Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Given the bilingual nature of the Canadian federal government, two Canadian Hansards are maintained, one in French and one in English. This makes Hansard a natural bilingual concordancer, and it is often used to train French-English machine translation programs. In addition to being already translated and aligned, Hansard is large in size. New material is also always being added. All that makes Hansard an attractive corpus. However, its usefulness is hindered by the fact that the translations, although accurate in meaning, are not always literally exact.
As my grandfather used to say, it is always better to get the information straight from the horse's mouth. That requires our work to be public in most cases. I want to reiterate that the Standing Orders provide for the situations when we can proceed in camera, or when it is preferable to do so. But those situations are far removed from the motion we have been divided over for a few days.
And if all those openness tools we have given ourselves are not enough—it is almost strange that an NDP member must talk about this, but I am doing so because, for once, I must recognize the Senate's wisdom—I will read a short section of the Rules of the Senate of Canada regarding committees. You will see that the wording is incredibly specific:
92. (1) Except as provided in sections (2) and (3) below, all meetings of Senate standing and special committees shall be held in public and only after public notice.
There is an old saying we often use: what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. I assume that what's good for the upper house should be just as good for us. I repeat:
[...] all meetings of Senate standing and special committees shall be held in public and only after public notice.
Reference is made to sections (2) and (3), which I read to see what the exceptions were. Section (2) says the following:
(2) Except as provided in section (3) below, a standing or special committee may decide [...]
It is not automatic; we may decide.
[...] to hold an in camera meeting to discuss its business only when the agenda deals with any of the following: (a) wages, salaries and other employee benefits; (b) contract negotiations; (c) other labour relations; (d) other personnel matters; (e) consideration of any draft agenda; and/or (f) consideration of any draft report of the committee.
I think that the two last items I listed, (e) and (f), are totally relevant to Mr. Harris' amendment, where he asks:
That the motion be amended by adding after the words “in camera” the following: “with the consent of at least one member of the opposition or a vote by the committee at the start of any sitting where committee business is to be discussed”.
The committee must be given the agenda, become familiar with the meeting content and decide whether proceeding in camera is necessary.
Section (2.1) says the following:
(2.1) Meetings of the Committee on Conflict of Interests for Senators shall be in camera unless the committee accepts the request of the senator [...]
That is less important. I don't think this is a conflict of interest situation.
Section (3) says the following:
(3) Meetings of subcommittees of any standing or special committee: (a) except as provided in sub-paragraph (b) below, shall not be subject to the provisions of section (1) or (2) above [...] (b) when clause-by-clause consideration of any bill is before the said subcommittee, shall be in public.
So the rule is that the meetings are public, and the exception is that they can be in camera if the members agree. Once again, that is exactly what Mr. Harris' motion says. We will continue to have public meetings, unless a request to go in camera is accepted, “with the consent of at least one member of the opposition or a vote by committee at the start of any sitting of the Committee where committee business is to be discussed”.
I will leave it at that. But I still think that it is important to draw attention to the wisdom of the upper chamber, whenever appropriate.
I have also briefly looked through the papers in an attempt to find out whether the issue we have been grappling with for a number of hours is an issue only for the Standing Committee on Official Languages. Let me remind you that I came up with two hypotheses about our disagreement. The first one was that we are subject to this motion because the government party wants to impose an ideological vision. I was hoping this hypothesis was false and I still hope so. My second hypothesis was that this motion—and, as a result, this amendment—are the outcome of a procedural disagreement that we were not able to resolve among ourselves. So the solution was to take an arbitrary and high-handed approach to resolve it by moving a motion that could be summed up as “Shut your mouth”. I hope that is not the case either.
As I looked through the papers...