canadians who do care what we do here, who do care about the work of parliamentarians, who do care about being well represented.

Marilyn says, “Thank you so much for protecting our democratic rights.” Harold, 40 minutes into this extensive debate we've had, wrote, “The liberals had better realize that the next election Canadians will not elect them again if they keep screwing us Canadians over. How tough is that to figure out”. That's pretty harsh language.

Barb says, 29 minutes in, “Everyone keep talking. Canadians need their voices to be heard.” Lynn says, 20 minutes in, “Keep up the good work. Liberals are clearly lacking in work ethics”. I won't say that about the members before me here. You're doing exemplary work sitting here on this committee at this late hour in order to listen to me continue to discuss this. The PMO may thank you for it. You'll be at the top of the list, perhaps, for parliamentary secretary positions.

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

I doubt it. Don't count on it.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

The last thing Lynn says is that the “last thing they need is more time off”—“they” being parliamentarians, of course.

Silva says, “Liberals should all go—”. That's pretty harsh. There's an allusion to Napoleon and Marie Antoinette here that's excessive. Another says, “The people need to know at all times what is going on”. There's also, “Tom...thank you for using your abilities and knowledge to challenge the liberal moves” and “Thank you for speaking for us. Keep putting the word out there and hopefully something will click.” That's 55 minutes in. Obviously, people are interested. Obviously, they are taking an active interest in this.

Some of these were not just five minutes in, or two minutes in. Some of these people made commentary 53 minutes into my extensive debate, my substantive debate, on this subject.

Molly says, “Keep going Tom. Don't stop.” I eventually will have to stop, because I will run out of steam and out of subject matter that's interesting.

[An hon. member]

I don't believe that. I think you can go forever.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

The honourable member doesn't believe me, but I will eventually because I'm not the Energizer bunny. I won't stop yet, though. I've only covered off the first point with my three dozen substantive subpoints. That's already off to the side.

I'd like to go back to the 1991 speeches. Again, as you've heard me say before, past members have already debated this issue. Past members have already raised the problems with proceeding on standing order amendments without having the unanimous agreement of the other parties. I have mentioned that we should not be looking to the past for situations that arose where governments proceeded to ram through changes they sought to obtain through the PROC committee but also on the floor of the House of Commons. That is not the right way to look at our patrimony, the right way to look at what we have been handed to steward on to the next generation. The right way to look at it is as an opportunity to learn.

Mr. Jack Whittaker was a member of Parliament for Okanagan—Similkameen—Merritt. He rose to contribute to the debate on April 11, 1991. The reason I raise what he said here is that he made a lot of the same points, having read the biographies of great parliamentarians like John A. Macdonald, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Tommy Douglas, Mackenzie King, “to name some of them”. He went through the biographies, and mentions here what great love they had for Parliament and the work they did as parliamentarians in this House.

Going on here, even in 1991, he said:

The government in its arrogance simply ignored discussions with the opposition and invoked closure. The matter was passed on a voice vote without the necessity, but Parliament was not meant to have these matters pushed through or rammed through without proper discussion, without proper airing or without the adequate ability of the 26.5 million Canadians being given the opportunity to look these bills over....

I feel the same way about the potential for this study on amending the Standing Orders to go through without having this unanimous agreement component. I think we've taken a good step in televising this portion of our debates. That's a good step forward. The next step is to then agree to pass this amendment, a very reasoned amendment. It's very reasonable. It's not radical. It's not new. It simply says we want to seek unanimous agreement before we propose any changes, any tweaks, to the Standing Orders.

He then went on further to reference, just as many members have already, the McGrath report and the unanimous consent of the McGrath report. I don't want to go through the report with you and read sections of it out, because Mr. Christopherson did that before. I've mentioned that there was the Tom Lefebvre committee, which also proposed amendments. Many times the Standing Orders were tweaked with unanimous consent. Those types of instances, in which we have sought common ground and found consensus, we should refer to more often. We should go back into the Hansard and look at those individual situations when we did find ground to work together.

Even back then, Canadians cared. They cared in 1991. There were Ottawa Citizen articles written in great volumes. It says here:

“It is interesting, in looking at a recent article in The Ottawa Citizen this morning by Frank Howard, that he refers back to when this government first took office in 1984. Having spent a long time in opposition, it was very aware of the difficulties of the opposition and the need to give opposition members a voice and to make them feel that they were responding to their constituents' needs and wishes.”

I'm not going to quote from the article, as he does. They would feel as though they had an opportunity. That's what this amendment is all about. We just want to know that you have our best interests in mind as well, that you will not try to shut us down. We don't have that certainty.

We're fighting right now to get that certainty from the government caucus. We want that certainty. Our constituents, the ones who made comments that I've read to you, want that certainty as well. They don't want to elect parliamentarians to come here and not be able to advocate on their behalf at the committee level or at the House of Commons level. Certain motions may obstruct....

As I mentioned before, I won't be rated on how much government legislation I vote on or pass. I don't think a government is rated that way. A government can be critiqued that way for being inefficient and ineffective at passing legislation or having things fall through.

I remember when this government, the government that many of these members support, almost lost its vote on the Air Canada bill and it was saved by only one vote. That's taking it down to the wire, but that's not the fault of the government caucus members here. That is the fault of the House leadership on the government side. I really feel that this motion, the proposed changes the government is pushing forward, are to cover for the deficiencies in the House leadership on the government side. I'm using the nicest possible language to define the deficiencies that I see in the House leadership of the Liberal Party, the Liberal caucus.

I think that all of these proposed changes will be, in essence, changes that will be created or proposed and then potentially rammed through this committee on into the House, and potentially rammed through there as well. They will see fit to cover for the inability of the House leaders, the House leadership on that side, to reach consensus and an agreement with those on this side of the House, both the New Democrats and the Conservatives, as well as with others.

We've seen it happen sometimes that unanimous consent was sought for a motion in the House of Commons, and nobody had spoken to the Bloc Québécois members on whether they were agreeing to the unanimous consent motion. You may disagree or agree that they should be there or not be there, but they were elected by their constituents to represent them, and they are trying to do that job as well as they can.

I don't agree with their philosophy. I'm still a committed federalist. I was a federalist, even though I was young, in Quebec. I survived the 1995 referendum. I remember my parents with their van packed, ready to go if the vote happened to be a yes.

However, I still think Bloc Québécois members represent their constituencies. Their perspective matters. It matters because they sought, found, and earned the support of their constituents to represent them here as parliamentarians. I know I've had my disagreements with them, with their anti-pipeline stances, for example, but they are still equal parliamentarians to me. They have the same vote, the same equally weighted vote. They have the same ability to move a motion. They have the same ability to be heard on a unanimous consent motion when consent is sought. The amendment would fix the motion and ensure that we all have a voice here, through our caucuses, through our representatives.

I know that when Ms. May was here—Mr. Chair, you were kind enough to grant her an opportunity to speak—she made similar points as well.

With a lot of the changes proposed in 1991 and eventually forced upon the opposition parties, I'm convinced that both the Reform Party and Bloc Québécois opposition members came to regret them because they made it much more difficult for them to represent their constituents. To defend the interests of their constituents is one thing, but then to defend the interests of Parliament is another. That's a fine line. You may find yourselves, at times, in a situation where protecting Parliament is not the same as protecting your constituents and their interests at the end of the day. Sometimes they may come into conflict, and then it's up to you as parliamentarians to find a balance between the two.

That balancing of interests I spoke to at the very beginning is really important. For members of the government and members of the opposition caucuses, it's an important balance to reach, which is why we don't go over the top when we oppose something. We always try to find a balance in a measured way to show the government that we are unhappy or dissatisfied with the amount of freedom we are given to oppose in the reasonable way that we do.

Again, I'll be speaking about another member of the House, who spoke in the House on April 11, 1991—a different member, the member for Davenport. I'm not going to say the name right, but it was obviously a cabinet minister, Charles Caccia. If you read the Debates, he invoked the McGrath report and spoke to the number of times that closure was used, noting that between 1971 and 1984, a 13-year period that included minority governments, closure was invoked three times. In those years, when there were a lot of disagreement and a lot of changes in Parliament, with a lot of new members being elected, they only invoked closure three times. They were able to find consensus. They were able to find opportunities where they could have a reasoned debate, disagree, and vote against each other, taking the positions they needed to take, but in the end finding a way to go forward.

Finding a way to go forward requires us to pass this amendment. It requires us, including members of the government caucus, to agree that opposition members still matter to the proceedings and have been faithful to the duty we've been given by our oath of office.

That particular member, the member for Davenport at the time, went on to draw a contrast with the situation in 1991, seven years after the time frame he first cited:

...closure has been invoked nine times over a period of nine years. Do we not detect a pattern of management of Parliament that is pretty severe and pretty restrictive in resorting to such extreme measures?

With regard to this pattern of management of Parliament, what I think he meant to do in a very gentle way was to chastise the House leadership of the government for how it had chosen to manage the proceedings. I think you get a lot more with honey than a stick, when you entice members to take a reasonable stance and then proceed to defend their interests and their perspectives. That is okay.

The member for Davenport then goes on to describe the imposition he felt, which I've mentioned before, the imposition of the government constraining him in what he could do on behalf of his constituents, and the message it was sending to his constituents about his worth and his role in Parliament. This was quite a long speech he gave in talking about the different sides and the positions they had taken.

He went on to say:

We on this side of the House do not believe there is a bankruptcy of ideas on the part of elected representatives.

As for this “bankruptcy of ideas”, we on the opposition side have ideas for potential reforms to Standing Orders that the government caucus may want to consider taking on. Perhaps the government caucus has ideas that we could consider, separate from the ideas being imposed upon us by the Government of Canada. The only way we can proceed is by passing the amendment so that we can have the confidence that whatever the final product will be, it will be by unanimous consent, and the changes that we will have done will improve the functioning of Parliament, whatever that functioning is determined to be.

I believe it's about deliberation. It gives us more opportunities to debate and speak. As you know, there are the changes Mr. Genuis mentioned about potentially moving late sittings—and how we treat them—to the end of question period. That's not an idea that should be discounted so easily. It's an idea worth considering. It does have merit.

Especially on the face on it, it does have merit, but it needs further study. It needs in-depth study, and if it's to be changed, I think it should be changed by unanimous agreement. I don't think it could be changed simply because the government decides that it's a good idea and they're going to change the way late sittings work because it's easier for them to schedule in ministers to be in question period, to have them do this extended late sitting, an extended question period of four minutes on each side, perhaps, and to then leave for the rest of the day and not have to return for votes.

The member also talked about the work-life balance. This returns to the concepts about Friday sittings. I know that there has been disagreement on what actually is being proposed. We hear one thing in question period from the House leader, but Mr. Simms has offered a different perspective on it.

The member I've mentioned went on to talk about constituency work and what that looked like. He said:

Let me analyse for a moment the idea of having members in their riding longer every month...for one week.

That wasn't available yet. He continued:

This scheme is one that could be described as the steam-engine era scheme, coming from the time when travel was very slow and electronic facilities of the kind we know today did not exist. Fifty years ago, it took two or three days to reach one's riding. You certainly did not have a fax in your office or the telephone facilities and other ways of communicating quickly with your electors, constituents and the like. Neither did you have the capacity to travel back and forth by jet.

Almost the entire beginning of that no longer applies. I don't know if many of you still have fax machines in your offices. I have a perpetually broken printer, but I don't believe that I have a fax machine anymore. Now, with the advent of email, we are able to keep in contact with our constituents on almost a 24-7 basis. I answer my own Facebook messages to constituents.

Yes, it's a great way to keep in touch. That's what Madam Mendès is doing right now. It's a great way to keep in touch with constituents, especially when they know it's the fastest way to reach you. You can have that quick back-and-forth. Then the constituents know they've been heard, just like we will know that we have been heard if you pass this amendment and allow us to proceed to change the Standing Orders in such a way that we can all find common ground.

He goes on to talk about what the work-life balance was. He also talked about past proposals for these kinds of parliamentary reforms in asking these questions:

Has it packaged the product of the 1990s for our consideration? Or is it a product of the 1920s?

Where do you want to take us with these amendments? Do you want to take us back to where we were before, pre-1969, which would give us more time in the House of Commons to debate, to potentially filibuster, and to obtain more speaking time from the Speaker? We just don't know, because it's not in here. The only theme, the overriding theme of the government document that's been produced, is that efficiency matters more than deliberation and that we are too adversarial in the way we proceed with the business of the House.

I have mentioned that I don't agree with that assessment. It's wrong. You're not my adversaries. We have deliberative debate, and especially at the committees, with the added opportunities. It could be just as good to have this deliberation and this debate on the floor of the House of Commons.

Even in this time, it wasn't solely a conversation among members of different caucuses who weren't members of the executive, but they mentioned the concerning, far-reaching statements, declarations the Prime Minister of Canada made on environment and sustainable development—it goes on an on—declarations in abstract terms.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Sorry, but I will interrupt just briefly.

I promised to get back to people tonight about my thinking on the schedule. We will suspend tonight at 11 and come back tomorrow morning at 10 in room 253-D. It will be televised. You'll get the notice, but that's where it is. Then we'll suspend at 11 tomorrow till Monday, April 3.

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

What is it again for tomorrow?

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

We'll sit from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. tomorrow, and then suspend till Monday, April 3, so you don't miss question period.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Then we're adjourned until—pardon me, we're suspended until...?

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

That term is pretty loaded.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

We will be suspended until April 3.

I promised to get back to people tonight.

Mr. Kmiec.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

That's okay, Mr. Chair. It's probably a good thing you interrupted my train of thought.