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.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
Okay. On the topic of the new bill, did the minister not say something also about cyber-protection for elections? Would that be...? Did she mention that in the context of the fundraising bill or would that be a separate bill?
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
I'm sure that's separate. I'm positive that's separate.
That's a good question to ask her. If I were guessing, I would think some of that stuff is probably not legislative. It's probably a matter of procedures adopted by government bodies that already have the power to do that. That's a good question to ask her. I might just try to buttonhole her and ask her that question.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
It doesn't look like we're going to votes any time soon. You might want to do your cake now.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
All right. Does anybody mind if we take a moment to celebrate? Does anybody have candles or a lighter? It's our third “filibersary”.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
If we can find a lighter, we'll suspend, because the smoke detector will probably go off. Why don't we suspend?
We will suspend until the cake is ceremonially cut.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
As people are coming back to the table, I will note that there's an announcement of the all-party restaurant and hospitality industry caucus meeting today, April 11, at 6:30 p.m. in Room 330 of the Wellington Building.
Members of Restaurants Canada will be on hand to provide a “state of the union” on the industry and highlight the current challenges and successes the industry is facing. Caucus members of all parties will collaborate and identify problems faced by the restauranteurs across Canada and work toward solutions they can bring back to various committees and respective caucus colleagues.
That's in Room 330 at 180 Wellington Street, from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. Light refreshments will be served.
When we suspended, Mr. Reid had the floor. We will return to Mr. Reid.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
Thank you. I'm sorry. I just have one.... I was texting my mom, who wanted to know that I'm okay.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
I just said that I love her, which is the best thing to say to your mom.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
Mr. Chair, before the break, I was in the midst of reading the letter that I'm sending to Minister Gould today with regard to essentially the scheduling conflict we have between the items on the agenda for this committee that are coming from that minister's office, because we are the committee that takes care of the democratic institutions portfolio, and the Standing Orders review that we've been given.
I went through a series of four questions, one of which has four subsidiary items. The four subsidiary items are the items that are coming from her to us: the CEO recommendations report from the 42nd election; Bill C-33, currently at second reading; her proposed bill on political financing; and then, of course, our Standing Orders and how they work together.
Now we'll come back to my actual text of the letter I will write to her, continuing on from where I left off:
As you know, [the procedure and House affairs committee] can always be seized with questions relating to matters of privilege at any time, which can serve to disrupt pre-planned study schedules. Two such matters have been debated in the House of Commons just this past week.
I would be grateful [to you] if you could convey a response to my questions herein to the Clerk of [the procedure and House affairs committee] for the information of [all] committee members. You are, of course, under no obligation to make reference to this letter.
Then I go on and say some other stuff. I may as well finish it off here:
On the matter of your offer to meet in-person, I would like to take you up on your offer in the short-term, however the unpredictable but largely-continuous...meeting schedule [of the procedure and House affairs committee] does not presently allow me to commit in advance to being available to meet you at a particular time. That said, my staff are happy to work with yours to find a time that would work with both our schedules on short notice.
I think I'm going to add a little note in there to her as well to say that I'm also available to meet during off weeks because, unlike many members of this committee—most notably yourself, Mr. Chair—I don't have a riding that is far, far away. Perth feels like it's a million miles from Ottawa, but it's actually a one-hour drive from wherever you're sitting right now, if there's no traffic. I could come in and meet with the minister if she's in Ottawa. As a minister, she might be here during the break week.
Anyway, that was what I said to her.
As I was going through this, a thought occurred to me regarding the—
Liberal
Liberal
Arnold Chan Liberal Scarborough—Agincourt, ON
Are you sharing that letter with the rest of us or are you just giving it to the clerk?
Liberal
Arnold Chan Liberal Scarborough—Agincourt, ON
Are you sharing that letter with the rest of us? Or is that going through the clerk?
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
I was reading the letter to the minister. But I read it—
Liberal
Arnold Chan Liberal Scarborough—Agincourt, ON
Yes, I heard it. I just wanted to know if we could get a hard copy.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
Yes, okay. I was actually editing as I went along. Are you willing to wait until I...?
Liberal
Arnold Chan Liberal Scarborough—Agincourt, ON
Yes, of course. I can wait until it's official from you, but thank you for the heads-up.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
My suggestion was that she respond to the clerk, because it's a matter for the whole committee to deal with. I find—and you must too—that she's a very businesslike person. I think she'll deal with this in a businesslike manner.
I do want to deal with something else that just occurred to me as I was reading through it. Early on, when this debate started, I engaged in an extemporaneous rant, if that is the right word, vis-à-vis Minister Chagger's paper and Mr. Simms' motion to this committee. I argued at the time that it seemed improbable that Mr. Simms had read the paper and proposed his motion within an hour—or an hour and 18 minutes, whatever the time was—between Minister Chagger's paper being made public and Mr. Simms' motion being submitted to the committee.
He subsequently, in the context of a debate in the House, corrected a misapprehension that I had at the time. He said that he seen the paper a number of days in advance. I think he said it was three days or around that period of time; it was less than a week but certainly more than 48 hours. It was somewhere in that range. At the time, I just absorbed that information, but the little bell that it should have set off was only triggered as I was reading this letter earlier. I realized that Mr. Simms' motion therefore was presumably prepared based upon his reading of the House leader's discussion paper before he was aware that Minister Gould would be asking us to undertake these matters.
Of course, both the discussion paper and Mr. Simms' motion were introduced on March 10. Minister Gould was before this committee on March 9. It occurs to me that therefore he would have seen the discussion paper on March 7, say, and possibly could have written up his motion without an awareness of the conflicts. That may explain why we find a situation for which I mentioned the analogy of the left and right hand not knowing what the other is doing, but certainly the situation of two ministers asking for outcomes that are ultimately not both achievable at the same time, and both for the same use of the committee's time. We should always try to look for the most innocent available explanation for something. That is one that occurs to me and may explain this problem.
I wanted to outline all of this in more detail because it's my view that the Standing Orders are a matter of critical importance, but they are a matter that (a) can wait and (b) can be subdivided into subsidiary components to be dealt with one at a time, which I think it is not only the businesslike way of dealing with them, but quite literally the only way of dealing with them that will not produce a real dog's breakfast.
Moving from the basic agenda discussion, I want to go to something that the House leader, Minister Chagger, said last week and then repeated over the course of the weekend. I made it the subject of a question in question period. Given that we on the opposition side were talking about the need for a consensus before moving forward, she said, well, effectively, that means that if the opposition, one or the other parties, doesn't like it, we can't move forward with standing order changes, which is exactly what it means. She said that represents effectively a veto. Here I think I'm getting her quote exactly right: we cannot let the opposition have “a veto” over our campaign promises.
I want to discuss that. It gets into something that has always interested me, and that should be of interest to all of us, and that is mandate theory, classical mandate theory. What is the mandate of a government? What is a government legitimately able to do following an election?
There are different theories about this, sometimes expressed like this: what is a member of Parliament legitimately able to do? It's in the famous speech by Edmund Burke to the electors of Bristol when he was the member of Parliament for Bristol. He indicated that he thought what they should be doing is choosing the person who they thought had the best judgment and then relying upon that judgment, even when that judgment on individual issues conflicted with their own.
Liberal
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
That's right. The subsequent part, of course, is that he did not get re-elected.
While it's an interesting discussion, I think it reflects a kind of election that existed in the 18th century in the United Kingdom, one that has not existed in a very long time either in that country or this one, in which people were elected as individual members with very loose ties to any party. The parties we talk about from those days—the Tories and the Whigs—were not parties in the sense that we use the term. “Party” was essentially.... Sometimes the word used in its place was “faction”, and that's the best way to understand them.
It was a bit like how people talk about Red Tory and Blue Tory factions within the Conservative party, for example. Also, there was talk at one time of a Chrétien faction and a Martin faction in the Liberals. Within the NDP, there was the Waffle movement, and now there are the people behind the Leap Manifesto, and others who are part of different groups.
That was how it was seen in those days. In the 18th century, Parliament itself was a single deciding body. Of course, in those days it was largely independent of the executive, and the executive was independent of Parliament. That window was starting to close. There was a prime minister by about the year 1720 or 1725. Walpole was the first prime minister, that is to say, the first minister who was primus inter pares, who came to the king speaking for the cabinet with a single voice, saying that “all your ministers advise you this way”.
Parenthetically, this was something the king wanted. King George I was actually a very unpleasant individual, but he was also very much wrapped up in the affairs of his small kingdom of Hanover in northern Germany. He was fighting wars with all his neighbours, and he learned that he had been chosen as king of England, so he sailed across the North Sea, was crowned, and went back to Germany, where he spent the rest of his life. There was no further direct involvement by him in British affairs.
When I was in Australia, they were having a debate over becoming a republic. People would say that you had to have a resident as your head of state, that you can't have someone who lives in a foreign country, and that the British would never stand for that if the roles were reversed. Of course, the appropriate response was, well, actually, the British were the ones who pioneered this. They had a German for their head of state for some time. George I was actually buried in Germany.
Anyway, the result of this was that he was not in close proximity to his ministers and couldn't ask each of them for individual advice, so he got a single minister to compile everything, all the advice, and present it to him in a single package. I want to say that person was Horace Walpole, but that's not right. Horace Walpole was the nephew of the prime minister. He went on to become a famous author of gothic romances; that's “Gothick” with a “k” at the end. He was the architect of Strawberry Hill in the beginning of the Romantic revival of gothic architecture.
Prime Minister Walpole would summarize these things. The media didn't like it. They felt that classical government, what they were familiar with at the time, was that the king took his advice from all his ministers and then made his decisions. That's how the king's predecessor, Queen Anne, handled things. She had a number of ministers selected from the various factions or parties in the House. She would then make executive decisions based upon their advice. The idea of one minister reporting to the king and nobody else was seen as an infringement of the collegial style of government that had existed. The term “prime minister” was actually a term that was used as a term of opprobrium; it was a term of disapproval. At any rate, by the end of the 18th century, that convention had solidified, but parties themselves were still informal bodies. They were thought of more as factions than as parties.
It was in that context that Edmund Burke made his comment in essentially answering a question about whether he should come back to the electors of Bristol between elections and ask them how they felt about this or that. He took an approach that is different from the one I've taken. Every so often we find ourselves acting as independents when there's no party discipline on some issue and, if there's enough time, you can go back and consult your constituents. It's something that I have done a number of times, most recently on the assisted dying legislation, when I asked my constituents whether I should vote for or against the legislation. About two-thirds of them instructed me to vote for the legislation.
He could have done a version of that, but he was saying that he didn't do that. He said that what he did was to use his conscience and his judgment, and his judgment in particular. He said that people should regard him in the same way they would regard a judge. He went to Parliament with that same sense of impartiality, and with better access to the available information, something that was actually quite a valid point in those days. It would be hard to get information back to Bristol about one of the great issues of the day without a considerable lag. Communication moved at the speed of the stagecoaches that carried letters and the newspapers, but that's obviously not true today.
In the intervening 220 years—in round numbers—between Edmund Burke and the present, parties in a more modern sense emerged. The whole history of the early 19th century in Britain is the history of the firming up of party structures, something that really comes to its maturity, I think, in the era of Gladstone and Disraeli leading two clearly defined visions of the nation at the head of respective parties, with Gladstone at the head of the Liberals and Disraeli at the head of the Conservatives, and with a very clear manifesto, as they would call it in Britain—or platform, as we would call it in Canada—being produced by each one. A clear understanding was developed. Prior to that, it had not been clear at that time, although the convention had been developing, that if you were defeated on a key item in the House of Commons, the government would fall, and the expectation would be that the Prime Minister would proffer to the Queen the advice to call new elections. That was when that solidified: during the Disraeli-Gladstone period in the 1860s through the 1880s.
It is out of this that the idea of a mandate developed: a collective mandate that the entire government consists of people who were elected based upon the manifesto or the platform that was produced in the previous election. Thus, we developed what could be called the mandate theory, the theory about what a mandate can entail.
Do you face a situation in which the government has simply indicated a general direction, such as that it will practise fiscal probity or that it will have small deficits without defining what a deficit is? Or do you have a more detailed expectation, such that if the government said it had absolute authority to go forward with its proposal but then failed to articulate it, then it really ought not to move forward at all? Or is it the case that you have some freedom in the areas where you did not expressly articulate a policy?
I would submit that when we look at this, there are several answers to those questions.
First of all, how much of the vote did you get? I don't want to endlessly revisit the electoral reform debate in which people argued that the Liberals got 39.5% of the vote, and they have 55% of the seats, and therefore 100% of the power. In the arguments of those who were in favour of proportional representation, this suggests that they have a very limited mandate. The same thing could have been said about the government of which I was a part, which was elected in 2011 with an identical percentage of the vote.
One could argue, therefore, that no one really has a full mandate, but I don't see any evidence that this is how Canadians regard it. Canadians expect those who are elected to govern. They understand that it is not the preference of the elected party to get fewer than half the votes; it's the way things come out. Obviously, no party says that it will deliberately try to keep its votes below 50%, so you can't blame Justin Trudeau for not having 50% of the vote. If he could have found a way of doing it, I think we all believe that, in all sincerity, he would have tried to get 50% of the vote. Nobody's going to question that.
Do we say, then, that we are prepared to govern as if we have minority governments all the time, even though we have a majority? I never saw that argument presented. I think the Canadian convention, or the practice, or the understanding of the Canadian people regarding mandate theory is that if you get a majority government, something that is to some degree determined by chance—and that when you stick with 39% and move it around somewhat, you get a minority government—it is reasonable for you to attempt to act upon your election mandate.
That is what Minister Chagger was articulating. She was saying, look, this isn't a minority government. It's a majority government. We hold the majority of the seats and the people have voted for us to act on this platform. Had it been the Conservatives who had a majority government, they would have acted on their platform. None of us is expected to say that we're setting aside our platform and governing as we would if we had only a minority.
There's obviously a vast gulf between the way you act with a minority and the way you act with a majority government. Having been on both sides—minority and majority—in government, and having been on both sides of it in opposition, I can safely say that you act in very different ways. The opposition behaves in different ways too. The opposition actually is more restrained, in some respects, during a minority government, because it recognizes that it could defeat the government, and hence it has to be careful not to defeat the government when it didn't intend to do so. This allows the government a certain degree of freedom to say that it's going to act a certain way, and that if it is defeated in that, we'll have an election. Depending where the polls are, that can be a considerable barrier to over-eager actions on the part of the opposition.
I thought nobody understood that better than Stephen Harper, who managed to govern with two successive minorities. If you look back at Canada's history, you'll realize that, amazing but true—it's pure fact—no previous Conservative minority government had ever survived long enough to actually put its budget into effect. There had never been a Conservative government that actually produced a budget that made it through the House of Commons and was enacted.
There have been Conservative minorities, one in 1957 under Diefenbaker, who called an election unexpectedly and early in 1958. There was Diefenbaker's second minority, which failed very quickly in the early 1960s. In 1962 he was elected to a minority and lost in 1963, over his budget, I believe. There was the Clark minority, which fell over its budget as well. After that, we're all out.
This was, then, a significant accomplishment. There have been numerous Liberal minorities, and the reason they work is that since we developed minority.... We never had minorities before the 1920s, but since that time, the third party with the smaller numbers has always been on the left, so that when you divide up the spectrum, it's possible for the Liberals to govern. It doesn't always work out, but if you are a gifted political operator, such as Mackenzie King, for example, who governed through the entire 1920s with minorities and didn't get a majority until 1935, it can be done.
Indeed, as Pierre Trudeau pointed out, it can actually let you get through parts of your agenda. If you're on the progressive wing of the Liberal party and your own party is resisting, you can say, well, our NDP colleagues are demanding this or else they'll defeat us, and hence we need to move a little bit left. He actually made a point of stressing that he had managed to accomplish some policy objectives in the 1972-74 period that would not have been available to him had he had a greater number of seats in a majority. I learned about that by reading David Lewis's autobiography. He was the NDP leader in that period.