Are we all so self-important that we cannot shut off our cellphones when we come in here and pay attention to the business of the House for the duration of time that we are here? It just makes me sick.
As I was saying with respect to ministerial statements, the report states:
First, it is important that more ministerial statements and announcements be made in the House of Commons. In particular, topical developments, or foreseeable policy decisions, should be made first--or, at least, concurrently--in the chamber. Ministers, and their departments, need to be encouraged to make use of the forum provided by the House of Commons. Not only will this enhance the pre-eminence of Parliament, but it will also reiterate the legislative underpinning for governmental decisions. While we recognize that not all announcements will be made in Parliament, it is important that more of them be made in this setting.
It is ironic that we should be debating and adopting the recommendations of the modernization committee report that I just read, on a day and in a setting where we have had major policy announcements repeatedly made on topical developments.
What could be more topical than the events of September 11? Major policy announcements have repeatedly been made, not in the House but at Liberal fundraising dinners.
I say to the government House leader that there is something deeply ironic, if not hypocritical, about adopting this policy in the context of a time when we have seen major policy announcements made, not in the House but at Liberal fundraising dinners. I do not hold him responsible for the behaviour of his Prime Minister or of the government entirely, and I hope that in his heart of hearts he would agree with me
The Prime Minister should have reported to the House first after his meeting with George Bush as recommended by the modernization committee report. He should have reported to the House first, not after or in the course of fragmented responses to questions in question period.
However he did not. He is in violation of the spirit of the report for not doing so, as is the Minister of Transport for whom I otherwise have a great deal of respect. After a take note debate in the House, which made the airline issue the property of the House of Commons, the Minister of Transport did not come into the House and say that this is what we debated last night and this is what he will do about the problem. No, the announcement was made in the press gallery.
How many times does this kind of abuse have to happen before the Canadian public gets the message? Maybe Canadians already got the message that parliament does not matter. It does not matter to the government so why should it matter to them?
I would hope against hope that the adoption of the report would mean a sea of change in the way the government relates to parliament through the increased use of ministerial and prime ministerial statements. That would have been the statesmanlike thing to do. The prime ministerial thing to do would have been to use the House of Commons in that context.
Question period, even at its best which it seldom is, is too adversarial a context for delivering the kind of comprehensive policy statements we would have expected of the Prime Minister in the context of what happened in New York City on September 11.
There are many good things in the report and I will not have time to elaborate on them all. I have already alluded to the recommendations having to do with ministerial statements and with the timing of committees.
The procedure that is recommended with respect to closure or time allocation is a good one. We will see how it works. I hope it will act as a brake on the government when it comes to time allocation.
When time allocation occurs I hope the government will provide an opportunity for ministers to justify what they are doing, or at least allow members of the opposition an opportunity to question the appropriate minister. I am looking forward to seeing how it works.
As was said by the Alliance House leader, I would have preferred that the Speaker had been given some power independent of the House to rule on whether motions of time allocation were in order, but that was not to be. We could only do what was unanimously agreed upon.
I want to enter a reservation on another item which may turn out to be all right. It has to do with candidates for Speaker making speeches to the House. The original McGrath committee, of which I was a member, made a recommendation about how a Speaker should be elected. It was felt at that time that it would be unseemly for members to campaign for the speakership.
This was not a view shared by Alliance members when they came here as Reformers. It is something they have managed to create a consensus about, that there should be some opportunity for candidates for the speakership to speak to members. I hope this will not lead to full scale campaigning. I will wait to see whether or not the initial reservations of the McGrath committee are borne out in this regard.
The recommendation with respect to estimates is a good one. We are going back to a former way of dealing with the estimates before my time. It was in 1969 that the estimates were taken out of the House and sent to committee in the way they are now.
This was not something that was done by all party agreement. It was part of a package of so-called parliamentary reform imposed through closure by the government at that time. The process may have worked for a while, but it has not led to the kind of scrutiny of the estimates and accountability in terms of spending that Canadians expect of their parliament.
I am glad to see we will return some of the estimates to the floor of the House of Commons. As the Alliance House leader indicated, this is something which is done regularly in many provincial legislatures where ministers are accountable. Ministers have to answer for their spending in a way that federal cabinet ministers do not have to do.
I will comment on what the Alliance House leader said with respect to the confidence convention. The whole issue about free votes has been a preoccupation of his party since it got here. The Alliance House leader pointed out that the confidence convention did not exist procedurally. However it used to exist procedurally.
There was the language of confidence in the standing orders prior to the adoption of the McGrath committee report in 1985. Members were able to hide behind procedural language which said, for instance, that because opposition day motions were motions of supply they were in fact confidence motions. Therefore people had to treat them as confidence motions.
That is all gone. All the language of confidence has been removed from the standing orders. The Alliance House leader is noticing that in spite of that we have not had any significant change in the culture of confidence. We have changed the procedure and the standing orders but we have not changed the culture of confidence.
I hear what the Alliance House leader is arguing for. At one point I would have hoped this would not be necessary. Maybe we do need a motion in the House which lays out that only certain things are matters of confidence unless they are deemed to be matters of confidence in the wording of the legislation itself.
This happens informally from time to time. A couple of times the current Prime Minister has said something is a matter of confidence. It is a way of signalling to his backbenchers that he will not tolerate any dissent on the matter.
This is something that should be regularized. If it were regularized the possibility would exist for government backbenchers to rein in their government when they feel it was going in the wrong direction.
A piece of legislation could then be defeated without defeating the government. That is what this is all about. However that was not accomplished in this report. It waits for another day and will probably wait a long time. I do not see the current Prime Minister or the current culture of the Liberal Party as being terribly open to this kind of parliamentary development.
The government House leader said that parliamentary reform was an ongoing thing. I do not regard this committee report as reform. It is well named when it is called modernization. Reform to me suggests a redistribution of power between the government and the opposition and between the Prime Minister and his backbenchers.
There is not much reform here; there might be a bit. I am trying to make the government House leader feel better, but there is not much that I would call reform. That does not mean that what is in the report is not worth doing. However let us not go overboard and call it something that it is not.
We still wait for the day when members of parliament will have more independence from the government, particularly in committee. At the risk of alienating the member for Fraser Valley because he sometimes complains that I mention the McGrath committee too much, we recommended then that committee members not be pulled off committees by the government when they had the audacity to have independent thought, to think that the government was not perfect, or to amend legislation in ways that had not already been suggested to them by the parliamentary secretary.
That raises another matter and another recommendation in the McGrath committee which stated that parliamentary secretaries not be on committees. Government members do not and should not need a coach in committees. Presumably government members are able to exercise some kind of rational, intelligent function and make decisions themselves without having to take their cue from a parliamentary secretary.
Had these kinds of things been included in this report then I would call it parliamentary reform. I do not call this parliamentary reform. Nevertheless I welcome it and I hope that we will be able to make the best of what little we have before us.