Evidence of meeting #9 for Procedure and House Affairs in the 42nd Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was meeting.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Well, I don't recall ever going through it this way. It doesn't mean we shouldn't do it, but I don't have a precedent to apply that I can recall.
Liberal
Liberal
Anita Vandenbeld Liberal Ottawa West—Nepean, ON
Just for clarification, how many meetings were spent on this? How much testimony are we talking about?
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
None of us were at all of them. That's something else. If you were really being a stickler for it, I don't think any one of the three of us was at every single one. Sometimes Mr. Scott was there instead of yourself. I know sometimes I wasn't here.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
I was chairing another committee at the time, so I was away often.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
Yes. It's a lot. The other thing is that there is a system to it, but it's not that systematic. We jumped around a fair bit.
I think the first thing that makes sense is to have a meeting. I don't think 20 minutes will do it, but 20 minutes will let us get our heads around the problem.
I don't know for sure that this would happen, but common sense suggests we'll then find ourselves dealing with only a part of the code. Then we'd only be dealing with part of the transcript of material.
That's what I think would make the most sense.
Liberal
Anita Vandenbeld Liberal Ottawa West—Nepean, ON
There are 10 recommendations that were accepted by the committee that are in the report. Do we have a copy of that report? I haven't seen it in our binder.
Liberal
Liberal
Anita Vandenbeld Liberal Ottawa West—Nepean, ON
Oh, it's approved, so that's already been finished.
There were 13 recommendations that were not accepted. My interest would be to understand what the rationale was for the committee not to accept those 13 recommendations.
If there's a part of the transcript that deals with those 13 specifically, would it be possible to pull that part out of the testimony and just look at that? I think most of us are interested in knowing why those recommendations were not accepted so that we can then reflect on the reasons.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Everything has to be put in its time and context, so one of the things you will find is that we were running out of time in the last Parliament. The Parliament was grinding down, and the election was within sight.
There were two reasons that we would sometimes set things aside. One was because it was incredibly complex or not as straightforward as some might like to think. As well, the day-to-day experience of some members changed substantively.
I think what you're mostly focusing on is why they disagreed when it seems at first blush that they make some sense. That will be there, but you will also find that some things weren't dealt with just because they required a longer discussion. They may not even have been controversial, but we were desperate to get a report out. We were really worried that we would have gone the whole damn Parliament and not met our obligation at all.
That's why we said, “Look, we have this unfinished work. It is important. It's not right to just ignore it. Let's at least take a stab at finding the things we can agree on,” what we call the low-hanging fruit.
Anything that was controversial and/or required discussion and looked as though it wasn't going to be agreed to easily would just be set aside. Then we agreed to go back and revisit those, but by the time we had finished all the others, it was all we could do. We just said, “Okay let's call it a day. We've got something to put in. We're all in agreement. It's going to go through the House. It won't be an issue and it will make some important changes. Let's do that.”
We all agreed. We did that. We had the election. Now we're here.
Some of it is not because it's necessarily a bad idea. It may just have taken more time than we had to invest in it to talk it through.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
If I could sum up, there seems to be agreement to look at this and study it at some time in the future. For the first bit of the meeting, which would be in camera, the clerk or researcher would get us that large volume of documents so that people could look at them, and we would then carry on the discussion.
Is that generally what I'm hearing?
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Chair, the confidentiality aspect is important, because the documents reflect—think about yourself in the future—what you were saying when you expected no one else was going to read it except everyone in the room.
I would suggest that maybe we have enough copies for everyone to work with. Then we can collect the copies again and leave them with the clerk. Then, as we want to refer to them during our meeting, we could pull them out and have them, but nobody would walk out of here with a copy. That would not be acceptable.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
While we're all in agreement on it, for when we do that, could I get a motion to do exactly what you just said? We would have the documents available, and it would be mandatory that they be returned. The meeting will be in camera, and it will be mandatory that they be returned to the clerk before we leave the room that day.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Also, they should be numbered and identifiable, so we know the one that was handed to Christopherson that he has to hand back.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
They'll be numbered. Good. That's fair.
Is there any opposition to that motion? All in favour?
(Motion agreed to [See Minutes of Proceedings])
Because things keep coming up, maybe when we get closer to the end of the month that we've already programmed and we see what has come to our table, we can decide more of the timing.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Yes, it's one of those things that is going to be around for a bit, folks.
Conservative
Blake Richards Conservative Banff—Airdrie, AB
I assume the same will apply to the Chief Electoral Officer as well, and that when we get closer to that month, we'll set aside a date with him at that point.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
That's a good point. We'll ask about his next availability after the dates we've already programmed. That's good.
The researcher is suggesting that we also do a formal motion to bring to committee all the documentation that was under study in the previous study of the conflict of interest code . That's moved by Mr. Christopherson. Is anyone opposed?
(Motion agreed to [See Minutes of Proceedings])
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
That's great. We have, in theory, finished today's business, which means that we could get something else done, if that's okay with people. We could maybe go on to Mr. Christopherson's proposal. We can't really do witnesses, because people have till March 8 to submit their witnesses for the list, which is already pretty large, but we could....
Mr. Chan.
