Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise to speak to this motion which I think is a very good motion. I do support it in principle.
However, I am not sure that in addressing a very serious and important problem it actually has all the answers. So when I support the motion, when I vote for the motion, as I expect to do, it will be with some qualification.
I am a player in this debate in the sense that I also had a private member's bill that passed second reading and went to committee. It was Bill C-224. It was a bill that would require charitable organizations to disclose the salaries of their executive officers. That bill left this Chamber to go to committee with the unanimous consent of the House, so it had the full support of the House.
When it got to committee it caused a great deal of controversy. Many witnesses came before the committee, some for and quite a number, I am sorry to say, against it in principle. I was actually in the course of a private member's bill before a standing committee subject to attack ads in the Ottawa Citizen . It was a full page that read: ``Do you have no sense of decency, Mr. Bryden?''. It was perceived by some people that wanting charities to disclose the salaries of their executive officers would cause disclosures that some charities were not prepared to endure.
The original bill that I put through to the committee received a lot of support in committee but it was seriously flawed. Consequently I went back and with the committee's co-operation I made a number of very important amendments to the bill.
But such was the controversy that the bill raised that the government pre-empted the amendments that I was to bring forward for my bill and implemented the changes by regulation. I found myself in the situation where I had actually achieved my target. In fact, Revenue Canada stiffened up the procedures for the reporting by charities of their executive salaries. As a matter of fact, Revenue Canada improved the measures which were proposed in my bill.
Suddenly I was faced with the situation where the bill need not go any further than committee. I spoke at committee to this dilemma. I approved of what the government was doing. It did not provide the penalties which I proposed in the bill. My bill addressed only one fragment of the problem of the accountability of not for profit organizations. I could not see going forward with a bill that was incomplete in addressing a wide array of problems when 90 per cent of the bill, such as it was, was addressed by the government in its changes to regulations.
My colleagues on the committee, on all sides, concluded with my agreement that the bill would go no further.
We were left with a dilemma. How would we tell Parliament? How would we tell the world who saw the attack ads and who were aware of the news stories that I had brought in with this controversial private members' bill? How would we tell the world that the government had been very accommodating and that in fact my private members' bill had succeeded?
As it turned out, there was no way. We discussed in committee at some length the possibility of my submitting a member's statement; at the beginning of question period each member has an opportunity to speak for one minute on any subject. I still felt that I would not be returning to Parliament with the message that the committee had considered the bill and had come to some decision with respect to the bill.
The more we examined the issue, the more it became very clear that there was no easy way to take the message back. As a government MP, the irony was that there was no effective way for me to report to the people of Canada that my government had paid attention to a private member's bill.
So often we hear the criticism that private members' business does not go anywhere, yet my bill was an example of private members' business achieving something substantial. However, I could not in any way effectively tell Canadians that the government gives great weight to private members' business and in this instance acted in my mind very responsibly and very promptly to the initiative proposed in Bill C-224.
The reason I have reservations about the motion and why I support it in principle but not necessarily in content is that the parliamentary secretary raised the issue that if we report back to the House, then the House has an obligation to consider the report and there would be further debate. That raises the very real issue of House time. If we take up House time, then other members who may have similar private members' bills to put forward will not be able to do so. If I take up House time with debate that is no longer necessary, then I am depriving my colleagues of an opportunity to do exactly what I did and have the same success which I achieved.
This is a very serious problem. As I understand it, there is a committee of Parliament studying the whole issue of private members' business. I want to say that private members' business is very important in Parliament. Previous Parliaments have not given it the place which is its due. They did not exploit the contribution which private members can make to the legislation of this country by introducing bills which do not come from the bureaucracy, which do not come from government, but which come from individual members who reflect the interests of their constituents.
Private members' business does need to be reformed. This motion addresses an area of reform to which we should give due attention. While supporting this motion, I hope it will lead perhaps not to the implementation to the actual letter of the motion, but that it will lead to a furthering of the examination of the problem. Perhaps in the very near term we will come to a solution that will accommodate the concerns very legitimately raised by the member for Mission-Coquitlam.