Evidence of meeting #3 for Official Languages in the 41st Parliament, 2nd session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was amendments.
A recording is available from Parliament.
NDP
Yvon Godin NDP Acadie—Bathurst, NB
If it does not cut my time short, I don't have a problem with it.
Conservative
Jacques Gourde Conservative Lotbinière—Chutes-de-la-Chaudière, QC
He will get the time back afterwards.
Conservative
Jacques Gourde Conservative Lotbinière—Chutes-de-la-Chaudière, QC
Mr. Godin, you are contradicting yourself in your remarks. In the beginning, you said that this motion will take away the rights of parliamentarians, but now you are saying that independent members have too many rights because they will introduce too many amendments. That is really contradictory and I don't understand. If you could explain that to me, I might understand what you are saying about this motion.
NDP
Yvon Godin NDP Acadie—Bathurst, NB
Thank you, Mr. Gourde. Please ask me that again on other occasions, because it does inspire me to talk more about the issue. I will do my best to enlighten you.
When I said that the motion takes away a privilege from MPs, I was talking about a privilege they had in the House of Commons. However, they have never had that privilege in committees, and that is how it has been since 1867. The privilege I was talking about earlier is the privilege of going to the House of Commons to express their views; that is the right to speak in the elected House, where nothing is in camera. We want to introduce that right in committees now.
I forgot to mention something and you reminded me by asking for clarifications. If you take away that right from independent members, you may well upset them and they might seek retribution. Since you wanted to take away that privilege in the House of Commons, they could show you what might happen in committees. They might show up at a committee.
The committee rules do not allow them to sit non-stop for three or four days. Committees sit for two hours, then adjourn and come back. In the House of Commons, when we start to sit, a meeting can sometimes go on forever. That is why the Nisga'a agreement had 471 amendments. The work of the House started on Monday and continued until Wednesday morning. I remember that very well. We said no 471 times. Once that was done and over with, we continued studying the bill.
What might happen in one committee may well happen in three or four other committees at the same time. If you take away their privilege in the House of Commons and give it to them in the committee, four independent members could get together, decide to appear before three or four committees studying bills, and take over the committees.
For instance, if a committee is studying a bill on crime, which the Conservatives love, a member could appear before the Standing Committee on Justice to introduce 1,500 amendments to the bill that the government wants to adopt. An MP could simultaneously undermine the business of the finance, environment and transport committees. As a result, no committee, no bill would move forward. Is that what you want?
I suggest that you go and tell your party members that MP Godin might have raised a good point. Your political party might say that it had thought about it and it is fine. However, I don't think you have thought about it.
I am telling you, you should think about consulting with your party's leadership. It is not the end of the world. We could revisit the issue after the parliamentary break, when we are going to work in our ridings. It is really a break, not a holiday. I personally have never gone back to my riding to take a holiday. We are supposed to go back to our ridings to take care of our constituents and work with them. At the same time, we could think about this and decide whether we will move forward with the motion when we come back.
Once again, I ask the government to support our request.
Mr. Gourde, you also seem very concerned about the privilege of MPs. You said that I was contradicting myself, but I am sure you would not want to lose your privilege if you were in the opposition. You will not be on the government side forever. One day, you will be in the opposition. What you are passing today will be in effect later. This story will not be over.
Based on my 16 years of experience in the House as an MP, it was the Reform Party of Canada that came up with this tactic. Once the door was open, we saw that it was an option. However, it has not been used that often. Instead, the practice has been to have little negotiations between the House leaders and the independent members. That usually does not take very long.
In that particular case, the Reform Party did not agree and the debate continued until Wednesday morning. However, in other situations I have seen, the debate stopped. So it wasn't the end of the world.
Conservative
NDP
Yvon Godin NDP Acadie—Bathurst, NB
My colleague is talking about 2011. I think we debated the budget for 58 hours. There were not 200 amendments. No, it was actually the debate on getting postal workers back to work. The number of amendments was not an issue in that case.
That will happen again in the House if the government goes after unions and workers again. I was not too keen on what was said at the Conservative convention last weekend, Mr. Chair. They seem to think that workers' representatives are all demons. However, without workers' representatives, unions or workers' associations, we would be in the same situation as some third world countries where people earn $2 an hour and do not have a pension plan or any other benefits. That is something we could discuss some other time.
In this particular case, we can tell that the proposal comes directly from the government because it was introduced in all the committees. We are told that committees are their own masters. We also know that political parties help their members to introduce motions in committees. However, when a proposal is submitted everywhere, we know that it comes from the party. In this case, I don't think it was deliberate. I do not say that unkindly. But I think I am right in saying that, if independent members are unhappy with the proposal, if they feel that a privilege is being taken away from them and if they want to make us pay for it, they can go to major committees where the government is trying to pass bills and shut them down at the same time, all in the same week.
If the Conservatives have not thought about that, I am sure that they will be aware of it once they read what I am saying in the “blues”. It could happen. Are you ready to pay the price? In your shoes, I wouldn't want my government to tell me that Mr. Godin raised an issue, that he might have been right and that perhaps it is time to consider the issue again. That does not seem to be the case. You seem ready to take action along those lines. I don't know. I look at you and feel that you are really listening. Perhaps I have raised a good point. Perhaps you will not fall asleep during my speech.
This idea has not been fully explored. I think the government members figured that, if they allowed independent members to introduce amendments in committees, those members would stop introducing them in the House. But they did not think about the fact that the same problem could occur in committees, where they are trying to push some bills through. In some cases, when their bills go through the Senate and it takes a few days, the government becomes impatient. The Senate is there, but they wish it weren't. They feel that what the Prime Minister says should be approved right away and we should go along with it, but that is not how things work.
Imagine if we were debating a bill that the government would like to pass again and it took weeks. That will happen if it is what those members want. I repeat: it could affect a number of committees and bills at the same time.
We may have sometimes thought that independent members should not have the right to ask questions, but we must admit that the Speaker has always given them the right to speak. Since all members are part of the House, the Speaker has always allowed them to ask questions in the House of Commons. Independent members have had this opportunity since the inception of Parliament.
I think the issue is too significant to be addressed piecemeal in our committee. Let us refer it to our experts from the Committee on Procedure and House Affairs and let us try to develop procedural regulations. There is no harm in that.
I know other people would like to have a turn and I would like to give them an opportunity to do so, but we still have 10 minutes. The chair said that the division bells will ring at 4:20 p.m. It is now 4:10 p.m., so we still have at least 10 minutes.
I am not sure if I made myself clear about the danger of this amendment. You don't have to agree with me. I don't want much. We should invite the independent members to appear since we are talking about one of their privileges. If we must go ahead with this motion, we should hear what they have to say. If the government changes its mind and refers the issue to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs because it thinks it is important, that is fine. We must consider what the outcome will be if our committee does the study. Perhaps that point has never been considered or raised. If we come back to the issue later, we will have time to think it through.
Other committees may suggest things, but the Conservative members reject them, saying that they received instructions from the Prime Minister's office and that they are doing what the government tells them to do. You are not losing anything if we wait until the next meeting; you have the majority. I don't know how long we will talk about this or what priority we will give it, but I just want to caution you.
Thank you.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Michael Chong
Are there any further comments on this motion?
Mr. Nicholls, the floor is yours.
NDP
Jamie Nicholls NDP Vaudreuil—Soulanges, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I too share the concerns of my colleagues about procedural hijinks stalling the work at the committee. I think the question that we have to ask here, colleagues, goes to the heart of the purpose of committee work. I think it's an important question and I think this motion shows a misunderstanding of committees' purpose. As they stand right now, committees work fairly well. They're not perfect, but why should we start mixing up this system if it's working fairly well with something that, as my colleague said, could tie us up in procedural hijinks that would stall the good work of the committee?
At the last meeting we were trying to frame routine motions so they better reflect the ideal functioning and efficiency of committees. We were not trying to change the way committees function or their composition or add new elements. We were trying to better frame the best practices.
I believe this motion will change how committees function and will perhaps change the purpose of committees. It seems to me that the motion will move the privilege of a member to make amendments from the Commons to committee. There's a reason why we have an official opposition and a ministerial party represented in committee. The Canadian system of Parliament allows third, fourth, and fifth parties, if the numbers warrant, to best reflect the franchise of Canadians. The system, I underline again, is not perfect. That's why we've asked for many years for some kind of proportional representation to better represent Canadians' franchise. Some parties in Parliament are not recognized, but they receive a fair amount of the vote in Canada, and they do not get party status in the House. As I said, that's not perfect. When a million people vote for a party and they don't get representation, it doesn't reflect the way they voted.
However, that said, committees aren't accountable to parties, they're accountable to Parliament. Allowing independents to introduce amendments at committee I think is a misunderstanding of the purpose of committees. The purpose of committees is the idea of scrutiny. The U.K. studied this idea of scrutiny quite extensively and how Commons committees should scrutinize. I wish to share with members of the committee some of the findings of Westminster when it studied this very important question of the purpose of committees and the purpose of scrutiny.
They said: While there is no clear and agreed statement of what scrutiny is for, the purpose of the scrutiny committees is often described as being to “hold Ministers to account”. Certainly an important element of our work is to require Ministers and civil servants to explain and justify their actions and policies, to subject them to robust challenge; and to expose Government — both ministerial decision-making and departmental administration — to the public gaze (though some elements of scrutiny — where matters of national security are involved, for example — have to be in private). Some would argue that scrutiny, and the openness it brings, are an end in itself; others that its ultimate purpose is to improve Government. The political reality is that, individually, Members' agendas will differ.
And I underline this point. When large blocks of Canadians vote, say, Conservative, NDP, or Liberal they're voting for a program, they're voting for a set of ideas shared by a group of people.
Independents often strongly represent the interests of one particular riding in the country, a certain set of constituents, rather than having the national focus, as with the parties that are voted for all across the country. That's not always the case. There are certain members who get voted in by certain parties and only get one seat, and they're effectively independents in Parliament even though they represent a large body of people across the country.
To get back to the purpose of scrutiny, members' agendas will differ. Some will be keener to improve the government's performance, others to expose its weaknesses. But collectively, committees should influence policy and have an impact on government departments and the agencies to which their functions may be devolved. This is our first objective. The extent of this influence and impact is a primary measure of the effectiveness of committees.
I said at the top of my speech that I share the same concerns as my colleague from Acadie-Bathurst. If we move the privilege of presenting amendments from the House of Commons Parliament to committee, this effectiveness of scrutiny will be affected in a negative way. It will tie up the work of committee. It will tie up the work of the ministerial party in a way that will reduce the ability for us to scrutinize legislation carefully, scrutinize ministers, and scrutinize all elements of legislation and the direction of the country.
There are other purposes of scrutiny. The reason I'm bringing this up is because I'm trying to argue to members that it's important that this effectiveness not be cut by introducing a new element, a possibly radically element, as my colleague mentioned, of independents being able to flood the committee with amendments that would make our work and our scrutiny more difficult.
As presented in this report by Westminster, which is the mother of all parliaments—that's where our Parliament gets its inspiration, and we should look at best practices across Commonwealth countries; the U.K. took the time to look at best practices—they said that while a committee's primary purpose is to scrutinize government, it is sometimes in the public interest for them to extend their scrutiny to other organizations. That's why we invite witnesses here and question them.
If we're tied up with amendments from independents, our ability to scrutinize other organizations, witnesses, who come before committee, will be affected negatively. It will allow us less time to question witnesses. It will tie us up in more procedural hijinks, and the efficiency of this committee will be affected.
Another finding is that scrutiny committees are not just involved in scrutinizing others but have to have an active role in putting issues on the agenda and acting as a forum for public debate. It's well known that certain independents have certain pet issues. In our political system, that's the way they often get attention from the public and the media. There are certain independents who are one-issue members, or they frame their interests around a couple of issues, whether it be transparency or the environment.
Chair, I'll conclude my remarks there.
I see that the bells are ringing, so I will give over the floor.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Michael Chong
Thank you, Mr. Nicholls.
We will continue the discussion after Remembrance Week.
The meeting is adjourned.
