Human Resources Committee on May 31st, 2007

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Let's hear from everybody. I have a couple of suggestions, but let's hear everybody out. We'll get some things on the table, and the committee will decide which direction we want to go.

I have Madame Savoie, and then Mr. Savage and Mr. Lessard.

[Denise Savoie, NDP, Victoria, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

We all appreciate that we have a lot of work to do on the employability study, and that's a very serious issue. In fact, this bill, if it were considered by the government, might help young people to overcome some major obstacles in accessing post-secondary education.

Mr. Lake referred to many of the bills that have been brought forward. I know it must be annoying for the government to have an opposition when it wants to act like a ruling party, but here we have opposition parties who are bringing proactive solutions to some issues we are facing and looking at this committee as a way of collaborating to find a solution to this technical issue.

I wasn't suggesting adjournment; I was exploring whether there are solutions other than just packing it in.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you.

I have Mr. Lessard and then Mr. Savage.

[Yves Lessard, Bloc, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

With all due respect to Mr. Lake, just because he is opposed to a bill does not mean that it was ill conceived. Otherwise, it would mean that he has perfection on his side, something that we can not easily acknowledge. Each party works hard to ensure that the bills tabled are constructed in the best possible way.

In my opinion, these bills have considerable merit, especially since the House determined that they should be considered at second reading and possibly at third reading. That is already an acknowledgment of their considerable merit. The bills mentioned have much value and were not selected precisely because of political or ideological positions.

This is the kind of debate in which we are engaged, Mr. Chairman. I do not want to belabour the point, but this bill has considerable merit because its objective is to help people, particularly people in need of assistance, for example, disabled persons—like the ones here today—or persons on low incomes. The bill would provide them with the means to become as self-sufficient as they possibly can. Admittedly, Mr. Chairman, that is a very laudable objective.

We are facing a technical problem that can be resolved two ways. We could decide to stop right here and the government party could then proceed to throw everything out immediately. We are not the bill's sponsors. We could also get together the members of the support team, that is the clerk or other individuals, and one representative of each party to see if the will exists to put forward an amendment that could be debated and in the process, correct the bill's shortcoming. The fact is that some provisions will have the opposite effect of what the bill intended. That is a fact. The aim of the bill is not to take away from the provinces and from Quebec any rights in the area of compensation. That is not the objective.

Once we realize that, then we need to ask ourselves how the bill can be amended. It is not difficult. The first step, in my opinion, is to ask if the amendment can be debated. If the government party says that it wants nothing to do with the amendment, then I do not think we will be able to proceed much further. The clerk has indicated that we can suspend the sitting and discuss this amongst ourselves. That is what I suggested we do from the very beginning, Mr. Chairman.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. Lessard.

Mr. Savage.

[Michael Savage, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Thank you, Chair.

Mr. Lessard has a very gentlemanly, distinguished way of expressing his view. I agree with what he said.

Let's not malign the process. Mr. Regan worked with the legislative personnel, House of Parliament personnel, and the Library of Parliament in crafting this bill. The purpose of going through it at committee is to determine situations that may need to be rectified.

I'm not a technical expert; I'm not a wizard at this like you are, Mr. Chair, but is it not possible that we could begin clause-by-clause and suspend when we've finished everything else and come back and finish this? Perhaps it would only take two or three minutes on Tuesday morning or afternoon.

I'm just asking the question, if there's a way we can work through this.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

The way I understand it right now is that you have a couple of options.

Certainly, it has been indicated that section 14 does change that. The challenge we have with that is, regardless of what amendments I foresee being made, that's still going to happen. I'm going to rule him out of order and you guys can overrule me. I don't recommend it. You guys have done it before, but the Speaker has always upheld the recommendations we have.

The second suggestion is what Mr. Savage says, that we go through what we have here today and then we look at whether there are a few minutes we want to take to give some time.... The challenge is still the scope of the bill, and that's still an issue you're going have to wrestle with over the weekend and over the next couple of days.

I don't have any issue with that. Mr. Savage, I'd be happy to go through all that stuff, and then we could look at maybe just waiting until Tuesday to see if you can come up with anything that would be worthwhile, but certainly getting the bulk of this done at this point in time.

I'm going to ask the committee once again.

Mr. Lessard.

[Yves Lessard, Bloc, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

I do not think that Mr. Savage's suggestion is very useful, because it would force us to vote against every single clause. Let me explain why. If by chance we were to vote in favour of each clause, then we would be assuming that section 14 would be amended in the process. However, that is not a given.

If, after all of the clauses have been adopted, the key provision that is causing the problem is not amended and a recommendation is made to refer the bill to the House, we will have helped to create a situation that is not in the interest of the provinces and Quebec. For that very reason, I suggest that we consider immediately dealing with section 14 in some way other than with a standard amendment.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Okay.

I have Mr. Lake, Mr. Savage, and Mr. Chong on the list.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

I want to respond to Ms. Savoie, and I guess partly to Mr. Lessard.

I agree with you, Ms. Savoie, when you talk about proactive ideas. I have no argument with our needing to come here with proactive ideas. It's part of our role as parliamentarians when it comes to private members' business. Obviously, there are some things we're going to agree on and some we're not. There's no contention on that at all.

In fact, I have respect for all three of the individuals who have brought forward the three bills I talked about—Mr. Nadeau, you, and Mr. Regan. My contention is that we're coming forward with bills that aren't well thought out collectively. Obviously, these are fairly political bills; they would have to do with more than just the individuals bringing them forward, when we're dealing with things that have been brought forward within the parties.

There are some major pieces missing in every one of them: essential services in the labour bill, the aboriginal community in the child care bill, and now this provincial issue with the Liberal bill. These are major issues that are causing some problems and causing us to be spinning our wheels a lot in this committee.

Just to respond to what you said, I'm all in favour of bringing forward proactive ideas based on what are strongly held beliefs, which may be different.

This is a committee that works very well together, I think. Based on what I'm hearing from other committees, we're doing a pretty good job here. I think it's really important that when we come to the committee we have our homework done to the best of our ability and that we deal with things in a logical and common sense manner, actually trying to accomplish things.

Everything we're talking about here is taking us away from accomplishing something in the area of employability and away from accomplishing things in the area of the poverty study that I know is very important to Mr. Martin—and to all of us, but obviously pushed by Mr. Martin in the first place.

That's the point I'm trying to make. WIth each of these things we've wasted a lot of time, not necessarily because of disagreement or political philosophy, but just because homework hasn't been done ahead of time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you.

I'm going to recommend that we break for five minutes to collect our thoughts and then determine, when we sit back here, how we're going to handle things.

I have Mr. Savage, followed by Mr. Chong, and then I'm going to suspend for about five minutes so that the parties can talk to each other for a moment.

[Michael Savage, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Just a word on Mr. Lake's comments about too much time. I'll remind him that we're in our second meeting on this bill. We've only had one meeting on it, so we haven't put a lot of time into it. It's a private member's bill. I don't think it's fair to suggest that we've wasted time on it.

I'm not sure whether Mr. Lessard fully understood what I was getting at; it could be because of my cumbersomeness with regulations around Parliament. What I was suggesting is, can we deal with everything else about this bill in clause-by-clause consideration and then suspend the meeting and come back next week to look at the amendments that we may be able to work out to satisfy the Bloc? That is what I was suggesting. If we were able to do that, it shouldn't take very long at the next meeting to go through it.

That's what I was wondering: first, whether it's possible, and second, whether it works. Or does the Bloc feel they have to amend a whole series of parts of the bill in order to make it satisfactory?

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you.

I want to point out that should we be able to go through all clauses, we will probably have to come back to a section. We will need unanimous consent to do that. So once again, I think we could take five minutes to talk to all parties to determine whether that's the way we want to go.

We're going to go to Mr. Chong and then to Mr. Lessard, and once again, perhaps we could take a five-minute break after that to suspend temporarily.

Mr. Chong.

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

We've now been at committee for about 40 minutes. I respectfully ask that we go immediately to clause-by-clause study. We are on the agenda to go to clause by clause. We've been debating this now for a substantial amount of time. We have departmental resources here. We have a full number of members of the committee present.

We have an agenda. I think we should follow the agenda. The agenda calls for clause-by-clause consideration of this bill, and I would respectfully ask that we move to clause-by-clause consideration.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. Chong.

Mr. Lessard is next.

[Yves Lessard, Bloc, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

Mr. Chairman, you have summed up the situation very well. We need to look at how we can come up with an amendment with a predictable outcome. Otherwise, we may end up with a bill that the Bloc Québécois helped to pass, in terms of recommendations. However, the key component, namely section 14, may be missing.

The following scenario is very possible. Far be it for me to ascribe motives to the Conservative Party, but ultimately, voting in favour of the recommendation, without section 14, might be in their best interest. They did not side with us and vote in favour of all of the other clauses in the bill. They voted with the Liberals to send the bill back to the House of Commons. If we adopt all of the bill's clauses as currently worded and if ultimately, we cannot amend section 14, we will end up with a bill that will have the opposite effect of what Mr. Regan and his party were hoping for.

I am not willing to take that risk, Mr. Chairman.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Okay. I'm going to suspend for five minutes, and then we're going to come back and deal with this.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

I have a couple of suggestions. I don't know if some of the opposition parties have some suggestions.

[Patrick Brown, Conservative, Barrie, ON]

Mr. Chairman, I'd suggest we start the vote, clause by clause.

[Lynne Yelich, Conservative, Blackstrap, SK]

I'd second that.

Do the opposition really care about this bill? They've now been suspending this.... We've spent more time trying to get them to the table on their own bill, and now they're not even here to do clause-by-clause consideration, while we're an anxious government.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

It's good to see you guys have had a change of heart.

There are a couple of suggestions here, ladies and gentlemen, and we need to move forward.

One of the suggestions that was made to us earlier is that we look at going clause by clause on this and that some discussions ensue in the meantime between meetings, discussions in which we would look at trying to come to something we need to do. We would need unanimous consent to come back to that, to raise that.

We're here to deal with clause-by-clause consideration. If we decide not to do this today, we still have the issue that's here before us. This is a bill before our committee. You guys decide on the direction we want to go. If we don't deal with it today, it just means we put it off, and if we miss our deadline.... Our deadline to report it back is June 19; if we sit until June 22, then it would be reported back as is.

I was going to suggest that there are any number of ways we can move forward. We have clause-by-clause, and we can look at having the parties talk about trying to come up with an amenable motion or amendment to open up clause 14, but....

[Lynne Yelich, Conservative, Blackstrap, SK]

We'd like to go clause by clause, all four of us.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

The government would like to go clause by clause.

Do we have any suggestions here by the opposition? If there are none, then I'm going to suggest that we start going clause by clause.

Go ahead, Mr. Savage.

[Michael Savage, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Mr. Chair, if we go clause by clause, it doesn't necessarily mean we have to finish all amendments today. We could adjourn the meeting and come back and pick up where we left off at the next meeting.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

We could, if that's what the committee decides as a majority to do.