Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today to participate in this debate on the standing orders mandated under Standing Order 51. I had something to do with the creation of this standing order in the 1980s and I think it has proven itself to be a worthy recommendation to provide the House with this opportunity on a regular basis. This is an opportunity for the House to consider how it can improve on its procedures which are rooted in tradition and in history but which also must be responsive to changing political contexts.
I begin my remarks by considering two contexts that make the House of Commons unique. The first is the unusual fact that there are four opposition parties duly recognized by the Chair and the standing orders. Immediately following the last election there was considerable comment in the media about how such a parliament would function. I think it is worth pointing out, as the government House leader did, that this so-called pizza parliament, an institution for debating matters of public concern and for holding the government of the day accountable, has worked better than many commentators led us to believe it would.
It is true the government has continued to resort to time allocation and closure and each of the opposition parties has on occasion made full use of the rules of the House to provoke votes and debate issues more fully than the government would have liked. But when it has come to the practicalities of planning for the orderly consideration of parliamentary business, I think it is fair to say that the parties have managed to adopt an effective and pragmatic way of dealing with one another and have served the public well.
This has allowed for an unprecedented degree of forward planning of the parliamentary calendar, and the government House leader is to be commended for his efforts in this regard. The whole question of legislative planning is a matter which I consider to be important and which I regard as some of the unfinished business of the special committee of the reform of the House of Commons. I am glad to see we are making progress in that regard.
The election of a five party House of Commons did confront the House with the challenge of reconciling the new political context with the existing standing orders that in a number of ways have been designed for some time now around a House consisting of three parties.
The House has already dealt with one of the implications of five parties by amending the rules regarding speaking times for private members' business under Standing Order 95, ensuring that members of all parties can speak in each debate. We dealt with the matter of redesigning question period over the summer of 1997 after the election.
However, other difficulties remain and should be addressed. For instance, Standing Order 74(1) grants the first three speakers in a second reading debate 40 minutes of speaking time, a measure evidently and obviously designed to apply to a House that has three official parties. As it stands, this standing order gives an advantage to some opposition parties over others and increases the possibility that not all opposition parties will have their first speaker participate on the first day of debate.
This standing order should be amended to put all parties on an equal footing, a change that would have the added advantage of allowing for a question and comment period following the first speaker of all the parties. I think this would be a good thing. It is often the case that the leaders, the very people members might want to question, are exempted from this procedure.
More important, the current supply process does not allow for an allocation of debating opportunities that reflects the relative strength of the parties in the House. Standing Order 81(10)(a) and (16) set the number of allotted supply days at 20, 8 of which are votable. These numbers do not break down into an equitable distribution between the four opposition parties as they are now represented in the House.
The House leaders have agreed to improvise on the number of votable days in the current supply period in order to accommodate the current representation of the opposition parties in the House. However, the House should consider formalizing an appropriate formula for future supply periods.
The second unusual characteristic of this House is not only are there four opposition parties in the House but all four of them have in the recent past had members sitting in the House who were not recognized as belonging to a political party.
In the previous parliament the members of parliament elected as New Democrats and Progressive Conservatives by their constituents could not convince either the rest of the House or the Speaker to recognize their party status. In the parliament before that it was the turn of the Reform Party and the newly formed Bloc Quebecois to have their party status go unrecognized.
This is not the occasion to fight past battles for recognition of party status. However what the past disputes have shown is that there is no clear definition of party status in the standing orders themselves, only a loose and ambiguous series of precedents that are often in contradiction with one another.
Given the experience of each of the four opposition parties and given that there is not now a party seeking recognition in the House for which there would be a conflict of interest, it would be opportune for this parliament to carefully consider ways of clarifying the rules regarding the recognition of parties under the standing orders now that all the parties are on an equal footing.
The House may decide to formalize the most recent Speaker's rulings on the 12 member threshold, or it may choose to resurrect an earlier tradition of recognizing smaller parties. But the House itself should speak clearly on the matter animated by the most generous democratic outlook.
Apart from dealing with the presence of five parties in the House which is unique to this parliament, the House should also revisit the enduring questions of whether our current parliamentary practices give the fullest possible expression of the democracy Canadians rightly expect from this institution.
I think it is fair to say that those questions can be distilled to two basic issues. First, is there a proper balance between the ability of the government to govern and the ability of the opposition parties to hold the government accountable and offer alternatives to the government of the day? Second, is there a proper balance between the legitimate and necessary operations of party discipline and the opportunities of individual members of parliament either to dissent from the party line or to put before the House consideration of issues that concern them individually?
As the House considers how it might address these enduring questions there are a couple of historical precedents that should instruct us on how to proceed and how not to proceed with changes to the standing orders.
The example of the Special Committee on the Reform of the House of Commons which resulted in what is now called the June 1985 McGrath report after its chair, the Hon. Jim McGrath, a former member for St. John's East, should instruct us on how to proceed. The McGrath committee of which I had the honour to be a vice-chair offers the good examples of a consensus building process as well as a series of specific recommendations some of which remain to be implemented and still deserve the attention of the House.
The episode not to be repeated and indeed an episode some of the consequences of which should be undone was the unilateral imposition of major changes to the standing orders by the Mulroney government in June 1991 against the vigorous opposition of all of the opposition parties at the time. I urge members of the government not to repeat in any way the unilateralism of that regrettable episode and to be guided by their past opposition to those measures forced on the opposition parties on which there is no consensus.
Among the most undemocratic of the measures introduced at that time which offends the principle of striving for a due balance between the rights of the government and the opposition was what is now Standing Order 56.1. If the government has been denied unanimous consent on a particular course of action, this standing order gives the government the right to put the same question again during routine proceedings without debate or amendment and deems the motion to have carried unless 25 members stand in their places to oppose it.
This measure was clearly designed for use against small parties or factions in situations where a government wanted to act quickly and override the required parliamentary process for consideration of a government bill or motion. In essence because it sets a threshold which some opposition parties can meet and others cannot, its effect is to allow the government to deprive a recognized party of party status in particular situations where it is convenient for the government to do so.
This is not to argue that the government should not have at its disposal in situations where it feels it must act quickly mechanisms to accelerate the parliamentary process. What makes Standing Order 56.1 intolerable is that the government already has a wide array of other tools at its disposal to do so.
The government can use time allocation, closure, and seek extended hours. All of these measures balance the right of the government to act quickly in particular situations with the rights of the opposition parties to insist on due process. Standing Order 56.1 removes that balance entirely and without such a balance, where a government can act as if it has the unanimous consent of the House when in fact it does not, the Canadian public remains vulnerable to a parliamentary dictatorship.
It is unfortunate that the government has seen fit to make use of Standing Order 56.1 two times in this parliament, even though the Liberals opposed and voted against such a change when they were in opposition in 1991. On the first of those occasions, the government used it as part of its parliamentary tactics in moving Bill C-24 through the House very quickly, the back to work legislation concerning the dispute between Canada Post and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers.
This brings me to the next point about achieving a greater balance between the rights of government and opposition. Whenever governments want to circumvent the normal proceedings on government bills, it is almost always to force back to work legislation through the House quickly. It is almost always a case of infringing on the collective bargaining rights of Canadian workers.
This pattern stands in stark contrast to the direction that has been taken in recent years regarding the rights of investors and corporations. In the NAFTA, the WTO and the embryonic MAI, the trend has been to put up more barriers to government actions that might impinge on the rights of corporations and to make these corporations almost immune to government action.
In the case of the draft MAI, the proposal is to put in place a series of hurdles to public action that would last up to 20 years, even if governments were elected to withdraw Canada from the agreement. This stands in stark contrast to the rules and practices of this House where labour rights can be compromised by the passage of back to work legislation in a matter of 20 hours, not 20 years.
Here is another area where our democratic practices must restore some balance. I point to Standing Order 71 which states:
Every bill shall receive three several readings, on different days, previously to being passed. On urgent or extraordinary occasions, a bill may be read twice or thrice, or advanced two or more stages in one day.
This standing order is very vague about what procedures must be followed in order to read a bill at more than one stage in a day. It is therefore very vague about what must be legitimately done to circumvent one of the opposition parties' most important vehicles, which is time.
Time is not just time to be wasted; time is time to be used. Time to consult with interested parties. Time to make the opposing case to the public. Time to make sure that public policy is not conducted in a reckless manner. What has happened over the years is that delay has come to be seen as inefficient in a culture of efficiency, rather than seeing delay for what it is and can be, which is an integral part of a parliamentary process by which time is provided to the public and to opposition parties to make sure that a full and appropriate debate takes place.
I urge the House to consider ways of formalizing the procedures for allowing a bill to be read more than one time in a day in such a way that gives greater balance between the government's ability to act in a timely manner when there is a legitimate time constraint and the opposition's ability to do its job well.
Clearer rules would have the added benefit of creating a greater opportunity for constructive compromises to be arrived at as is often the case in back to work legislation, a process that in the past has shown parliamentary democracy to be working at its best as a vehicle for mediating between competing interests in society. When the government needs the opposition to get something through, we then have a meeting of the minds, genuine dialogue and genuine amendments to legislation. Things get done around here in a way that they should be conducted more often.
There are other standing orders giving power to the government to accelerate the consideration of government business which need some rebalancing. These are the standing orders governing time allocation and referral to committee before second reading.
In regard to time allocation governed by Standing Order 78, it is clear that time spent on a bill is a major source of conflict between governing and opposition parties. On most occasions when an opposition party makes deliberate use of a filibuster as a tactic, or the government resorts to time allocation, the parties will ultimately be guided by how the public judges their actions in the next election, or for that matter in the next poll, that is, such decisions are very often matters of political judgment.
However there have been and no doubt will be occasions when there will be a widespread and objectively arrived at concern that a government is resorting to time allocation too precipitously, and that there is a genuine public interest in a full debate in the House. For such a situation it is important that the standing orders vest in the Speaker the right to rule a government motion for time allocation out of order or inadmissible.
It is right and proper for the Speaker, especially now that the House has an elected Speaker, to have the authority to stand in the way of a government that was prepared to use time allocation to stifle debate when there was a widespread appetite for such a debate.
Giving the Speaker such an authority, even if he or she did not use it regularly, and I would not anticipate the regular use of such a power, would create the healthy habit of circumspection before the government resorted to time allocation. Perhaps then we could move away from the practice of the almost routine use of time allocation which really makes a mockery of the procedures of the House.
As regard referrals of bills to committee before second reading, it is sad to say that while this measure has the admirable intention of expanding the scope of a committee's ability to amend a government bill, in practice it has been used too often simply as a means to accelerate the passage of bills that the government clearly has no intention of allowing the committee to amend.
Standing Order 73(1) at present only requires the government to notify representatives of the opposition parties before proceeding with referral to committee before second reading. I urge the House to consider amending this standing order to require the agreement of at least some of the opposition parties before referral, perhaps along the lines of Standing Order 78(2)(a) which requires the agreement of a majority of the representatives of the several parties.
There is one further point I would like to raise under the heading of rebalancing the rights of the opposition and the ability of government to govern. That is the right of standing committees to scrutinize non-judicial order in council appointments. This process is governed by Standing Orders 110, 111 and 32(6), measures that resulted from recommendations of the McGrath report.
Although these standing orders are in place and empower committees to scrutinize a wide range of public appointments, committees are not making use of the powers available to them with any kind of regularity. I call on committee chairs and the government majorities that support them in committee to allow committees to make greater use of these standing orders in the spirit in which they were introduced. If they do not and the process withers on the vine, then the House should consider strengthening the rules requiring committees to fulfil this important function.
In the meantime the House should also consider extending the process of committee scrutiny to judicial as well as non-judicial appointments. I do not now wish to suggest a particular formula for the parliamentary scrutiny of judicial appointments but some form of scrutiny must be on the agenda for parliamentary reform.
The introduction of the charter of rights and freedoms fundamentally altered the role of the judiciary in our Constitution and its relationship to federal and provincial legislatures. As a country we are still in the process of assimilating the profound changes the charter has brought to the relative power and authority of the judiciary and the legislatures. The House of Commons must participate in that process by considering whether the new powers of the court must be met with a new level of parliamentary scrutiny.
I would now like to address some of the issues pertaining to the balance required between the requirements of party discipline and the rights of individual members of parliament. The main opportunity for individual members of parliament to play a meaningful role in the legislative process, or certainly one of the main opportunities, is in committee. It is in strengthening the independence of committees that this House can do the most to achieve a better balance between party discipline and the independence of individual MPs.
The McGrath committee recommended that alternate membership on committees be abolished and that members of committees themselves, not the party whip, have the responsibility of seeking their own replacements. The thinking behind this recommendation was to lead the House of Commons away “from the concept that everything in the House of Commons is controlled by the whips, the House leaders and the prime minister”.
It borders on the tragic to watch situations develop where a committee is doing exactly what it is supposed to be doing, studying a bill or an issue carefully with the members developing an expertise and a collective sense of where policies should be headed, and to have the process cut off by a government whip who can stop such a process in its tracks. The current rules make it easy for whips to undermine the work of committees.
I urge the House to revisit this recommendation of the McGrath committee as well as the recommendation that parliamentary secretaries not be allowed to sit on committees. Too often we see the parliamentary secretaries sitting there as a kind of censor or a government point man on the committee.
Another area where the effectiveness of committees could be enhanced would be in altering the concurrence process for committee reports.
At present any member of parliament may move concurrence during Routine Proceedings, but almost always the process results only in a single speech by the mover of the motion and the first government speaker moving that the House proceed to Government Orders. The current process then is useful only as a dilatory mechanism for the opposition with the government retaining full control over the debate and any subsequent vote on concurrence.
Committee reports are too important a part of the legislative process to be reduced to tactical footballs in the procedural wrangling between government and opposition. There must be some mechanism to allow for a full debate on important committee reports.
One possible mechanism would be to allow a committee that presents a unanimous report to recommend to the House that a concurrence debate and vote be held on the committee's report and that a fixed number of days be set aside each parliamentary year as with the supply process for holding such debates should committees request them. These debates could be time limited perhaps along the lines of the 180 minute debates with 10 minute speaking spots attached to the process of referring a bill to committee before second reading.
Another area relevant to the status of individual members of parliament is the whole question of Private Members' Business. This has been the subject of much parliamentary activity in this parliament with points of privilege being raised concerning the resources available to individual members of parliament for the purposes of drafting private members' bills and with the 13th report of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs proposing a new method for selecting votable items of Private Members' Business.
I just need a few more minutes, Mr. Speaker. I wonder, with unanimous consent of the House, if I could wind up my remarks.