I am indeed here. I am pleasantly surprised to get a turn a little earlier than I thought. I raised my hand when there was some talk of how we might have a discussion to move past this.
Obviously, there is a lot in Ms. Vecchio's motion about the WE Charity scandal, but what's important to note is that my Liberal colleagues on the committee have also made this about the WE Charity scandal, because they refuse to have a vote because they are trying to protect, presumably, the Prime Minister for sure and others who were mentioned in the original motion from having to come to discuss the WE Charity scandal. All that is to say it's very much the Liberals on the committee who, as much anybody else, have made this about the We Charity scandal.
What I've tried to propose is a way forward that puts the focus back on prorogation. We've heard many times—and I don't think it's in dispute—that the Prime Minister effectively.... While it's the prerogative of the Crown to prorogue Parliament, she does that on the advice of the Prime Minister. It's effectively the Prime Minister's prerogative to decide when Parliament is prorogued.
There are obviously differences of opinion about the reasons for the Prime Minister's prorogation. We've heard also some disagreement, and I think some real questions. We've even heard from Liberals at committee that, well, you know, the length of the prorogation might have been different, and maybe they didn't quite get that right and the timing of when it began.
There are some questions about the nature of the prorogation. We know that the Prime Minister is the decision-maker. I've offered many times on the record and off the record to various folks on the Liberal side that we could bring this back to the topic of prorogation by having the Prime Minister at committee for an hour and, as far as I'm concerned anyway, dispense with the rest. I know there are other committees pursuing the WE Charity question, and rightly so, but for as long as my Liberal colleagues are going to continue to filibuster in order to defend other Liberals from having to talk about the WE Charity scandal, this is what it's about.
If we're going to end up voting on this motion, then I'm going to support the Conservatives' motion. There's no doubt in my mind about that. The question then becomes, can we get back to making this about prorogation? That means having the sole decision-maker on prorogation come before the committee. I know that I'm not saying anything that's actually new here, but I think it's important because we've heard so much, so many words, from other colleagues that I think it's easy to lose the thread here.
The reason we're having this study is that the Prime Minister himself proposed this as a mechanism to prevent political abuses of prorogation. There can be legitimate reasons for prorogation. I think I've said here before—maybe I haven't—that the Manitoba legislature routinely prorogues. Every year, they come back with a Speech from the Throne. There have been uncontroversial prorogations in Canada's history. There were several, I think, in the Chrétien era. Nobody has talked about them, because they weren't interesting.
There are a lot of ways to prorogue Parliament. I'm not disputing that it is a tool that can be used. The pandemic is clearly all-consuming, so the idea that there might be a prorogation having to do with that is not outlandish. It's just that it happened to be announced the day after the minister of finance resigned right in the middle of a scandal and the day before a whole bunch of documents were due that might have shed some light on that scandal. I think any right-thinking person might think that there really is a connection there.
Yes, there may be questions for the Prime Minister about the WE Charity scandal, but also about the timing of the beginning of that prorogation. There are also questions about why the Prime Minister saw fit not to end it earlier, for instance, and to have us come back in order to have a far more fulsome discussion than what took place in Parliament about the expiration of the CERB program and what would replace it. We know, of course, that the legislation ended up being rushed through and there were some problems with that legislation.
Again, when we talk about the sickness benefit and then people later using that in order to quarantine from international travel that they had taken against the advice of the government, that was something that.... All parties agreed to that legislation and didn't identify that as a problem, but in fairness to opposition parties, I'll say that we didn't have a lot of time with that legislation. It was tabled and had to be passed in a matter of days, because the CERB deadline was there, despite the fact that I know I can say with certainty that New Democrats were calling for the House to sit in the month of September so that we could have that longer discussion.
There are a lot of legitimate questions about the timing and the nature of the prorogation that belong rightly with the sole decision-maker in respect of prorogation in the context of a study that has come about as a result of his own proposal for how best to prevent abuses of prorogation.
It makes perfect sense to have the Prime Minister here for one hour, and we could move on. I am putting that back on the table. I welcome a discussion about why it is that people don't think one hour of the Prime Minister 's time, in order to make good on his own proposal for how to prevent abuses of prorogation, the kind that we saw in the Harper years....
I would like some of my Liberal colleagues to say, if they think it's true, that had this mechanism existed in the Harper Parliaments, they would not have thought it was appropriate for Stephen Harper to come before PROC and defend his government's position. Then maybe explain how this mechanism is actually supposed to prevent political abuse of prorogation if the only decision-maker doesn't actually have to defend the decision in questioning to committee, because then I don't think it's a very good mechanism.
Of course, people at this committee will know that I think the best mechanism would actually be to have Parliament vote on prorogation because in instances of non-controversial prorogations—as I have said, there have been more of those than not in Canada's history—I don't think it would be difficult to get Parliament's assent to a prorogation. But in cases where it is controversial, then I actually think it's Parliament that should decide whether Parliament rises. It's Parliament that should decide whether all the work of committees is suspended or not. It's Parliament that ought to decide whether the legislative agenda gets cleared or not.
If a government doesn't want to move forward with certain legislation, it's always their prerogative not to put it up for debate on any given date. We saw that. Bill C-27 was a bill, a bad bill, I might add, that was presented by the Liberal majority government in the last Parliament, and I don't know that it was debated at all, in fact. I was relieved. I would have preferred that the government just withdraw it to give people peace of mind about their pension. That always hung over people's heads in the last Parliament, so withdrawing it would have been a better way forward, or dare I say, even a prorogation mid-Parliament.
There were times in the last Parliament that I did say that I thought we were about due for a prorogation. There was a lot of stuff on the Order Paper that the government clearly wasn't interested in moving forward with and I thought it would be good to just have the government reset its direction. Then the government picked the most controversial moment that it possibly could have, raising the spectre of political abuse for prorogation after over five years in government. So yes, we have questions. That's fair. That's what Parliament is for. That's what the accountability function of Parliament is all about. It's a principle of responsible government that elected parliamentarians be able to pose questions directly to decision-makers within government. Let's get the Prime Minister here and let's get this study over with and let's move on to something else.
Thank you to Mrs. Shanahan for allowing me to make that intervention sooner rather than later.
Thanks to the committee for listening to that again.