We can't waste a good historic moment.
Now, on motion 6 I have a last point, and then I'll stop talking about this article. There was a reference made that the motion was denying the right of MPs to debate committee reports. That's one of the things the government, I guess, had wanted to do.
The motion did no such thing. It simply stipulated that if a member called for concurrence debate on a committee report—committee reports are only debated if a member requests such a debate—there would be 20 minutes of debate, the debate would be adjourned, and then a debate could be called again at a later time.
This may seem like a good idea, but again, it robs the opposition of the opportunity for others to participate in it too. Why would it be only one member? The model that we have now allows for multiple members to participate.
I have personal experience with this. I don't track what every single other committee does, but on occasion I do have my staff get me the report of the natural resources committee just so I can see what the recommendations were and which witnesses they spoke to. Sometimes I do get constituents or stakeholders asking me if I saw the report. I keep track of the reports now so that I have them handy in my office, or I have a link ready to go so that I can read them. That's my airplane reading. In my case, I have to use an airplane to return to my constituency.
Now, we should be able to debate that, and it shouldn't be just one member. Opportunities should be given for others to participate in it too, which is why motion 6 was considered, as Mr. Julian called it, “draconian”. I don't know if we can term it that way, but that was the opinion of another parliamentarian, a parliamentarian with experience in the House. I will probably never agree with Mr. Julian on very many issues of substantive policy, but I will agree with him on issues of parliamentary debate, I think. I think we can find common ground. Although we haven't spoken much, he now sits much closer to where I do, so maybe we can have that debate between ourselves in private, build that trust, and find a way to co-operate on future issues.
You heard me mention Sean O'Sullivan, and Diefenbaker's great love for Parliament and what he considered to be its substantive work—i.e., debating motions like the one we're debating today, producing reports, reviewing how government spends, making a point on behalf of a constituent, and rising in the House to name them. In that case, I think it's a good thing when you can speak on behalf of a constituent who has a very specific issue and either ask the government for action or get other members, such as members of the government caucus or opposition caucus, to rise and congratulate them on an activity or a success or an achievement. Diefenbaker used to say, “I have always been a House of Commons man”, and I think that's important to remember. All of us should look to the House of Commons as the ultimate deliberative body. We should all be House of Commons men and women, to edit Diefenbaker's original comment.
There's one last thing I'll mention about Sean O'Sullivan before I stop mentioning his name. He was the one who moved a private member's bill that made the beaver a national symbol of Canada, seconded by the Right Honourable John Diefenbaker. Would he have been able to do that if these rule changes had been introduced?
I genuinely like private members' business, because I think people bring forward ideas, and you can learn more about individual members' interests and passions by the types of private members' motions and bills they produce. I'm just concerned that in private members' business, as it stands now, there's not as much substantive debate. We give 10-minute speeches. Sometimes we use the full time and sometimes we do not. Maybe there should be a Q and A, or maybe there shouldn't be. Maybe it could be restructured in such a way that there is more back and forth between members for discussion.
I can't tell you what the right or wrong answer is on that one. What I can tell you, though, is that if you get rid of Friday sittings, there will be that much less time to consider them. As Mr. Simms has said, his view would be to have a full day, potentially. But I just heard the House leader on the government side, in her answer to a question in question period, say that we could reapportion the days. That's not the same thing Mr. Simms said.
I appreciate that we can have individual ideas about how it should be done. I personally think that Friday sittings should be as they are, but perhaps you can change the way it's done, with more private members' time. Maybe it should be all private members' business. Maybe it should be a time for a specific committee or two committees of the House to take their work straight into the House, for it to be debated openly.
I don't know. That's just a suggestion, but it's a suggestion that would take probably more than 45 days to consider. It would be a substantive change to how we operate as parliamentarians. Committees and individuals would need to prepare. Would it be a debate on a motion or would it be a debate on the types of reports you want to do? Reports are typically considered in camera before they're produced. Would it just be on the committee report, potentially, for a full-day debate on it?
All these types of changes to the rules have to be done with our amendment passed in order to be considered. I personally view this as a short timeline for this study; it's too short to consider something so substantive as changing how we treat a Friday in this House. As I mentioned before, a lot of ideas are being pitched by the government in this modernization of the Standing Orders of the House of Commons, which, as I've mentioned, I think is the wrong way to go about this. It should come from parliamentarians to the executive to say how we think we should change the system.
It's not for efficiency's sake, and not for speed. It's to be able to deliberate in a better manner and to improve House of Commons debates with the increased participation of members. I don't see very much of that here. It talks about convincing more people to run for public office.
To be honest with you, I did not reread the Standing Orders of the House of Commons before I chose to run for Parliament. I did not reread them to make sure that I understood in full what every single standing order allowed me to do or disallowed me from doing. They bore no relationship to my decision to run. I think a great many people do not read the Standing Orders before they decide to run. Perhaps they should. I don't know. It might help them establish themselves in the role and be a better parliamentarian. They give us the book on the very first day, and we're told to read it. It's like your first university class, when you walk into the technical college and the master electrician hands you the code book and says, “Read it, understand it, and then come back to me.”
I think that for the Standing Orders it's a communal ownership. It's an intergenerational ownership. They don't belong to you as members of the government caucus, and they don't belong to us as opposition members. They belong to all of Parliament.
They definitely do not belong to the government. The government cannot dictate to us and tell us that we're too slow in passing its legislation. We are working as fast as a deliberative body can and should work. It's not my fault that it hasn't tabled all that much substantive legislation. It has had some that has been pretty substantive, and I wish we would have had more debate on it, but the executive being able to move forward legislation in a speedy manner—or what it believes is speedy—is not our responsibility as parliamentarians.
What we're doing now in having this debate is our responsibility. It's our constitutional responsibility to debate, deliberate, criticize, and find opportunities to amend and improve things, just as this amendment is our attempt to improve the motion presented by Mr. Simms. That's all it is.
Again, to go to the point I've made repeatedly, Parliament cannot fail. There is no backup. You only get one chance. Substantively changing it in the way mentioned in that 1985 article on Ontario will mean deep and permanent changes to the institution, to how the work is done, and then to the opportunities to co-operate and work together.
I won't read the Magna Carta here, but I will reference it. Many of the privileges we enjoy are from that time, when it was far more dangerous to be a member of Parliament than it is today.