Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to enter the debate today. It is an interesting debate because it is one of those occasions where we actually have a debate in the House of Commons. People come with ideas and exchange them. Far too often we see ourselves here with our set pieces and not listening, but I think the debates on the standing order changes have been useful and helpful. Perhaps it is because they affect us all as parliamentarians.
In the brief time allotted to me I would like to talk about six different areas of the standing orders which I believe are in need of change. The first relates to the taking of votes and the practice of applying votes, the same practice we have been using since the start of the 35th parliament.
While every member of the House would agree that this practice has greatly reduced the time it takes to record votes, it is also true that this time and money saving measure can and has been denied by only a single voice. In other words, even though our vote is recorded in Hansard as having been cast, any one member can stand and say he or she wants everybody in the House to stand again, again and again, as many as 20 to 30 times in a single evening. Because what is most important is the vote itself that is a time waster.
My first recommendation would be that the procedure of applying votes by party should be institutionalized in our rules. Instead of requiring unanimous consent, what is now common practice, a minimum of five members would be required to force a traditional stand up vote. Such a standing order change would not infringe on the voting rights of anyone but would be consistent with the rule requiring five members to force a recorded vote. In that sense it is consistent, would speed things up and would make it a regular part of voting.
I would especially like to pay tribute to someone who works in our House leader's office, Mr. David Prest who first came up with this idea back in the last parliament and brought it forward as a time saver. One day, if we were ever to send to Mr. Prest the amount of money the House saved by using his original idea for applying votes, he could retire a very wealthy man. My hat goes off to him for that initiative.
The second issue I would like to address is that of House orders or motions which direct a standing committee on how to act. The problem I see is that the House may pass a motion, as it did in the last parliament, to create, for example, a victims bill of rights, or earlier in this parliament a motion to toughen up the drunk driving laws. Once that motion is passed by the House and sent to committee there is no guarantee that it will be dealt with or resolved in committee.
In both instances just mentioned, the motions were brought forward by the Reform Party and were supported by a majority of the members of the House. Yet no action was taken at committee. It is for this reason that I recommend that committees be required to report to the House on the progress of any order given to them by the House within a prescribed number of sitting days. There should not be any open endedness about these. When they are referred to committees, they should have to report back by a certain date.
Third, I would like to touch on a specific standing order which all parties in this House have spoken against at various times, Standing Order 56. Under this standing order when unanimous consent is denied, a minister can move a motion without notice, without debate or amendment to suspend the standing orders. While 25 members rising in their seats can have that motion withdrawn, 25 members is a far cry from unanimous consent. At any other time when someone asks for permission to table a piece of paper, to put a motion before the House, any one person can stop that by saying no to the unanimous consent.
Standing Order 56, which gives a minister special power to suspend the standing orders, is in my opinion dictatorial and an abusive rule. That is why I recommend that Standing Order 56 be deleted when we go through these standing orders.
The fourth item I want to address is Standing Order 73. It allows the government to designate that a bill be referred to committee before second reading. This process evolved, when I was first here, in the 35th parliament. It has evolved, I do not think intentionally, into a shortcut for the government which basically restricts one stage of the legislative process to 180 minutes of debate. The limiting of debate on any bill should be considered on a case by case basis which only the House collectively can decide. This should not be a decision left solely to the government which can unilaterally decide to limit debate on a bill. Therefore I recommend that Standing Order 73 be deleted.
During that debate on Standing Order 73 it may be that some people will say we need something in there to allow for the flexibility of amendments, in other words when amendments can come to the House. If this is the case, that is the only part of that standing order that should remain. If the House decides to amend rather than delete this standing order, I would recommend there be restrictions on the types of bills that are allowed to be considered by Standing Order 73. In other words, bills based on ways and means motions should not be allowed to proceed in this fashion. We do not want to see rules of the House used to limit debate. That is a decision for the House as a whole, not for the government side alone.
My fifth point relates to the question and comment period that follows most speeches in the House. Under the current rules the most important speakers—it could be argued the most important—cannot be questioned in debate. In other words, if the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition or the minister sponsoring the bill speaks on the bill, we cannot as members of parliament question the minister, the Leader of the Opposition or the Prime Minister following their speech. What may be very intriguing or may set the agenda for the entire bill or the day's debate, instead of a question and answer and a give and take on that very important speech, there is nothing. We are not allowed to have an exchange.
The few times that we have asked for unanimous consent to allow that exchange to take place have been some of the best debates in the House. It is between a very knowledgeable minister, a very concerned backbencher on one side of the House or the other. That give and take has made for some very good dynamics and interesting debate in the House. A provision should be introduced to allow for questions and comments for those people.
Finally, I would like to address the issue of committee reports tabled in this House. The vast majority of these reports are never adopted by the House let alone acted on. The accountability of the government with regard to its response to committee reports must be improved. I think of times when reports come from the procedure and House affairs committee, a committee I sit on. It may have to do with a question of supply. It is tabled in the House.
The House adopts that it be tabled but there is no vote on whether it is concurred in. In other words, for the folks who are watching on TV, if we put a concurrence motion forward, we start the debate. I say I would like to debate the tabling of that report and I would like to debate the contents of that report. Here is my motion and away we go. We can do that. We start the debate. We give our points of view and maybe one or two others do. The government inevitably and repeatedly will get up and say it is a nice little debate here, folks, but we move we return to the orders of the day. As soon as the government does that, the debate is finished. Instead of dealing with that report, the report instead of becoming a report of the House drops to the bottom of the government order paper, not the House's order paper.
I say those reports are the property of the House and should be dealt with by the House. It is not right when they are defeated like that or a motion to go to government orders occurs that the report becomes a government order itself. That is not a government order. I would argue that is a committee report and it is not the property of the government.
In other words, the procedure where a concurrence motion becomes a government order once debate on the motion is concluded should be disallowed. It should come back at another date for further debate and a decision by the House.
The government should not have control over this process. That is why the further recommendation on that is that the House always be permitted to have a free vote on a committee concurrence motion, if it is in the interest of the House. Many of those motions are adopted by unanimous consent. They are routine motions and we do not want to tie up the House or the voting time of the House.
We will be having a report soon from the procedure and House affairs committee again on the referral about the comments of some of the members of the House and whether they were contemptuous. That will come forward in a report. It will be tabled in the House. I would like the House to decide on that. The report from the committee is one thing but because that was a decision of the House to send that to committee there is no decision of the House to put it to bed once and for all.
We end up with a motion or a report and it just hangs there. There is no final determination of what to do with it, whether the House supports it or opposes it. It just sits there festering away, waiting for a nice day.
Those changes would make the House more responsive. It would make it fairer to the House as a whole and not just the government side. I think it would make things quicker and therefore cheaper. It would be better all around for both the government and the opposition benches.