Public Accounts Committee on April 19th, 2012

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

I believe the amendment is out of order because it changes the intent of the original mover's motion, which is to have the planning meeting on Tuesday.

[The Chair, NDP, David Christopherson]

I don't think so. I don't see them as being mutually exclusive. We can still go with that list. We can still meet on Tuesday and have a planning meeting, even if the committee decides there's no more planning that needs to be done.

I'm not seeing the point of order. I'm listening.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

What you just said is not clear.

[The Chair, NDP, David Christopherson]

What Mr. Byrne did was a very clever veteran's trick. What he did was move an amendment, which is in order. He made the substance of his amendment the substance of his motion, which is entirely in order.

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

I've gone further. I've actually added a second amendment, which would be that witnesses appear as panels, with no more than two witnesses per panel and each panel appearing for a minimum of one hour, and then the committee report its findings to the House of Commons.

[The Chair, NDP, David Christopherson]

It's in order. I don't see anything out of order. It was a bit of a parliamentary sleight of hand, but it works and it's in order. The point of order is ruled deemed to be not a point of order.

Mr. Byrne, back to you.

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

I will continue. I'll try to be brief, Mr. Chair, because I want to get to this.

I think this is much more acceptable than having deputy ministers, with their own vested interests, deciding who will appear before this committee. That's what the parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Public Works has said: it's on record that it's more appropriate for deputy ministers to decide who accompanies them at the table than for members of this committee. This is a much better method, and I think we'll get better answers as a result of the committee retaining its capacity to call witnesses who are directly involved in this issue, as opposed to just at the deputy minister level. It was, after all, Mr. Chair, the government--

[The Chair, NDP, David Christopherson]

Sorry, Mr. Byrne. There's a point of order from Madame Gallant.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Reference was made to the parliamentary secretary making an official statement or it being on the record. I would like to have reference to where that official reference is so I could double-check it and see it for myself.

[The Chair, NDP, David Christopherson]

It's not a point of order.

Mr. Byrne can decide to acquiesce to your request or not.

If there is anything further you want to say, ask for the floor and I will give it to you. It is not a point of order.

Mr. Byrne, please continue.

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

It will be in the blues at about the 48-minute mark of the meeting, I would suggest, Mr. Chair.

I was saying that this will be a much more helpful approach to take--that is, having the committee decide. I hope, Mr. Chair, that after weeks of potential preparation nobody came here without bullets in the holster, so to speak, without a witness list to present before us.

I'm proposing that this should be our planning session. Let's get to business. Let's get the job done. Let's get it done now.

I'll surrender the floor.

[The Chair, NDP, David Christopherson]

Thank you.

Would you please work with your staff and the clerk to ensure that we have the proper wording of your amendment, please, while we move on to other speakers?

With that, we'll move on to the next speaker on my list.

Mr. Allen, you have the floor, sir.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

It's like listening to duelling banjos that are out of tune, to be perfectly frank.

The intention of coming here in the first place—and I will put my hand up as one of the signatories of the letter—was to get work done. We have now spent the better part of 70 minutes running around in a circle like a hamster on one of those wheels. Quite frankly, this does no service to the Canadian public. What I'm hearing from my colleagues in the other two parties is that they actually want to serve the Canadian public, and yet I do not see that happening.

What I'm looking to both of you to do, since we literally have duelling motions, is for both of you to somehow stop banging your heads together until you get flat spots, and get this work done.

We have offered a compromise. We are continuing to offer the compromise. If this is indicative of what we're going to be doing on Monday for another two hours, the chair is absolutely correct that it will not matter what we do on Tuesday. There will be no meeting on the 26th because we will still be arguing about how we're going to call witnesses and who's going to be on the list and how we do it. So for once, let the grown-ups—and I say that purposely—rule here and let's get on with the business of doing the business, because quite frankly this is not what we're about. I've sat on this committee for a number of years on and off. This is not what this committee was about before, but that's where we've gotten ourselves to today.

What I would suggest to my colleagues is that we agree on the substance of a motion that says we intend to start with chapter 2. We're all in agreement. Do we need to break these motions up into individual bite sizes so we can get unanimous consent? If I were to say that we all should start on the 26th, would we all agree? Let's just nod heads if we do. I think so. We've heard that already around the table.

The next piece is when do we want to start calling witnesses? We want to make sure they're on the 26th. Let's nod in agreement.

So let's do the next piece. Who? How many? Let's do that now.

The obvious one is the Auditor General. Let's do that now and let's bite-size this thing up, just like little bits, and get it done. This adding a layer of complexity to see which one can get the motion passed because they have ownership of the motion isn't getting us anywhere, so let us try to find a way to start this study next Thursday with a witness list we will eventually find unanimity around. Most of us would probably agree.

I heard my colleague across the way say the Auditor General is an obvious one. Kevin Page, the PBO, is an obvious one. The deputy ministers are obvious. I would hope he is also saying that if I have some folks that I believe would be of that level or of that calibre who have some involvement, indeed the government would say that's an interesting witness to hear from as well.

I would never expect the deputy minister to tell me what my witness list should be, just like I wouldn't tell the government what its witness list should be, and I haven't. I have my witness list, which is mine. I offer it up for discussion.

We need to move forward. We have 45 minutes, give or take a couple of minutes, to get through this. I would sincerely hope that, at the very least, we actually pass something today so that we can start next Thursday. Otherwise, we have simply delayed the process for no other good reason than that we could. That is not the intent of the three on this side of the House, who are saying to you, “Let's move forward.”

We are in agreement on the 26th. Let's find a way to simply set aside the ownership of a motion, and get down to work. This is what Canadians have asked us to do. Let's get it done. Let's simply go do this.

I see a way through this. I think most of us see our way through this. Let's take the path. Let's get on the path and get it done. We can actually get this done. Surely to goodness we can manage that in a two-hour segment that Canadians are watching. They're watching us here. We don't get this big an audience. They're the biggest audience we've had for a long time.

Let's move forward with this. Give up ownership of your motions, gentlemen. I implore you to both do that. Let the committee have ownership of the motion in a holistic way and let's move forward.

I look to both of my colleagues, who I know want to move forward. I know they do. We all want to get there. Let's find a way to do that in a more harmonious way than where we're headed now, because we're literally headed nowhere, and that's not a good place for us to be headed, at the moment.

We're trying to find a way there. We're offering some light on the way there. Mr. Saxton has agreed with part of it. I appreciate his taking us up on the date. When I asked about when, they gave us a date, and they gave us a very appropriate date, I thought, very expeditious. We really appreciate that.

All I'm looking for now is that instead of saying we're going to delay all of the planning until Tuesday, let's start with some preliminary planning now, because we actually want to have a meeting on the Thursday. We can hammer out the rest—this person, that person, and all those other bits and pieces—on Tuesday. We're actually going to have to do that; we won't get it done today because we'll simply run out of time.

I thank you, Chair.

I apologize to my colleagues for maybe this angst that I feel, but it seems to me that we need to move forward and we need to do it quite rapidly.

[The Chair, NDP, David Christopherson]

Thank you, Mr. Allen

Mr. Shipley, you have the floor, sir.

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

I listened to Mr. Allen that we need to serve the Canadian public. Absolutely we do. We should have been doing this a couple of weeks ago, when we had the opportunity. It was a choice at that time not to.

I find it interesting, in terms of moving ahead, that a colleague across the way from the Liberal Party, 65 minutes after the meeting has started...that it should be deemed now as a planning meeting when he had the opportunity of putting that motion forward.

As I said, this is about a committee to consider a study of chapter 2; there was no consideration at that time to even notify us that there would be a planning meeting. He chose not to let us know so that there would be some grandstanding, unfortunately, on the Liberal side, and maybe supported by the NDP, I'm not sure. We didn't sign the notice to have the meeting. So I'm not so sure that coming back two days ahead of a meeting has been in the best interest of the Canadian public in terms of spending for people to come.

So we need a way forward. Actually, I think we should get to the vote. The way forward is that we would take Mr. Saxton's motion that says we will start the study. We will have the planning meeting on the 24th. We will have witnesses on the 26th. That way, everyone has an opportunity to put their names forward. We then talk about the discussions, not dictated, quite honestly, by one person of this committee.

We take Mr. Allen's comments seriously that when we've been on this committee prior, we've worked well as a team. We're here to do the best for the country. We've done that by putting names forward. We each select out of it. Some we like, some we don't, but that's how it works so that we get both sides of the story. Then we talk about how they come forward so that actually as a committee we get the best value from those witnesses as they come forward—not dictated by one person at this time without the discussion or without the courtesy, quite honestly, of even letting us know that they wanted to have a planning meeting.

I suggest that we move forward on Mr. Saxton's motion. We have to deal with the amendments from my colleague across the way. We will deal with those. I suggest that we do and we get moving.

[The Chair, NDP, David Christopherson]

Thank you. It's a good time to clarify the discussion.

We can't really put lines in the sand on these discussions, but technically, colleagues, just to keep everybody up to speed, Mr. Byrne attempted to move two amendments. Of course you can't do that; you can only move one. That actually is what's before us right now, the amendment with regard to the date and the witness list. I'm not going to confine the discussion to just that, because I don't think that's helpful, but I do want to remind everybody that when it comes time to start doing some voting, that's where we are. We are on the amendment to the motion. That is what we will ultimately vote on first, barring any amendments to the amendment, which could yet happen.

With that, Monsieur Dubé has the floor.

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

Actually, I am going to defer to your wisdom, Mr. Chair. I don't think I can do what I wanted to do, given what you just said. In the wake of everything my colleague Mr. Allen said so eloquently, when I added my name to the list of speakers, I wanted to propose Mr. Shipley's friendly amendment in the appropriate manner, even it meant doing so formally, if necessary. But in light of what you just said, I don't think I can do that just yet, since we are discussing Mr. Byrne's amendment.

[The Chair, NDP, David Christopherson]

You can move an amendment to the amendment, which means you can take any part of what Mr. Byrne has said and you can offer a minor change or you can add a bit. It's an amendment to the amendment. That is open.

But right now, whether you agree or not, we are on the amendment, and that is what we will vote on.

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

That is what I thought. Regardless, I have saved a bit of time by declaring my intention for later.

[The Chair, NDP, David Christopherson]

Very good. Thank you.

Mr. Byrne, you have the floor again.

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Since we're all in a big hurry to get this done, why don't we get in a big hurry and get this done? I don't see any reason why we have to move out of here at four o'clock. We have lots of time. Let's get this done.

I'm prepared to stay beyond the prescribed hour of 4 p.m. Let's hold our planning session right now. I think that's the smart thing to do so that we can get this work done. If there's any objection to that, then I think members can make that perfectly clear.

You've ruled, Mr. Chair, that there is one amendment before us and that it is as follows.... I won't read out the entire list of names, because that would be redundant, but it's that the committee hold a planning session at the meeting of April 19, 2012; that the various witness lists include but not be limited to—and then there are the 11 witnesses I have put forward; that witnesses appear as panels, with no more than two witnesses per panel; that each panel appear for a minimum of one hour; and that the committee report its findings to the House of Commons.

[The Chair, NDP, David Christopherson]

I need to interject here.

My understanding from the clerk is that what you just said you wanted to do is a separate motion that's not part—

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

I would have preferred, but if you're saying that it cannot be done as a separate motion—

[The Chair, NDP, David Christopherson]

Yes, but now you want to take two of them and make them into one. You were okay in wanting to have two amendments; you just couldn't do them simultaneously.

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

I'm sorry, Mr. Chair. I thought you had ruled one out of order.