Thank you, Chair. I appreciate that.
I'm sorry, Ms. Vecchio. To be quite honest, you sounded a lot like my lawyer. I'm sorry. That was just an aside.
I'm sorry, Ms. Vecchio. I will lace up my running shoes and quickly run to the point in just a few moments. Before I do that, I want to sum up by saying that we find ourselves in a situation where so much has changed.
Anyway, to quickly finish that story—and I promise, Ms. Vecchio, I will finish it quickly—what she said was that she witnessed question period and then voting, because we had a vote after question period. In terms of question period, she said, “I really like question period; it's real 21st century stuff.” I asked what she meant. You have to understand that in European parliaments, most of them just stand up for 10 minutes, do their spiel, vent their spleen and then sit down. Each one does that, but there's no debate. She loved the back and forth. She thought that was real 21st century stuff, but she said, “I have a concern.” I asked her what it was. She said, “You debate like it's the 21st century, but you vote like it's the 19th century.” It's a good point. All we do is stand up and sit down every vote. There was no electronic vote then. Everyone else was doing electronic voting except for us, until this came along.
The point is that so much has changed in the House of Commons. How we conduct ourselves.... I see you all in a square that's so big in front of me, and I've been seeing that for quite some time, for almost a year now, if you look at the Zoom technology.
Our schools are this way. Broadband Internet used to be a wonderful tool to help with schooling in rural Canada. In rural Canada, broadband Internet is now the school. That's the school now, and not even just in rural areas but in urban areas, especially for those of you in Ontario and Quebec who are going through this latest situation. My heart goes out to all of you. I won't talk about that too much because I feel that Ms. Duncan did it so emotionally and appropriately that I would not serve it justice. It was quite something to behold.
The change that is thrust upon us has to take into consideration everything in the House of Commons. Why prorogue? What does it take? We used to joke that proroguing the House means that it's the old control-alt-delete of the political system, but actually, control-alt-delete is more of an election. This is more like the F5 refresh in terms of what is happening, what we have been doing and we're about to do.
Sometimes a government will exhaust itself to the point where we've done what we said we were going to do. Now, whether you believe that is a matter of debate, but nevertheless.... You're going to do all that you want to do, to a point where you say, “We've done that and where do we go from here?” Well, that calls for a Speech from the Throne. It calls for a direction. It calls for an indication to the people of where you want to go. That's the original purpose of this, but that's the government's decision.
What if the sands beneath us change and start to move? What if external factors dictate that life is not normal anymore, if what we knew as normal is no longer normal? Society has changed dramatically to the point where, when someone asks me, a politician, what's going to come of all this.... Who knows? Who knows what changes will come? What are the long-term effects of this? I don't know. How do you judge what the forest will look like if you're still amongst the trees?
I think that for us at some point we have to step back to a certain degree and try to refigure. The Speech from the Throne following the 2009 election had a distinct direction to it, whether you supported it or not. Whether you didn't like the direction or liked the direction, it had a path, but now the environment in which we walk has changed so dramatically that the path has to take a different way. Not entirely different.... It doesn't have to go backwards, but it has to change.
You have to think about what it takes to indicate to the country that things have changed, and now we have to think about that. Normally I would say to you to think of the budget from yesterday, but I won't get into the budget today. I won't talk about it because I know that's not what we're here to talk about. We're here to talk about the motion and the amendment and so on and so forth. I think that I'm glad to be here because prorogation was the original factor by which we find ourselves in this prolonged discussion about what it is that we want to do and where it is that we're going.
Those are my thoughts on the changing of the House. I know that we all want to change the way we operate in the House of Commons in a way that's befitting of our current circumstances. I'm even willing to say that we should go beyond what has affected us through this pandemic and say that now that we have made some changes, finally, such as voting through my phone, we can make other changes to the House.
There's Mr. Blaikie. He has some good ideas. I think he has one great idea that he'll probably bring up later, but this is something that we have to discuss. I'm glad we're doing this, because we're talking about prorogation as one of those things.
Prorogation is not our invention, but it's certainly something we practise. Earlier, I mentioned the path that we're on now, the circumstances and how the ground beneath our feet that has shifted and therefore we have to make.... That's why I think prorogation was justified in this particular instance. I know that others would say to you that the circumstances of the situation with the WE Charity, as was said earlier, were dictating that, but I have to disagree, not based on the fact of where I sit in the House, but only because I think that this is one of those times.
The question is, would prorogation exist outside all the factors that you're talking about regarding the issue with WE Charity and others? Absolutely, it would. It would be completely justified. If you look at.... I'll only mention this about the budget. Look at it. Look at the face of it, at all the things in that budget that were affected by the pandemic. You may not agree with the actual substance within that budget, but on the topics, just look at the index. Look at the table of contents. There's not a lot about the table of contents that you can disagree with, no matter who you are, because these issues have to be handled.
The extension of benefits such as the wage subsidy or the CEBA, these things.... This is something that is providing a great benefit to this country, but these things do have an expiry date, and that has to be talked about. These sorts of measures were not to be talked about before the pandemic struck. We tried with EI from the very beginning. We went into the benefits, the CERB. Going into the CERB, we had to create this new dimension in financial arrangements with our constituents. The pandemic dictated all of that.
How does that relate to prorogation? Well, I think that all leads into a refresh of the House. Some of you might say, then why didn't you just call an election? Yes, well, I'm from Newfoundland and Labrador. Not so much.... How would I say this without being insensitive? We just had an election in Newfoundland, the likes of which I don't even know if the Commonwealth has seen before—not just Canada, but the Commonwealth. That's in the sense that voting in person got shut down the day before we went to the polls. Then you had to mail in your vote. We may end up with a challenge based on the charter and the right to vote. Who knows? It's possible. A lot went awry. Without pointing fingers at anybody in this particular situation, I'm sure that will unfold, and rightly so.
There's a lot to learn from this. The ultimate refresh is the election. It may have worked in other places. I've read about what they've done in British Columbia. I think they did some really good things. In New Brunswick, there were some good things there too. There are things that we will address down the line.
How many times did we debate about voting online? How do you accomplish voting online in a national election without trusting the system completely? That's a hard thing to do. Voting by phone.... Basically, voting remotely is what we're looking at. My goodness, in the House of Commons, we're already doing it. I'll never forget it when I first got into this thing. I was still saying, “Pinch me. I can actually vote on my phone in the House of Commons.”