Mr. Speaker, I started by mentioning that the 70th report deals with Private Members' Business. I am building the foundation of why this report is an important one. I am talking about the importance of the work of committees.
This committee's 70th report is no less important than any other committee's work. A subcommittee of the procedure and House affairs committee diligently goes about its work. It sacrifices its time and energy. It calls witnesses. There is give and take in committee and again it is brought forward. I am just building the argument. The trouble is that all that work is for naught.
The work of that committee on the 70th report talks about criteria for Private Members' Business. It talks about bills being drafted in clear, complete and effective terms. They must be constitutional. They must concern matters of significant public interest and so on.
I do not have any quibble with that report. The report is fine. The problem we are talking about is that in general reports come into the House and go into a dark hole, never to be seen again.
I will continue to build the case, the background, the underpinnings of this argument. Another report dealt with was the televising of committee work. It was the 48th report of the same committee. It was a unanimous report brought forward to the House of Commons. It talked about how we got together.
I was on that committee and spent more than a month there. We listened to procedural experts. We listened to constitutional experts. The press gallery made presentations. We listened to people from the print media. We talked on and on.
The conclusions we came to were unanimous. The government whip was on that committee. The chief opposition whip was on that committee. There were 15 or 17 members from all parties of the House on the committee which brought forward this case.
As I mentioned earlier, the unanimous report, the 48th report, talked about televised committees. What has happened to it? What has happened to the televised committee report? Absolutely nothing.
Recommendations were brought forward that all of us had agreed to. They talked about the need to show democracy at work. MPs spent all this time in committee. There are committees, right now as we speak, that are diligently doing their work, the give and take in committee. Who knows about it? We cannot even get a Hansard from committees any more.
The televised committee alternative that all parties agreed to has gone nowhere. It has been ignored by the government. It has been sitting in its hands for weeks. There has been no response. The silence is deafening.
We are talking about the 70th report on Private Members' Business today. These types of reports are abused by the government. Often they involve busy work, work given by the government to members of parliament to keep them occupied while the government does what it darn well pleases.
Nothing comes of a committee report on a good subject matter. A good mandate has been given by the House or by the committee. A study sometimes involves hundreds of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours. It involves the testimony of witnesses, written reports, give and take, and all that I mentioned earlier. What comes of it? Nothing. It is something that keeps people busy, but it does not have an impact on this place because it is ignored by the government.
When decisions are made in committee no one even knows what happens to the recommendations. I was in a committee the other day and a parliamentary secretary, who should know better, stood and asked how we could make sure something happened to the recommendations.
I had to break the news to the poor fellow. I told him it would be tabled in the House and that nothing would happen to it. It would be tabled in the House with our unanimous support. The government would take a look at it and probably one person in one office would say “I do not like it”. Then it would go into that big round filing cabinet, never to be seen again. That is what would happen to it. That is the sadness of the committee report system. That is why the 70th report, another piece of good work, is largely ignored.