In French. If I can find a transliteration, I might use it.
It was far more dangerous before. In fact, I believe the first few Speakers who were elected by our parliamentarians to sit as Speakers—Mr. Chan is making the motion—did not keep their heads. They displeased the executive.
In a more symbolic sense, then, don't behead the opposition. We're not your opponents. We're not here to displease you. We're just here to raise the point that we're stewards, with you, in Parliament. You may be on this side, and then you may not find the rules as pleasant when it's someone else using them against you.
I would not be the one to want to use them against you. I think the best opportunity for us is to find a way to pass this amendment on the motion, to proceed with a study, and to build that trust, which I believe this committee did have before. It grants us then an opportunity to debate these things, potentially, but to come to unanimous agreement on what actually goes forward.
The committee is always free to take up afterwards another study or another series of studies. This is probably the most important committee of the House. The public accounts committee perhaps rates a very high second. The Standing Joint Committee for the Scrutiny of Regulations has a disallowance clause....
The member for Perth—Wellington is looking at me with shocked eyes. I'm sure he has a favourite committee that he wants to reference.
You know, as another idea, we could always agree that if any member disagrees with a proposal that it be stricken from the discussion. I know that's been mentioned before. That's basically what our amendment says. I think we've covered off everything that may potentially be changed: “Standing Order, provisional Standing Order, new Standing Order, Sessional Order, Special Order, or to create or to revise a usual practice of the House”. We're just saying give us an opportunity to keep things as they are and consider it some more.
There's nothing wrong with further consideration. Delay is not a bad thing in Parliament. It truly is not. You want to get it right the first time you do it. I hope we get as close as possible to getting things right the first time we do it. A lot of the detailed work is then done in government regulations or passed by order in council. We give to the executive, to cabinet ministers, the ability to make very specific decisions. Our statutes are detailed, but they don't go down into the minutiae most of the time. We trust that the cabinet will make the best decisions on behalf of Canadians. We also trust that public servants will then implement those decisions, both statute and regulatory decisions, on behalf of Canadians. We hold the government accountable for the activities and the services rendered to Canadians by public servants.
Madam Jordan was here before. I used to sit on the Standing Joint Committee for the Scrutiny of Regulations. We had two witnesses, and I was told that it was the first time in eight years the standing committee had witnesses appear. Both times we were debating, and then asking the witnesses very specific and pointed questions about why the departments had not followed the orders given to them by the cabinet and given to them by members of Parliament through the statute. They had gone, we believed, far beyond a reasonable interpretation of the statutes and regulations.
There wasn't finger-pointing and blaming. There were Liberals there too, at the time. They outnumbered the Conservatives but they agreed with us, and I agreed with them. This had nothing to do with our partisan affiliations. It had everything to do with the fact that a deliberative body, Parliament, had decided, with specific wording in mind, that specific regulations were passed, and public servants were not following through. They were going beyond the letter of the law. It was an opportunity for us to question them, to debate back and forth, and to make the point to them that they had gone beyond what Parliament sought to do through a statute.
Will those opportunities disappear? Will they go away? How will these joint committees with the Senate work? That's my worry here. If we program too much of the activities at the committee level, will I have that opportunity, if I rejoin that committee, to question aggressively, if necessary, a public servant or a stakeholder group—perhaps because they've misled me, either on purpose or by accident—who comes to present before me? Those types of opportunities are rare.
Will I even be able to call them as a witness? That's an open question: will I be able to do that? I don't know. I've been on committees such as the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development, where it's freewheeling and we add witnesses whenever we want to. There's a great deal of trust among us. There has not been a single dissenting report since I've been on the committee. I think that's a testament to our willingness to work together, back and forth, just as it should be, if we can pass this amendment to the motion.
A lot of the proposals the government is pushing for in “Reforming the Standing Orders of the House of Commons” would be termed historic. “Transformational change”, in fact, are the words I would use, because they would transform how this place works. I mentioned before that faster is not better; being more efficient is not necessarily something we should seek. We are a results-oriented organization, it's true, but it's also about the journey of how you get there, because that builds the public's confidence that we have considered everybody's opinions.
When you have time allocation and you shut down debate, that's one thing, and people get angry and unhappy. Governments have different reasons for doing it, but when from the beginning they say that you cannot do this because the rules say you can't express yourself to the point you may wish to in order to represent your constituency, it is going to have an impact on parliamentarians, both on this side and on the government caucus side.
What it will do is disincent members from running for office again. I'm sure there are organizations out there that will cheer that: fewer members of Parliament rerunning for office, and more rookies and new people. But here's where I think we will lose if we don't have these members who run again, who recommit to another four or five years in Parliament: we'll lose that experience. I can't pick up the traditions of this place by reading the Standing Orders. Nobody told me on the first day when I entered the chamber that you bow towards the Speaker or bow when you walk across the floor in front of the mace. They just told me not to walk across the box. It's like traffic light signals. It's very important. I saw a member of the Liberal caucus almost pass through it accidentally, not thinking, and I've almost done it once myself. I stopped myself.
Nobody explained that to us. You only pick that up from the members who have been here longer and who spread the news, almost like preachers of Parliament's traditions. That's how I've learned about the respect you should have for the mace, for the Speaker's chair, and for the institution we're in.
I'm worried that this motion is too reckless without amendments. I know that at the beginning I mentioned that I had only a couple of points, and that I would go through about three dozen sub-points for each of my main points. I'm about halfway through the first bullet.
The decorum in the House is governed by really just a handful of Standing Orders, if that, and they're very broad; they're up for interpretation. We rely on the Speaker and the more experienced members—again, the veteran members—to tell us. The clapping, the excessive standing ovations, the eating in the House.... It's not a cafeteria. It's where great men and women have debated substantive issues: whether or not to enter a war, how to conduct a war, World War II, World War I, the Korean War. Important debates have happened there.
I know that in other workplaces you can work at your desk because you don't have time to leave and go anywhere. On things like decorum, I was told that clapping was introduced in the early 1970s. It was introduced because members used to thump their hands on the desks and cause the microphones to pop out. Also, it was probably damaging to the desks. If you do it enough, they'll will go away.
Look at the Assemblée nationale in Quebec. There is no clapping. There is no heckling. There is no anything. It is stoic, maybe you could say, in its question time. I think “stoic” would be the nicest term you could use for it, but it can be boring.
I'll say one thing about our question period: it is not boring. Neither is question time in the United Kingdom. It is not boring. Questions go fast. You have to listen to the answers. A good minister or a good parliamentary secretary will be humorous, will give a direct answer and a substantive answer, and actually will answer the question.
I think that's all that opposition members are really looking for. We're not looking to catch you in an error or anything. What we want is a substantive answer. It can be a short one too. A simple no or yes would suffice at times. You don't have to use the whole time. You could police yourselves.
My concern is that with some of these changes that we may bring through, we may not think about these traditions or customs or conventions that we have. We may accidentally introduce something, or take away something else that made us want to work together, that made us want to reach across the aisle and maybe have a private conversation with another member over something they were or were not doing.
I know that the ruminations of the president of the Treasury Board at times can be interesting. I know that the Speaker has admonished him at least once for eating in the House. I don't eat in the House, because it is not just like any other place of work. It is Parliament. It's the House of Commons. It's the floor of the House of Commons. In many other workplaces, I ate and did everything at the same time at work, especially when I was an exempt staffer. Every single exempt staffer will appreciate this. You don't have time to eat your lunch somewhere. You stay at your desk and you prepare your boss for question period. You resolve the issues ahead of time. You have the meetings you need to have, and you resolve them. That was my experience.
This is not like any other place of work. That's why changing how this place of work functions should not be done by only one caucus, or one party, or a small group of people. Further, I would say that it's not even the caucus but the government that is looking to do this through this very short, slim document.
Reducing the speech lengths that we could have would deprive Mr. Genuis and Mr. Christopherson, who have spoken before, and deprive those who come after me from being able to speak to the amendment of this motion. Some things that could take five minutes to say should be said in 20 minutes to allow the translators to translate, potentially, but sometimes you need all the detail to truly understand. It could be vice versa, and something said in 20 minutes should be said in five. There is no reason to be verbose. I feel I need to be verbose today, but not on most days.
I know that the main motion discusses October 6, 2016, the day that was spent in the House to debate the Standing Orders. I think any subject matter taken up from those debates should have a more substantive study than the 45 or 60 days that would be allowed by this. As well, just because their ideas are being pitched here on the floor of the House,...they still should be unanimously agreed to. They cannot just be one member's idea, or a group of members' idea, like the executive council of the cabinet members, to push it through on the rest of us.
You are all parliamentarians, equal—equal to the chair, equal to me. I don't have any extra power than you. We should all have an equal opportunity on the Standing Orders, the sessional orders, and the rules of the House, as they stand now, that will help us do our work. Changing them or amending them should be done by unanimous agreement.
I now want to reference a few of the speeches and some of the ideas they've picked out of them. Some of them are about process.
Mr. Chair, you're the one who mentioned the semicircle, and as I mentioned before, the reason we sit across from each other is really an echo, a historical echo, from Westminster chapel, where the monks sat across from each other. The pews faced each other instead of facing the altar. We've continued that tradition down through the ages. The mace sits on the table. There's a calendar on the table that we don't really all need. There's a clock in there, but we all have smart phones. It sits there by tradition, as do all the rules. All the Standing Orders and all the procedural rules are in those books. The clerks sit there as well. They now have screens built into the table. We've adjusted technologically to changing circumstances and on different things in order to speed up certain mechanics of this place.
I remember 12 years ago, when I was here working as a staff member to a member of Parliament, that they still delivered the Order Paper and Notice Paper every single day. Now you need to get them online. They are no longer delivered, at least not in the Confederation Building. That's okay with me, because doing that was probably a waste of paper. All of us can get them online.
That's a mechanics change. It doesn't have substantive impact on the work I do. I check the Notice Paper every day. Every Monday, when I am back here, my staff has already printed it off and provided it for me. That allows me to do my work. I can figure out what's going to happen, generally speaking, over the next few days.
I also have certainty that when I go to committee, I will be heard and I will be able to speak. I don't have that certainty, based on the way I see this motion functioning, based on the non-commitment I see to this particular....
I see that the bells are going off, Mr. Chair.