It is clear that the Standing Orders were never intended to pave the way for such shenanigans. And we all know it.
What is more, I and a parliamentarian from another party visited Great Britain's parliament, on whose procedures we modelled this standing order 32 years ago. There, I saw how this legislative procedure worked. It was plain that it was never intended to obstruct the parliamentary process.
In December 1968, the report stage procedures were adopted by the House. I am being reminded by members that perhaps what we have done here is more important than from where we got the rule, which was in the U.K. Okay, then, let us limit ourselves to what was done here when we adopted the rule in December 1968. The then chairman of the House procedure committee, which is what it was called then, proposed these rules. He said when he put them into place—these are his words, not mine—that his “description of the legislative process substantially applies to the proceedings of the United Kingdom parliament”.
In other words, when the rule was put in place in 1968, the chair of the procedure committee recognized that he went to the U.K., received the rule there and applied it to the Canadian parliament.
In the same debate, the acknowledged master parliamentary philosopher of the time and another member of the Special Committee on Procedures of the House—and I am sure my hon. friend from Winnipeg will want to speak of this—the late Stanley Knowles spoke about how this rule should apply. He said:
Generally speaking, however, the whole tenure of our recommendations has been to try to eliminate duplication of debate and to facilitate the possibility of the nation's business getting before parliament and being dealt with.
The Prime Minister of the day, Mr. Trudeau, said with respect to report stage:
The new power to be given to the Speaker to permit him to marshal proposed amendments and to select those that best permit the House to express its views will help to focus and to improve debate. If adopted, this will be one of the first instances in which the House has made use of the Speaker's new status in order to improve its own procedures.
Those were the words of Prime Minister Trudeau when we put that rule in place in 1968.
I have just enumerated three sources: one, the chair of the committee that put that rule in place; two, an opposition member and very eloquent spokesman, the late Stanley Knowles; and of course, the former Prime Minister, the late Right Hon. Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
It is clear to me that the framers of the report stage rules want this to be very clear. Here I draw attention to the words of former Speaker Marcel Lambert, a former Conservative member of parliament as well, who said:
Your Honour will have the task of marshalling these amendments and frankly, with the greatest respect, I do not envy you your task.
That is what Marcel Lambert, a former Speaker himself prior to that time, said. I believe he was Speaker around 1962, during the Diefenbaker years.
What Mr. Lambert was saying was that you, Mr. Speaker, will have a hard job of selecting through these amendments, ensuring that only the proper ones will be votable and so on. That was what a Conservative member of parliament said.
Thus we see that at the time the report stage procedures were adopted in Canada, it was clearly anticipated that the Speaker would exercise the very broad powers of selection that are exercised in the United Kingdom.
Erskine May's Parliamentary Practice discusses the power of selection on page 466 of its twentieth edition. Here is what it says:
Selection is made by the Chair in such a way as to bring out the salient points of criticism, to prevent repetition and overlapping, and, where several amendments deal with the same point, to choose the more effective and better drafted.
It is the same point.
Experience has shown that, in most cases, the discretion conferred on the Chair to select the amendments which may be moved is the best method of securing reasonable opportunities for all varieties of opinion.
That is what was said by Erskine May. The book is on our table in front of us as a reference manual, so I am not exactly inventing new parliamentary law here. It was clearly the intention of the designers of the Canadian report stage that detailed legislative work would be done in committee, that the great majority of amendments would be disposed of in committee and that the report stage would be confined to amendments that could not have been moved in committee or that enabled the House to address major points of criticism.
As Marleau and Montpetit, or M and M, as we sometimes refer to it now, indicates at page 663, the designers of this process intended that all members, not just those on the committee, should have the opportunity to propose suitable amendments, but the intent was not for this stage to become a repetition of committee stage. That is not Erskine May this time. This is our book, Marleau and Montpetit.
Over time, Speakers ceased to exercise that authority—I will not be challenging how Speakers have administered it, as these things happen—with each successive Speaker being less assertive than his or her predecessor. As a consequence, the report stage of bills took on what I would call an exaggerated place in the process at the expense of other stages.
In 1985 the reform of the House of Commons special committee, the McGrath committee—there is one member of that committee serving in the House and he will probably speak later—urged that the Speaker exercise the power to select, but the only practical consequence was that amendments that had been defeated in committee were routinely not selected at report stage. The member was a prominent member of that committee, as I have said, and is very much a prominent member of the House today and a very respected member as well.
As a consequence, the practice arose whereby members simply did not propose their amendments in committee at all, reserving them instead for report stage. This is only one of the problems. This further diminished the committee stage and exacerbated the already inflated role of report stage.
It gets worse. It was not long before the usual operations of report stage began to be employed for purposes for which they were never intended, rendering the process not merely one that is exceedingly unpleasant for members but also one that brings the House into what I will call public disrepute. I do not think Canadians watching us vote 24 hours a day 3 days in a row on changing commas to semicolons can be impressed by our collective behaviour.
We have seen before that when someone in the House stumbles upon a dysfunctional method of asserting political disagreement, it may start as the nuclear weapon of the parliamentary arsenal: we use it the first time because it is the greatest and most important issue ever to have hit the legislature, but in not too long a period of time it becomes the sine qua non of parliamentary opposition. In other words, we use it the first time because it is earth shattering, the second time we use it because it is very important, and the third time we have to use it, otherwise we are not serious at all. This is a little bit like the bell ringing incident.