Mr. Speaker, I am the chair of the standing committee concerned. We are dealing with concurrence in our report No. 48. The member has picked out this report. Our committee, I believe, is now in the seventies in terms of reports that it has submitted.
I will make some comments about the report that the member quoted from selectively. There are five main recommendations.
The first one deals with the situation the member described. At the present time, as many viewers of CPAC will know, there is a committee room that is equipped for committee hearings and they are televised. Those proceedings are broadcast through CPAC when the House of Commons is not sitting. That has been quite successful. There is a procedure whereby committees go into that particular room. Recommendation one of the report dealt with that.
The second one dealt with the fact that the House of Commons already has portable television equipment which can be moved around and can go into committee rooms and particular committees. There is a procedure for doing that. Their proceedings can be taped and, in the same way, can go out over the CPAC channels at times when this room of the House of Commons is not in operation.
My colleague, the House leader for the Reform Party referred in part to that. Our House leader, very soon after the report was presented, made the suggestion that it might be very useful, as a point of departure for discussion, to discuss fully equipping another room so that committees could be broadcast from it. That was the second recommendation.
The third one, which is very important, was the recommendation with respect to CPAC. A consortium of cable companies tapes the proceedings in the same way as they are taping what I am saying now. It goes out across the entire country on the parliamentary channel. CPAC deposits a tape of these proceedings which becomes the electronic record of the proceedings of the House of Commons. There is a discussion about that.
I would suggest that the CPAC arrangement, if one talks to people across Canada, has been very well received as a creative way for getting what the House of Commons does.
The channel already has very creative programs, such as the scrums, the extended interviews with ministers and other people, and a variety of programs about the way the House of Commons operates. In my experience they have been very well received. The committee's recommendations on that are very important because it is basic to the healthy broadcasting of the House of Commons.
The fourth recommendation deals with the fact that the standing committee was very concerned, as is the hon. member opposite, that members' work in committee be better represented on the airwaves across Canada. We then came to the point of the pilot study, which was the focus of the House leader's speech. A proposal was made for a pilot study by the media with certain constraints, which he described.
The report contains four recommendations, which the hon. member has brushed over. The member was concerned about one of the recommendations, although he admitted that our House leader, very early on, proceeded with a suggestion which actually was a stronger presentation of one of the recommendations; the equipping of a second full time committee room where proceedings could be televised.
From the point of view of this debate, I will go back to the fact that my committee, which is one of 20 or 25 standing committees and subcommittees of the House, has presented over 70 reports. The normal procedure when reports come in is, if they are substantial and involve considerable changes, as this one does—and the hon. member is quite right about that—there is healthy discussion between the parties and the House leaders.
My colleague from the Reform Party is the leader in the House of his own party. Normally there is discussion about the reports because sometimes reports come in and some parties like one part and some parties like the other part. It is a healthy discussion and something comes from it.
In this case, I would suggest that healthy discussion was stifled by the Reform Party which did not take up the opening offer, as it were, of our House leader which was to go beyond one of the recommendations here and fully equip a second committee room.
It is very important that reports coming into the House be thoroughly considered. One of the best ways of doing that is for the House leaders to look at them, discuss them in great detail and then come back to the House and make recommendations which can be supported by all parties.
Although the Reform Party members express great interest in the matter, it is also of great interest to me personally as chair of the committee and to my hon. colleagues on this side of the House. It disappoints me that they did not engage in the normal dialogue that follows the tabling of a report in the Chamber.
I move:
That the debate be now adjourned.