I'd be very interested in that. It would provide us with some context for understanding what can actually be done.
The other point I'd make is that like a lot of things, you can say that the rules aren't perfect and that they provide for what some people might consider an abuse. But any time someone stretches the rules, there's a public debate about it. When a government uses time allocation, as they are allowed to do according to the rules, there is a public conversation about that. When the government brings in omnibus legislation, it's ultimately up to the public to evaluate, on the basis of what they're hearing about the bill, whether it is a proper use of the legislative process.
We can look for ways in which people within this place, committees, the Speaker, and perhaps other bodies make and enforce rules. There is some political accountability there as well. This speaks to some of the complexity around omnibus bills.
Here is the argument the government House leader uses for the approach in the discussion paper. She says:
This approach would allow for the divided bills to be debated together at second reading, report stage and third reading but would be subject to separate votes at each stage. In addition, the divided bills could be sent to separate committees if the subject matter of the bills warranted such action.
I'm a little bit confused about what the intention is, because this document speaks of dividing bills, but then it says “this approach would allow for the divided bills to be debated together at second reading, report stage and third reading”. I don't quite know what that means. If you have separate bills, then you have separate bills, which means that they are debated on different days. They're not only voted separately but are debated at separate times. Perhaps something else is meant by this, that the divided bills would be debated relatively close to each other. That's one thing, but it makes me wonder, looking at the text in this discussion paper, if what's actually envisioned by the government House leader is not a full separation of bills but something in between, a sort of semi-separation. There would be separate votes but not actually the separation of them.
I will say that there's a very simple solution to the feeling that you need to vote for a bill that contains elements you like and don't like. That is simply the question of report stage amendments. The process we follow, generally speaking, is to have fewer and fewer report stage amendments. There was a time when report stage amendments could be brought forward fairly easily, but then the change was to say that report stage amendments could be moved in the House only if they couldn't have been moved in committee or in certain exceptional circumstances.
Changes have been made to now allow members of non-recognized parties and independents to move amendments at committee. It's interesting that some people, Ms. May in particular, have objected to this on the basis that the only effect of allowing them to move amendments in committee is that it prevents them from moving amendments in the House at report stage. I argued when we discussed this at committee that really, this is a question of what privileges members have in relation to each other, because if members of non-recognized parties can move amendments at report stage and members of recognized parties cannot, that introduces a certain advantage for members of non-recognized parties.
The process, over time, has been to tighten allowing the movement of amendments at report stage. It isn't clear whether what the House leader is concerned about is dividing the bills in terms of debate or dividing them in terms of having separate votes. You could just reverse that trend and have greater latitude for the moving of report stage amendments.
The interesting thing is that it's up to the Speaker already in those exceptional circumstances. As I talked about in the context of Bill C-14, there are provisions in the Standing Orders that allow the Speaker, in exceptional circumstances, to allow the consideration of report stage amendments, even if they've already been considered at committee, but only in exceptional circumstances dealing with issues of a certain importance.
Yes, one might say that it's difficult to ask the Speaker to evaluate the relative importance of bills that come before the House and decide that these are important enough to have report stage amendments and those are not. Certainly, in the case of the euthanasia legislation, Bill C-14, I think it was quite obvious that this was an issue of grave importance for the House and for all Canadians, so the Speaker allowed report stage amendments to be made, even report stage amendments that had already been moved at committee, so we had report stage votes.
Of course, when you have report stage votes, that takes a bit more time. There's a potential interaction between this and the provisions on electronic voting. I'm not ready to take a definitive position one way or the other on electronic voting, but part of the concern about report stage amendments and having a whole host of report stage amendments is the amount of time they would take in the House. When people can constantly move forward a whole bunch of report stage amendments, then on all legislation you could have a massive amount of time spent voting at report stage. That would make the business of the House very difficult in terms of proceeding in an effective way. If you had procedures for electronic voting, perhaps it would be easier to introduce more report stage amendments, which would also address some of these concerns about omnibus legislation, because at least you would have separate votes taking place.
On the other hand, there are still some fundamental problems, legitimate questions, at least, with electronic voting. In the same podcast I referenced earlier in my remarks, Kady O'Malley talked about the fact that she was opposed to electronic voting, because she felt that the kind of democratic accountability exercise associated with members standing and voting was important.
If you had a whole list of report stage amendments, and you were voting on them electronically, and it happened every time, I would worry that it would, in a sense, increase the amount of effective control political parties had over members, because it would be impractical for every member to know all the details of every report stage amendment in the event that there was a very large volume of report stage amendments coming forward.
The solutions to this are not easy, but it is possible that more votes at report stage would go some way to addressing some of these concerns.
The theme I keep coming back to when I talk about changes to the Standing Orders is that there is an inclination by some to say that we have to, not quite burn the whole House down and rebuild it, but fundamentally re-engineer this place to make improvements. I don't think we need to fundamentally re-engineer this place to make improvements. I think we can make certain improvements that leverage the existing strengths we have. Rather than creating a completely new process for the adjudication of omnibus bills, using report stage amendments more would use a procedure we already have to greater effect.