Procedure and House Affairs Committee on March 21st, 2017

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

It's a fair point to make. To whom is it important and to whom are you accountable at the end of the day?

If you were to agree on a particular vote on division, let's say, and a constituent came up to you and asked you how you voted, I would think that you would answer them by saying what your feelings were on it and by saying that had there been a recorded vote, you would have voted either yes or no. I have had a lot of difficult questions asked of me by constituents. I've told them how I would vote—yes or no—and whether or not it's recorded in a place, I would tell them that I agree or I disagree.

We just had a contentious vote on Motion No. 103, and I had a constituent actually message me on Facebook. I read all my Facebook messages. I probably shouldn't have said that, because now everybody is going to start messaging me on Facebook—

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

I respond to those personally.

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

I'm already there.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

You're already there? You have more experience than I do, Mr. Simms.

I took the opportunity to respond to her and to say that I was going to vote against it, knowing full well that this individual could then tell me something less than kind. She said, “Thank you for confirming why I didn't vote for you, and I won't vote for you in the future.”

I always say that's okay, that I want to earn their vote. If I don't earn their vote, it's okay for them to vote against me. It's okay to disagree with me. I've said that to people at their doors. I've said not to vote for me if they were thinking that I would do something for them. I've told them to ask me some questions and we would see if we agreed on certain general issues or the issues that they particularly care about, whatever those are. Whether those are gun rights or gun control, social issues or fiscal issues, ask me the question, and I'll try to do my best to respond.

I know that many politicians have the gift of gab and are able to not answer a question. I think many members of cabinet and those working hard to join it are working hard on raising their skill level in not answering the question or answering it but not completely. I think part of being an effective parliamentarian is to understand when to answer a question and how to answer a question with politeness, with ability, and, at times, with kindness towards the person asking you. I don't think we should be impugning each other's characters, either in the House or outside the House. I try not to do that. I'm not perfect, and I fail at times in doing it, and people remonstrate with me for doing so.

One thing I'll mention before going into another article, the one I mentioned at the beginning, is that again during today's question period the House leader made certain comments about Fridays, about how they're only half days and we could reallocate those hours. Typically in a question period, we have 40 questions asked. That's about 200 a week. There used to be more questions asked. In one of the old Debates issues I saw a Diefenbaker debate, where they were discussing this issue of the Standing Orders and how many questions were asked per week. They were being asked something like 300 to 400 questions a week, which is much more substantive.

I've explained my experience with the Alberta legislature, where you had a question and then a supplementary. You could have up to two supplementary questions on the same subject. They were a way for a member to raise an issue and then dig a little deeper. You were forced to ask questions related to the subject. We sort of do that today. You can see that the questions are set up in such a way that they follow each other as well as possible. At least within the context of the political caucus, the party that a person sits in, that's coordinated. If we were to take away 40 questions, those would have to be added to other days, hopefully. I hope most members would agree.

I also think it's important for the Prime Minister to be there to answer the questions, because it's the only time when we can ask him a direct question and expect an answer. Whether it's direct or indirect is beside the point; we have an opportunity to ask him. We have 45 minutes for the opposition parties to ask questions and to hear from the Prime Minister.

Those are the chances we get to ask the head of the government what he or she thinks about a particular policy issue or to ask about behaviour, integrity, or government policy. It's a chance to discuss that. I would hope that whatever we do with Fridays—I know that Friday is being mentioned, but you could do it to a Wednesday, a Monday, or any day—we always ensure that those opportunities to keep a government accountable are there, because there will also be fewer days for members of the government caucus to raise a question in the House, which they may choose to do.

I'll just remind members of the government caucus that once you stand to ask a question and are recognized by the Speaker, you can ask whatever you want. You have that freedom. Just because you had a question in mind and you agreed to a question earlier doesn't mean that you have to go through with it. Courage, my friends, courage.

I do the same thing on my side. I write my own questions. That's probably different too. I have very specific things I want to ask and I propose them. I do ask them when I have them.

I'm not a frequent asker of questions. It's not that I don't have material; it's just that I find other places to do my work, such as the debates here at committees and just the general debates in the House of Commons. I'm not as prolific as the member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan or the member for Winnipeg North. They count their words; they don't weigh them. It's the inverse of how the Yiddish proverb goes.

I find opportunities here to contribute on behalf of my constituents, and I am worried that the rule changes we could make will constrain me in the type of work that I can do and like to do in this place.

I've talked about the demotivation of parliamentarians. The number one reason people leave a workplace—and not just Parliament, but any workplace and any organization—is that they can't tell how their activities and what they do on a day-to-day basis relate to the overall goals of the organization. I think that is important to keep in mind. It's not about bad supervisors, although they play a really big role. Once you become disenchanted with your workplace, you will not want to proceed.

Without the amendment, I think you will disenchant some of us. In some cases you may be happy about that. You may be pleased that some members won't run again in the next election, but I think it would be an especially great loss for this Parliament to lose experienced members.

I see the chair wants to...?

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

I was just going to say that you made that point yesterday about why people leave workplaces, so—

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Yesterday?

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Yes, or this morning. Just try not to repeat.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

It was last weekend.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

The article I referred to is from page 42 of the Canadian Parliamentary Review, the summer 1990 issue. I have it here. It was about Bill 68 in the Ontario legislature. You've heard me mention this bill. I wanted to find an example of what a government was experiencing after a loss of trust, that loss of consensus amongst the different political parties and MPPs.

Bill 68 was called “An Act to amend certain Acts respecting Insurance”. This was in 1990. There was a day and a half of debate, and then the government tried to call time allocation on it. The opposition argued that the Standing Orders did not allow for that and that time allocation was premature in view of the “insufficient time” spent on debate at that point. They said that after a day and a half it was not the right time to move time allocation—

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

When was this?

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

It was in 1990. It was the Peterson government. Acting Speaker Michael Breaugh—I may not be saying that correctly—ruled the time allocation motion in order based on the Standing Orders of the day, so opposition members launched a filibuster.

I think it's a good example to hear a little bit about. It was the longest debate on a time allocation motion in the history of Ontario legislature as of summer 1990. This is an old article, and I don't know if it's happened since then. They've changed the rules since then to constrain members from being able to speak at length.

The opposition members used tactics including quorum calls, points of order, divisions on motions to adjourn the House or adjourn debate, the reading of petitions, and the introduction of many bills. It lasted for 49 hours and 35 minutes over 18 days.

The longest single continuous contribution to debate was by Peter Kormos from Welland—Thorold, who I've mentioned before, at 17 hours and 15 minutes. He was interrupted by points of order, four divisions on motions to adjourn the debate, three divisions on motions to adjourn the House, and a 20-minute suspension of the meeting until simultaneous interpretation services were made available. On May 9, 1990, the government moved closure. I think the government just gave up.

It was a total breakdown of this system of trust. If the government had not moved it and perhaps had waited just a few more days to move it, the government could have completely avoided the situation that they had created for themselves. Once you go down that funnel, there's only one way that I think it can go for all of us as parliamentarians, and that's poorly. I don't think it improves the situation in any form.

As I mentioned before, I did go through the debates from 1991. There are two specific members I want to reference, because I think that when they spoke about the changes to the Standing Orders that were suggested and then forced through by the government, they were specifically talking about committees. Committees, as I mentioned, are an important area for me, as are the proposals mentioned here.

In that debate, Mr. Blackburn, the member for Brant, who had been elected in a by-election in 1971 and then re-elected in successive elections, was a member with substantial legislative experience and substantial parliamentary experience, and he said:

When was the last time anyone wrote a bill on this side of the House, or a backbencher on the other side of the House, that actually became the law of the land?

He was asking an open question about the role of parliamentarians as legislators and the role that we can have in amending something through a motion at committee. In this case, it was about contributing to debate and amending a bill at some point. He's quoting in general:

Members say: “Oh, well, committees have been reformed, you can go to committees.”

He means to seek that opportunity to be a legislator.

He went on:

What are committees? Committees are just a reflection of this Chamber. Why does the government find it so difficult to maintain its membership in committees on a day to day basis, and therefore wants more time off? It is not so much that members would rather spend their time in their constituencies—certainly that is one reason—....

We've heard that argument being made for changing the way we do our business here: to make it more “efficient” so we could spend more time in our constituencies. Some of us have constituencies that are remote and difficult to get to on a weekly basis, but that was a problem even then, in the 1990s, and a hundred years ago it was an even bigger problem. It has always been with us. It's not new, so I don't understand why we have to rush a study without having this amendment that we've proposed.

He continued:

—but the other reason, I am convinced, because I feel it on this side of the House, is a sense of uselessness. It it a sense that you can produce the best report that a committee has ever produced, and all it does is gather dust on the shelf.

We now know that Mr. Blackburn was wrong, because we've used the McGrath report. The New Democrats and other members have repeatedly referenced the usefulness of the McGrath report, which shows what this committee could do, as was done in June 1985, by the looks of the report from the Honourable Mr. McGrath, who was the chairman of that committee. I believe that later on he went on to become a lieutenant governor.

It shows that some of these reports, even 30 years afterwards, are referenced by other members of Parliament, because in that committee they considered this fully. In that report, you can see that they travelled and they considered witnesses. It was a thorough report, and they did it by unanimous consent. Together they agreed, because they had a shared experience that convinced them to do certain things and to not do others. They did not pursue goals that they could not all agree with.

That was Mr. Blackburn. I'll just put this away.

The Honourable Bill Blaikie was both an honourable member here and a fine gentleman. His son now serves in this Parliament. I've had discussions with the younger Mr. Blaikie about his dad and about how much I've appreciated some of the debates. I've listened to them and I've read them. I think they're very substantive. I think the deliberations he offered within the confines of the Standing Orders were very valuable.

On April 10, 1991, during the debates on how the government was pushing through the changes to the Standing Orders that they wanted absolutely, without seeking that unanimous agreement, he said:

I think that this is the way the Standing Orders of the House of Commons should be changed: by unanimous consent and agreement between the parties. That is what happened in 1983 as a result of the committee, chaired by now-Senator Tom Lefebvre, and in 1985 as a result of the work done by the Special Committee on the Reform of the House of Commons, which was headed by Jim McGrath, now the Lieutenant Governor of Newfoundland.

It doesn't say “Labrador” here, so—

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

Okay.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

I just want to make sure.

Mr. Blaikie senior, in this case, the member at the time for Winnipeg—Transcona, continues on to say, and I think his particular experience is very valuable:

I had the opportunity to work on both of these committees. I wanted to reflect on the changes we have before us here, in light of the parliamentary reform process that I have seen unfold since I arrived here in 1979.

He actually worked on both of those committees, so his viewpoint as an experienced parliamentarian, as a member who has served on both of those committees, which reformed the Standing Orders not once but twice with unanimous agreement, is very valuable, and he's a New Democrat. I'm not even looking for a Conservative I can agree with. I actively looked for a New Democrat I could agree with and cite and quote.

He mentions here other members storming the chair at one point. I know that this was Harvie Andre, who was a member from Calgary, a very well-respected member, who actually did no such thing and would defend himself till the very end. I have the privilege of knowing his daughter Lauren as well, who lives in Calgary with a gentleman I worked with at the Calgary chamber, Craig Watt.

He goes on to mention other members, the types of work they've done, and how they contributed to committee reports on the McGrath committee and on the Lefebvre committee. He says here about the McGrath committee:

At the time we all agreed with the McGrath committee that delay is not necessarily a bad thing.

That goes to the argument of efficiency found in the government's document.

Delay is one of the features and functions of parliamentary democracy.

Delay is so we can consider the question put before us, either a motion or a report or private member's business. It is not a delay to debate. I have heard that mentioned by a current member of the executive, the Minister of Finance.

Delay is not a bad thing. If I have an argument with my wife and I disagree on something profoundly, or she disagrees with me, and we sleep on it, we didn't delay; we just decided to pull back, sleep on it, and then decide the next morning, as opposed to deciding in the heat of the moment and then making a bad decision.

I think the same could apply to Parliament. We're all members seeking to find that common ground among each other.

He goes on to say:

They are providing crucial political time for the public to mobilize against something which they may or may not regard as something they want to oppose.

That is exactly what we as opposition members are trying to do today, and were trying to do yesterday and the day before. We are trying to rally Canadians to demonstrate to them that we believe the motion without the proposed amendment, and the contents of “Reforming the Standing Orders of the House of Commons”, the March 2017 document that the Government of Canada posted online, are bad for the opposition. We believe they will lead to an opposition that is an audience, able to be seen but not heard. I would think that would be a great loss to this Parliament and to parliamentarians on all sides.

Now, people can disagree on the other side. I know a person who disagrees with our interpretation of what's going to happen, but the fact is that we, the opposition—I think I speak for a great deal of members—have very little trust right now for members of the executive. I don't necessarily mean members of the government caucus here at the table. What I mean is members of the executive. We have very little trust for them right now. We could rebuild that trust if we could pass this amendment, and we would like to get to that point.

I have two more things from Mr. Blaikie's contribution here during these debates. It's from April 10, 1991, on page 19293 of the House of Commons Debates.

He says:

...and the use of delay as a primary parliamentary function would not be so absolutely crucial to the role of opposition, if there was more meaningful input. But that they have not provided in this particular reform.

He's talking about the 1991 reform, when they were rushing through changes to the Standing Orders, as I feel changes to the Standing Orders are being rushed here. This is a parliamentarian of years of experience, who is saying this in 1991, who was first elected in 1979, who had served on the McGrath committee and served on the Lefebvre committee—two times they were able to reach unanimous agreement on the types of changes they wanted to see to the Standing Orders—and was a New Democrat in those years, no less.

I think that is the—

I was worried for a moment that I would not be able to continue.

I have just a few more quotes from Mr. Blaikie on the idea of parliamentary secretaries on committee. While I value their work as parliamentarians, I really don't believe they should be on committee. They can come sit in as parliamentarians, but I find it difficult to believe that they are able to separate cleanly their roles as parliamentary secretaries, meaning spokespeople on behalf of their minister and the executive, from their role as parliamentarians.

It is an incredibly difficult and fine line to walk as a parliamentary secretary, because you are there to promote, advocate, defend your minister, go to meetings, propose ideas, and work on their behalf and on behalf of the executive. You take on that role. You volunteer for that role. Nobody forced it upon you. You took on the extra duties. Just like then, in 1991, as Mr. Blaikie references, this is the excuse used by the parliamentary secretary to the House leader, who said:

It is not for control, it is for information, contact and communications, et cetera.

It's just like the argument that's used today: oh no, by no means will they direct the committee to do certain things, or direct members of the committee to vote a certain way or to propose a certain motion.

We're all working as a team on our individual teams, and we'll always be doing that. There are only so many spaces on the committee to work together. Some of the recommendations here could and should be studied, maybe to grow the membership of the committees and to include others who are unable to contribute to it, but that can't be done without the unanimous agreement that we're proposing in our amendment.

I have problems with some of the content of the motion, but I could live with it, as long as we pass this amendment. I think the study period is too short to study all the substantive changes being proposed for consideration. There's not enough detail, in some cases, to actually go through with it. I've mentioned the themes before, theme 1 and theme 2. You could break those down into separate complete studies, and you would have ample work at this committee in studying that over two or three years.

I've mentioned free votes before, so I won't repeat the points I've made on that. I won't mention that Mr. Blaikie twice rose in the House on a point of order to complain that the government was interpreting opposition day motions as matters of confidence. I would hope that we would never return to such a situation, where members of the government caucus are forced to vote a certain way on opposition day motions because they're matters of confidence. The government can name something a matter of confidence.

I think some changes that were made in 1991 and 1985, and some changes, as I mentioned, that were done by unanimous consent over the past 20 years, were at times good changes. They allowed members of the government caucus, and members of the opposition as well, to be more independent. Not everything is a matter of confidence.

Mr. Blaikie mentioned that as well in his contributions to the debate. I think it's important to reference him in particular, because he was a member of both the McGrath committee and the Lefebvre committee, so his viewpoints, because of the time he spent there, provide insight. He was a 12-year member of the House of Commons at that moment. As I mentioned before, it's from the veterans that we learn about procedures of the House.

Another member I want to mention is a former Speaker, Peter Milliken, the member for Kingston and the Islands. He was very well known and I think well liked in the House. Amongst parliamentarians he was well respected. He says here as a member, not as a Speaker, that:

This time we have had the government say in House leaders' meetings that it had changes it would like to propose to the rules; here they are; tell us what you think.

That's not what we've been asked to do. We've been directed to do it, not asked for our opinions in a general sense. We haven't been asked to cobble together the original motion. That's why we're trying to get in our say through this amendment.

He continues:

I submit that it is contrary to the past practice of this House. It has denied the opportunity for public input on the changes that are being proposed which fundamentally affect the way this House operates. This House is, after all, the public forum of this country where citizens have the right to express their views through their representatives and, on occasion directly, in the committees.

I think this is a profound statement by a parliamentarian who later became Speaker of the House, adjudicating the Standing Orders. There may be members here who know Mr. Milliken better than I do. This may just be apocryphal, but I was told that he did his studies on the Standing Orders and on question period. He read the Standing Orders before he became a parliamentarian, so he understood them in a way that many of us are learning to understand them and appreciate them.

In another section that I want to reference here, he quotes someone else:

Mr. Andre says the opposition's planned fight against the rule changes is just for the sake of appearances, since the three party leaders have been actively negotiating the changes since December.

The House leadership was trying to negotiate a solution to the impasse. Our House leadership has been trying to do the same, I understand, trying to find common ground and increase trust so that we can find some type of agreement. That's why we spend meetings trying to reach that agreement among ourselves, which we've so far failed to reach.

Don't consider our continuation of this debate, my continuation of this debate, as being solely to obstruct you. I want to make some points. I hope I've kept my repetition to a minimum. I've introduced into the discussion new material—articles, ideas, past debates, the opinions and judgments of parliamentarians with decades of experience. I think they're valuable for this exercise and this consideration because they're germane to the discussion. We're talking about changing the rules of how we work.

Mr. Milliken went on to say, with regard to the government House leader, that:

I presume he meant by that that just because you have been negotiating means you somehow agree.

Just because we negotiate, it doesn't mean we agree with the intent of all this, which is to drastically change the Standing Orders of the House and we how we do our business. I know that members have said that it doesn't necessarily mean that. Well, we have no way of knowing that, because we weren't party to the original discussion on the motion. That's why we're proposing this amendment, to at least reach some type of common ground. At least on this little bit we were hoping to find unanimous agreement to proceed on the study.

This amendment isn't trying to gut the original motion. We're not trying to eliminate it. We're saying that we will proceed with your goal, but we would like to have confidence in you. We would like to build that trust and co-operate, but with the knowledge that you will not force this upon us. We can talk, we can debate, but that does not mean that we somehow agree—yet. Perhaps we'll come to an agreement later on.

There is another reference I want to make. It is to Charles Edward Selwyn Franks, a constituent of Mr. Milliken, a good friend of his, a former professor of his, who wrote a book called The Parliament of Canada. On page 5 it says this:

There are two further functions of parliament which are so important that they deserve to be identified in their own right, though they might also be subsumed under the general rubric of making a government work.

This is related to the efficiency argument that the government is making.

The first of these is the function of parliament as a recruiting and training ground for political leaders; the second is the function of political communication, where the processes of Parliamentary discussion, in Bagehot's terms, express the mind of the people, teach society, and inform both government and citizen of grievances and problems.

How will we be able to debate those things and get to the grievances and problems, to, in his view, teach society and inform both government and citizens, if we don't have substantive debate at the committee stage, since we don't have it all the time in the House of Commons? The mechanisms the government can use to proceed with time allocation reduce debate. This is the place where parliamentarians used to debate all the issues, used to propose all the amendments, used to go into committee of the whole to propose amendments there. Yes, it was a very difficult process. It was perhaps inefficient, but it was effective in ensuring that parliamentarians had full capacity to represent their constituencies.

Mr. Milliken went on to state:

Governments resent oppositions that look like a government in waiting because it is perceived that all the weaknesses of the government are shown up by a skilful and competent opposition.

I would hope that Canadians, in general, have found our caucuses, both New Democrats and Conservatives, to be skilful opposition. I hope the government recognizes us as that, and not obstructionist, not out to unnecessarily impede, but to skilfully demonstrate a point, which is that you have to seek unanimous agreement to change the rules of how this House works before you proceed with a study. If we can reach agreement on the amendment, then we can proceed with the study. I think that's been plainly evident.

I'm looking at my outline here and I've gone through about four of the points. I have two left to do. I see Mr. Simms giving me a thumbs-up. He's quite pleased. Eventually, the floor will return to him, but just not yet. I have a few more points to make.

Mr. Milliken went on, saying:

I will read from page 5 of the little work: “On the Role of an Opposition”.

This was something Mr. Milliken wanted to deal with, and he had been interrupted several times by other members.

He read;

Only a strong and alert opposition can hope to check and control the excessive control powers contrary to the Constitution that may be assumed or conferred upon governmental administration, the so-called bureaucracy.

Only an alert opposition can prevent the short-cuts through democratic procedures that cabinet ministers and bureaucrats frequently find attractive. It is only the opposition, functioning as a recognized part of parliamentary proceedings, that stands opposed to the degeneration of the governmental system into a form of arbitrary direction of public affairs by the executive and the bureaucracy.

I won't continue the quote.

The Standing Orders enable us to do these things. We are part of the parliamentary process. Part of proposing a bill should be considering how the opposition will react: whether there will be reasoned debate, whether it will pull the plug and obstruct everything, or whether it will say, “You are the government. You have the right. You have the mandate from the people to move forward with a piece of legislation, and you have recognized our right to oppose” within the rules that we have now.

If you choose to change the rules—and as members have said and members of the government caucus have said, you have a mandate to make this place more efficient and modernized, though I don't like the term “modernize”—I hope you will consider that we too still have a role to play here in these proceedings, at committee and in the House, through motions and, at times, dilatory motions or debatable motions or motions on committee reports. We have a role to play with you and we hope you will consider our viewpoints as well. However, unless you pass this amendment, we don't have faith that this will actually happen, because you can outvote us at this committee and you can have your way. There's just so little trust right now that we can't proceed on the basis of faith alone.

Later on Mr. Milliken made the point about 1969. I've had a very difficult time finding the Debates from the time and actually reading them all.

Mr. Milliken said:

The government finally used closure to get these rules through, after 12 days of debate. After 12 days of debate. I want to point that out to the parliamentary secretary. I can assure him that if closure is applied on this debate, he will hear about the 12 days of debate that went on in 1969. We are quite prepared to debate these for 12 days, I can assure the hon. member.

He was interrupted later on, but he was making a point that in 1969, again, the government of the day pushed through changes on the Standing Orders within 12 days, without that consent from everybody.

Parliament shouldn't be turning out legislation in quantity. My answer and the answer of many others has been that the mission of Parliament is freedom and the assurance that all the people shall receive justice. We're not a slot machine into which we drop a piece of legislation and then spin, hopefully not for no reason, and then a slug drops out at the end, and the legislation becomes law. We're not a slot machine. That's not what we're here for. You can't program this as you can a slot machine.

We're supposed to have open debate. We've chosen, I believe unfortunately, to move this from the House of Commons floor to the committee stage. We don't know how it will finish on June 2. We don't know what will be in this report, which is why we're asking for protection. This amendment is about protecting us. We're asking for protection. The weaker party is asking the stronger party, the government caucus, for protection, for certainty that it will not try to turn us into a slot machine as parliamentarians. That's all we're asking for.

I think it's a very reasoned debate.

I won't reference Mr. Milliken anymore. I'll put away the rest of his speech, but I highly recommend that members take a look at the debates in 1991 and his specific commentaries. Again, he was a member of the Liberal caucus at the time. He became Speaker, so I think he speaks from a position of experience and judgment, and he's also someone who actually studied the Standing Orders and has a deep appreciation for the traditions of this House.

Another member, David Berger from Saint-Henri—Westmount, quoted from the McGrath report:

We must strengthen the role of the House of Commons, and the key to restoring confidence in our central democratic institution is to enhance the involvement of the private member of Parliament in a number of areas.

He was talking about enhancing, but I can't tell whether many of these changes are enhancements for individual members or enhancements for the government. The two get confounded quite often, because what's efficient for an individual member is not necessarily efficient for the government. Having more deliberate debate is not efficient for the government. It says that slows it down. It wants us to be a slot machine. It wants to put in a piece of legislation, process it through, and then get it out the door within a fixed amount of time. It wants certainty.

Individual parliamentarians should say they can't give it that certainty. They need to consider this. They need to go back to their constituents and they need to go back to their caucus and they need to think about it. It's like buying a car: you're not going to buy it the first time you see it. The first time a piece of legislation is proposed, I may hum and haw. I will take weeks to consider it. I would hope people wouldn't buy vehicles based on an ad and then just walk into a dealership and buy the first Tesla they see, although I hear in Ontario you can get a heck of a rebate for one.

This particular parliamentarian then went on, and he was speaking to amendments to the Standing Orders, exactly the same thing that could potentially happen later on if this report becomes part of a government motion to amend the Standing Orders. He talked about question period. I have commented that question period is the one time of the day and during the week when we can uncover weaknesses in the government and disagreements, perhaps, with government policy.

He says that in the parliamentary system it's the government's responsibility to present a legislative agenda. We mentioned this before, but the agenda comes from the government. We don't disagree with that on this side. We accept the fact that the government will be setting the agenda, and it won't be us.

That's why the example in the reform to the Standing Orders of the House of Commons referencing the U.S. House of Representatives is just so odd. It's because in there, there is no government to represent. Every member proposes bills and pushes bills forward. Majority leaders debate among themselves and then figure out agreement on things.

I'll mention one more. The member for Saint-Léonard, Mr. Alfonso Gagliano, was a respected cabinet minister, a long-serving member with much experience to bring to debates.

I have tried to reference experienced members of the House who were Liberal caucus members to demonstrate the viewpoints that existed then. I value all members regardless of their political affiliation, but to me experienced members bring a thoughtfulness that takes time to accumulate. Mr. Gagliano had this quote:

A fundamental aspect of the principles on which the financial procedures of Parliament are based is that Parliament does not grant supply before the Opposition has had the opportunity to show why it should be refused.

So we don't say yes before we say no. All we're asking is this opportunity. Say yes to us, and then we can debate on the rest. Perhaps we'll say no, but we could say yes too. You can't automatically assume that our side will say no to any changes, because we've expressed an interest in considering changes. Different members have expressed different ideas. I hope I've contributed some ideas as well, ideas that I think would be interesting to study, although not to implement immediately, because they deserve some study.

I have just this last quotation here, again from Mr. Gagliano:

The role of an opposition party in a parliamentary system is to make the process more democratic by forcing the government of the day to be accountable.

The goal is to render passage of laws inefficient because of that need for accountability. It will slow things down, but it's a two-way street. One person's red tape is another person's accountability measure. Requiring a longer administrative form is meant in some way to fulfill a requirement to collect information and to assure yourself that the money is being spent in the proper fashion. One person will call it red tape. Another person will call it accountability and want you to show them the way you spend.

I am getting closer to the end, which I'm sure members will cheer.

There is a reference to the House of Representatives here—

[Ali Ehsassi, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

Say it isn't so.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

I have a few books here I could maybe begin with.

I want to reference the ninth edition of Congressional Procedures and the Policy Process, written by Walter J. Oleszek. It is an American congressional procedures book that people who take university courses on congressional procedures of both the Senate and the House of Representatives in the United States are forced to read.

It goes through all the details of such things as committee mark-up procedures, which are very similar to our committee report-writing stage; how to bypass committees; the committee chair's role; committee hearings; and the scheduling of legislation in the House. There are many examples in here. There are sections on privileged legislation and minor non-controversial measures. There are examples on the amending process on the floor of the Senate, and on a lot of procedures like committee of the whole, which is very similar to our own. This is a book that is considered to be fundamental to read when you manage procedural process in the Senate and in the House of Representatives.

I bring it up because every time we discuss the Standing Orders, reference is made to Congress, to the United Kingdom, and to other legislatures and how they function. With a study as short as the one proposed in this motion, I don't feel you would have the opportunity to get the full contribution of enough witnesses from the United States, potentially, or to travel there to consider their process to pass laws.

We've all heard about the gridlock in Congress and about how slow their legislative process can be. I don't think it's necessarily true. You've seen in the past that they've passed massive pieces of legislation, and pretty important ones too, like the Affordable Care Act, which made substantive changes, and they used these procedures.

I want to focus a bit on unanimous consent agreements, because we use unanimous consent to get around the rules when we need to when we've consulted with each other and we're agreeing to co-operate. I bring it up as well because unanimously agreeing to change the rules sounds a lot like unanimous consent agreements. If the Senate strictly observed every rule, it would become mired in a bog of parliamentary complications.

We on this side—and the government caucus does this as well—when we have been able to find common ground to expedite a bill or find common ground to pass a motion recognizing a day, a place, a person, or a particular situation, we have done so. We've found the ability to seek agreement, which is why it's so surprising to me that we can't find agreement on this very reasonable amendment.

Senator Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma, informed the other 99 senators that he would object to any attempt to pass by unanimous consent a measure to increase the debt ceiling. If one member of their Senate can slow things right down so that it cannot pass a particular measure, that sounds like a very inefficient way of doing things.

Majority leader George Mitchell, a Democrat from Maine for six years, said:

I regularly propound unanimous-consent requests on the floor and...when Senators object we hear within seconds—within seconds. Frequently when I am in the middle of a sentence, the phone rings and staff comes running out to say, “Senator so and so objects.”

They actually negotiate them back and forth on the floor, and actually cobble them together as they go, in the debates of the Senate.

That happens here, too. We have an open call, “Does anybody object to a unanimous consent motion?” and typically a member within earshot of the Speaker will say, “I object” or “No, I don't want to proceed with that”.

I don't think, though, that they think that their system is wholly inefficient. There are obviously members of the Senate who continue to do it this way because they think it produces results at some point.

This book says:

Unanimous consent agreements are often the product of intensive and extensive negotiations....

They actually draft written agreements that are then tabled with the Senate. They're at the table, and any senator can go to review them. This is once they have actually reached agreement on them.

I don't know why we can't make amendments to the Standing Orders using the same or similar inspiration from this procedural method. We can find common ground. I'm sure that we can if only we can have a very clear list of what the government caucus or the government intended by the changes it has proposed here.

I also use the example because programming is referenced, and programming happens a lot in the House of Representatives.

In here, one senator guesses that in the course of a typical week, they would probably enter into anywhere from literally 10 to 200 unanimous consent agreements, with 100 senators agreeing to them.

Including you, Mr. Chair, there are 12 of us. I'm sure we could come to some type of agreement, but we would like it to start with this motion right here, to find agreement on this motion. If 100 senators can write complex agreements and then table them before the Senate to deal expeditiously with an issue to find that efficiency that they're looking for, I think we can too.

These complex unanimous consent agreements are like our unanimous agreements that we seek. Some of them can be very long. The broad purpose is to impose time limits on debate, which is partly the proposal for programming in here for committees, and to expedite the scheduling of the Senate's workload.

There's talk of the parliamentary sessional calendar and of establishing predictability and permitting flexibility.

The predictability they're talking about is for the majority leaders. They want predictability. A piece of legislation will come in, at some point go out, and be moved to the House of Representatives. Again, there is no government line to defend. It's 100 independent, freethinking senators who generally agree with each other but who can also dissent.

They also have whips to rely on. There are general features to these agreements. They're negotiated contracts, basically, and accepted by all of them. They're comprehensive or partial. They vary. They waive points of order, and they may require the relevancy of amendments, so they eliminate the possibility for some of them to produce amendments.

These are all things a committee can do today. A committee can go into one of these, to take an example from here, and agree that they will not accept points of order. When committees travel, I have seen motions passed, before the travel is accepted, that during a committee meeting there shall be no dilatory motions or motions that would make it impossible for the committee to do its work.

I served briefly on the OGGO committee. I travelled with them to Atlantic Canada, including Newfoundland and Labrador, although we actually were unable to go to Labrador, and we passed those motions by unanimous agreement. Everyone agreed. Nobody wanted to shut down the committee while it was travelling, because we wanted to consider the witnesses and hear from them and get their feedback.

How would it help us to have rules set upon us that so that when we travelled, these rules would follow us? Has that been considered? Has anybody considered whether or not there will be exceptions to the rules when we're outside of the precinct? Will there be exceptions to how those function?

Now, all of these unanimous consent agreements are filed or recorded with the Congressional Record, the daily calendar of business, and the Senate journal, so no senator can ever miss it. A congressional scholar wrote that “A dozen or more complex agreements are no longer uncommon for complicated contentious measures.”

As I mentioned before, why don't we look at all the unanimous agreements we reach right now, at committees and in the House of Commons, to find opportunities to amend the Standing Orders based on the idea that since we're agreeing to these things quite often, why can't we just make them part of the Standing Orders? I think that would be a nice starting point. Plus, because we've agreed to them in the past, I think we would find agreement with them in the present—within this Parliament, I am sure.

Here I want to paraphrase a knowledgeable Senate aide whom Mr. Walter Oleszek references with regard to these consent agreements. There's increasingly a leaning toward the comprehensive rather than the incremental. Comprehensive unanimous consent agreements are now used to manage the decision-making process on the Senate floor “to an unprecedented degree”.

On the idea of “comprehensive” versus “incremental”, we can't tell, as members of the opposition, whether the government is proposing comprehensive changes to the Standing Orders—and we're supposed to accept, on faith, that they will respect us as part of the parliamentary proceedings—or whether they are proposing incremental changes. We don't know, and the few things that we do know, we don't trust. There's a lack of trust right now. We just don't know. That's why we cannot proceed with this.

I'll move on to a different chapter. It starts on page 260 of the procedural manual. We can compare the House and Senate now—the House of Representatives is referenced in here—and programming. I want to reference this for programming. I have the charts here on the differences between the two. Those I've mentioned I will not repeat.

They do have a more expeditious floor debate in the House of Representatives. They do. Because they have programming, it goes much more quickly.

Power is less evenly distributed—and they admit to that—between the majority and the minority. The majority holds all the cards.

There's a “strict germaneness” requirement—as for my pronunciation there, that's probably my third-language English at work—for floor amendments. This strict germaneness requirement for floor amendments means very strict rules on what a member can propose and cannot propose. They are far more partisan, partly because of the programming. It creates an environment where there are very few opportunities to make a point of debate.

I'm worried that these changes will lead to more partisanship at committee and on the floor of the House. I think we have enough of it. I think it's at a sufficient level. Sometimes it exceeds the need that is required, I think, but that's on us as parliamentarians.

They have very strict limits on debate in the House of Representatives. We have limits on debate here, but we can speak at every single reading of the bill. I have taken advantage of that opportunity, especially on the budget bill. On the last budget bill, I spoke at every single stage where I was allowed to do so. I remember getting ready to speak again on a free trade bill one time and being told by our lobby and the clerk that I had already spoken on it. I had spoken so much on the free trade bill that I was about to speak again when I wasn't supposed to.

The Senate and Congress have unlimited debate on nearly every single measure, which was the state of affairs in the House of Commons before now. With programming, you can see that the House has had its influence drastically reduced in what it can and cannot accomplish. They adhere very closely.... They have a rules committee. All it does is consider the rules. They negotiate these agreements to try to set the bar for all members of the House of Representatives, and there are 435 of them. It's a larger House than we have now. We may get there someday, and there may no longer be space in the House of Commons for everybody to be there. Maybe some of us will have to sit on the floor, quite literally, in order to be present.

I mentioned that the power is less evenly distributed. That uneven distribution comes at the expense of those who are opposed to the measure being presented on the floor. I don't think that's a model we want to adopt. As stated:

...the 113th Senate's rules, standing orders, resolutions, and laws affecting the business of the chamber are contained in over 1,400 pages and its precedents in one 1,608-page volume.

The Senate in the United States maximizes freedom of expression, quite literally. The House rules “show a constant subordination of the individual to the necessities of the whole House as the voice of the national will”, because it changes every two years.

The House of Commons is the voice of our national will as parliamentarians, so we shouldn't necessarily be taking direction from the government on reforming the Standing Orders of the House of Commons. As I mentioned, this is like the executive team telling the board of directors what to do.

If we're going to proceed on the contents of this and the Debates of October 6, 2016, then we must have the assurance on our side that we do not finish like the House of Representatives, where the individual is subordinated to the common group. It would be a big problem for parliamentarians on all sides if that happened, and if we were to copy programming the way it's proposed there.

I think the study length is too short. I think programming should be studied over a longer period of time, because it's such a substantive change to how we function right now, especially if the committees are changed as well. In terms of changing all these successive things, it's simply impossible to know what all the unforeseen problems will be, in circumstances we haven't thought of, with new events that happen.

I've mentioned this dual-track method. I want to expound on it just a bit to explain what it is. It's “programming lite”, as I would call it. As stated:

Formerly, senators could arrive in the midst of a debate on a banking bill, for example, obtain recognition from the chair, and launch into a lengthy discussion of the wheat harvest prospects. Today, complex agreements and the track system prevent that from happening. Now, senators generally know what measure will be considered on a specific day and at what time, when they are scheduled to speak on that bill, and how long they will have the floor.

They've already done some of this through those consent agreements, but they all unanimously accede to it. They say yes to it ahead of time, so if any single member has a problem with it, which is exactly this amendment, this would make us equivalent.

The government uses the House of Representatives as an example, but the example they should be using is the U.S. Senate. We are much more like the U.S. Senate than we are like the House of Representatives, because we have more similar terms. They sit for six years; we sit for four years. We should be more individual. We are more individual. We are trying to seek that unanimous agreement on things just like those senators are.

When they choose to, they can temporarily surrender certain rules, certain powers that protect their privilege. As I said, the Standing Orders protect our privileges and rights as members, but we can choose to temporarily suspend those in the name of passing a bill, agreeing to a certain formulation of debate because there's an urgent matter or an emergency or whatever it is that we're taken with. However, we should do it by unanimous agreement, just as the Senate does.

I find it interesting that the government would choose the House of Representatives, knowing that we're not like the House. We are much more like the U.S. Senate. I think that's a much closer example to how it should be.

There's talk of scheduling in here, and I want to raise this point on the House calendar about potentially moving things around. The very first sentence makes a reference to “a more efficient week”. I don't quite know what a more efficient week could possibly be. We have ample time for debate. We have a caucus on Wednesday. They're really talking about Fridays. That's really the talk: it is to move Fridays and go to a four-day work week. I know Mr. Simms has said the opposite, that it's not necessarily so, potentially a full day, but how would this work?

I think there are other changes you could do to make the House calendar more efficient, and they do very similar things in the United States Congress. They have scheduling procedures, and there's a table shown on page 272 of their procedural book, table 613, a comparison of the House Special Rule and Senate Unanimous Consent Agreement. In general, this is what they're...and I will not read the whole thing. There are just a few I want to pick out to make a point. They are formulated on the House side by the rules committee in public session.

The exact meeting we're having here is where they would seek that consent among the members on the rules committee. Typically, very senior members of either party would cobble together an agreement on how to proceed. It permits or prohibits amendments. It specifies time for general debate. The effect is to waive the House rules, and it doesn't specify date and exact time for vote on final passage, so I think this is a very important thing.

Even though they have the ability to constrain members, to tell them they will vote at a very specific time on a very specific day on these measures whether they like it or not, they don't do that. They don't specify that. They don't go as far as to program everything down to the specific hour, saying they will have it passed by then. That slot machine idea I talked about—dumping in a piece of legislation and numbers churning and getting a piece out—is not necessarily the goal. They just want certainty here.

On the Senate side, again, the effect for these unanimous consent agreements is to waive Senate rules. The adoption is sometimes aimed towards prospective floor action. If somebody might want to raise an issue or a motion or a report or table something, it's agreed to by unanimous consent of senators. As I've mentioned, I believe we're much closer, and should be much closer, to how senators work in the United States.

It often restricts non-relevant amendments. I think it is reasonable to debate whether non-relevant amendments should be eliminated at certain stages of debate and procedure at committee. Sometimes I see amendments removing that from the beginning of a bill or removing the bill title. Some of those changes were brought in in previous Parliaments, again in the name of speeding things up and efficiency, but I think a great number of members agreed with it and those particular forms of amending motions were moved to other stages where they could be done in a different way.

Is it perfect? I'd say no, but it's good enough that it doesn't restrict my ability as a member to propose an amendment at committee. In the Senate, their unanimous consent agreements can set a date and an exact time for a vote on the final passage, which could include a 60-vote adoption requirement. Because they need unanimous consent, they can agree they will have a vote on this day, at this time, when all the senators who want to vote on it and want to be present can actually assure themselves of that fact, which is different from the House, where they don't do that. Again, it's that minimal amount of cordial respect as peers that they extend to each other.

That's enough on that chapter. I don't want to belabour the point on the schedule.

The legislative calendar that they have for the House and how they do their work and how it's regulated, the 24-hour day session they have, is quite similar to our own. If they choose to recess, the legislative day is carried over to the next calendar day. It's similar to the way Parliament can sit for as long as it so chooses. They can choose not to adjourn. Committees can choose not to adjourn and can continue. They can recess on to another day, and it becomes part of the legislative day. They do very many of the same things, but those many same things are on the Senate side, not on the House of Representatives side.

They have the same type of routine proceedings, and I see changes being proposed to routine proceedings here. They're just mentioned in brief, and I'm interested by some of them. I can see the wisdom of some of them, but I'd like to consider them more. I think they need more time, but we shouldn't change them without unanimous agreement.

As for moving the tabling of petitions earlier in those 15 minutes, it was in 1991 that they limited tabling of petitions, because what was happening was opposition members were accumulating petitions, as we all do, and were tabling them one after another. That was delaying other government business that needed to be done, so we've moved the tabling of petitions to an earlier point. I would be fine with it, because it's 15 minutes. It's a fixed amount of time that everybody knows about. We as members have petitions to table. I keep petitions in my constituency office and I co-operate with my local members of the legislative assembly, who keep petitions from me in their office. I've started to distribute them to my community associations, the residents associations, because in Calgary every community has its own residents association with its own building, and now they are hosting my petitions as well. It's a great way to work with the general managers of these community associations to distribute these petitions. I think it's a valuable way to have people's voices heard, because it compels the government to answer within 45 days. Typically, what I'm trying to do now is to have a petition and then have the response to the previous petition, so then constituents can pick it up. They don't have to drive to my office. They can go to the community association to get the response. I think that's an interesting thing that they have.

The U.S. Senate has the call to order, the prayer, the pledge of allegiance, the presiding officer they name in case the chair is not there, leader time, morning business, and new or unfinished business. It's pretty darn simple.

Under “new or unfinished business”, the majority leader might bring new business before the Senate through the use of two fundamental methods. One is unanimous consent. Otherwise, they make a motion to move up S-1 or S-2 or whatever it is, and then the Senate might resume consideration of unfinished business from the previous day. That's kind of the way they work.

We work in one-week blocks, which I think is a very efficient way of doing things right now, because I have some certainty. I know which bills are coming up next, and it also gives me an idea of what the government would like to see passed, what the government agenda is this week. I go week to week.

I know during caucus meetings there's something we all do. Our House leaders do it, and I'm hoping on the government caucus side they do this too. They show you what the intention is in terms of debating the legislation before the House and outline what will we do.

In the U.S. system they've also amended filibustering on measures that were not critical. It used to be the rule.... In 1986 the Senate had to amend the rules that permitted a non-debatable motion for the journal's approval from the previous day. It was as though every single day we would have to approve the Hansard of the previous day. It's like being at a non-political corporation board meeting when somebody disagrees with the minutes, and then the meeting is held up because someone disagrees with the contents of the minutes. I've actually seen this happen at an general meeting of a professional association when somebody disagreed with the minutes and it delayed the meeting.

They amended it and removed that filibuster tool. Then they proceeded to eliminate it everywhere, and this was obviously by unanimous consent. All the senators there agreed to stop doing that by unanimous agreement. All of them together said they should probably stop doing that, because it was a bit ridiculous, perhaps, or maybe it was being abused as time went on. Potentially the rule might have made sense 100 years ago or 200 years ago in their case, because the minutes might have been written with some type of felt or ink and it would probably be hard to read sometimes.

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

A quill.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

A quill. Thank you. That's the value of the more experienced members.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

He was there.

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

I'm not that old.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

So the Senate works a lot more like we do in the United States, but they have similar complaints that I would have and certain members have. Their Senate is also very much empty during most parts of the day. Many members are not sitting at all times in the Senate.

They debate, they talk, they listen. They also are listening to the TVs. They vote, and then they move on.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

How do they vote?

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

It's electronic, at the table.

We had an offline discussion very briefly about the way they vote and whether that procedure could potentially be adopted by the House of Commons, to have either a screen or a switch or a machine. I would hope we never go the route of voting on our phones. I hope it would be a closed-circuit system—no Wi-Fi, but strictly like that.

I also think we should be doing more things on division. Mr. Simms raises a good point: how can we keep members accountable if we do more things on division? Technically, the system right now can work completely on division. If five members don't stand up, we just go by yeas and nays, and if someone shouted “On division”, we could then proceed. It would be much more efficient.

I think we've had more than 200 votes so far in this Parliament. I expect we'll have over 400 votes, then, if my math is correct.

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

Would it be automatic?