Madam Speaker, I rise in the House today to talk briefly about the business of private members and the recently filed report from the procedure and House affairs committee.
The current system of selecting votable motions and bills is based on a draw. Often there are up to 300 bills sitting in the bin and they are drawn for order of precedence. As all members know, they are then sent to a committee that is comprised of a chair from the government and one representative from each of the House parties. They decide which bills will be votable. At any given moment there will be five votable bills and five votable motions working their way through the House.
In 1985 the McGrath committee reviewed this business. It is an ongoing review. We continued it in the last parliament and we revised it in this parliament. It was referred to the House leader as a report, which went through the procedure and House affairs committee. It makes a few recommendations that I think are along the line of fine tuning or making the business of private members more reflective of what members of the House want.
Currently we separate the listings of motions and bills. As I said, we can select five of each to be votable and working through the business of the House. There is time allocated for the debate of Private Members' Business and private members' debates often result in a vote.
It is not a static system. As I have mentioned, it has evolved over the years as a response to the demands and concerns of members and it is continuously being improved and redefined.
The study that was undertaken in the last parliament was endorsed by this parliament. The recommendations include four or five quite different suggestions.
One is the concept of a maximum of five votable bills and motions. The committee decided this was an artificial separation. Given that they get the same amount of time for debate in the House, we would like to see that artificial separation removed. In other words any combination of 10 could come forward and be on the House agenda.
The second recommendation was to alternate the precedence order. Right now the bill is put into a draw and is selected literally through the luck of the draw. Sometimes there are 300 bills. A private member's bill can stagnate for many years. Sometimes they are drawn on a regular basis. My colleague from Mississauga South is probably the champion having had more bills drawn. He probably has shamrocks hanging from both ears.
The system we recommend so that the bill could be pulled out of that lottery and brought before the private members committee much more quickly is that the bill could be jointly seconded by 100 members of the House represented by at least 10 members from each of the parties in the House. It is not an easy process but it is more orderly. A bill that is of great interest to a majority of the members of the House could then go through the seconding process with 100 signatures and go before the private members committee to decide on its votability. We consider this a rather strong departure from the lottery system that is currently in effect.
The third recommendation concerns when a draw is held before a deferred vote. Votes are deferred all the time and we defer private members' votes. The debate is finished in the House, the reading is finished, everybody has spoken on the bill and the vote is deferred to the following Tuesday for example. We would like it to be deemed off the list at that point, once it is deferred. When there is another draw we could then fill that space with a new private member's bill. This is a housekeeping rule which gives more bills the opportunity to be deemed votable.
Another recommendation concerns an issue on which a lot of concern was expressed by many private members who came before our committee. When a bill finishes its debate in the House it is referred to a committee for amendments and discussion. Sometimes because the committee is too busy or maybe because there is an ulterior motive that is implied, the bill dies there. We believe that once the bill has had second reading and it has been voted upon in the House it is no longer a private member's bill but is a bill of the House.
We recommend that after second reading when a bill is referred to a committee it becomes a bill of the House and the committee shall report within 60 sitting days. The committee can ask for one extension of 30 days if it is too busy to have considered the bill. If at the end of that period there are no amendments suggested, the bill should be deemed reported without amendments. That will cause all committees to make sure that a private member's bill is treated in the same fashion as a bill of the House.
The fifth recommendation appears on the surface to be a rather frivolous recommendation. Right now we like to separate private members' bills from government legislation. In the normal system of voting we start in the front rows and work our way back. We suggest for private members' bills on both sides of the House that the sponsor vote first and then the voting begin in the back rows and work its way forward. We think this would keep everyone honest. There would be no influence by the front rows on either side of the House. We thought this would be an interesting diversion and a way of keeping the thought processes involved with private members' bills totally independent.
Members may recall that the House was prorogued halfway through the 35th parliament. The House leader introduced a bill that said all bills, government legislation and private members' bills, would be reintroduced at exactly the same stage they were when the House prorogued. This is not from one parliament to another; it is when there is a prorogation in the middle of a parliament. We thought it worked well. It speeded up the process and it stopped private members' bills from dying and having to go back through the lottery. We recommend that be enshrined in the rules governing private members business.
Legal advice is very important to private members when drafting private members' bills. We want the bills to be as accurate as possible, as votable as possible and as realistic as possible. We suggest that the House appoint a law clerk and parliamentary counsel for the House of Commons who would be responsible for the provision of legislative drafting services specifically to members, who would give them unbiased advice and would be without any party affiliation.
The last recommendation of the report was to give priority to members who currently do not have a lot of bills being drafted. In other words a member who went to the clerk's office for a first effort in a session and did not have three or four other bills being drafted would be given priority. That encourages as many members as possible to get involved in the process.
When we held the review which came up with these recommendations a lot of people said that all private members' bills or motions should be made votable, that there should be no process to select votability. A lot of people gave us written submissions. A lot of people gave submissions in person.
It looks on the surface like a really great idea. Everybody's bill would be votable. It would cut down dramatically the number of bills that would have time to go through the House. It would make each of those bills less important. There would be no way of jockeying them into importance. Every bill would be voted on mechanically. The conclusion of the committee at that time was not to make every bill votable.
I just came out of a procedure and House affairs meeting where we are talking about it again. We are looking at the criteria. As I said initially in my remarks, it is an ongoing process. It is here to serve the backbenchers specifically. It is their opportunity to draft legislation and to have an impact on the country and the legislation of the country. We will again revisit this. It is one of those processes that never stops. We will be looking at the criteria. We will be looking again at the concept of making every bill votable.