Mr. Speaker, I am glad to be able to finally get a few words in edgewise on this particular motion, although I understand the passion of the hon. member for Elk Island when it comes to these things and the fact that he had at his disposal what I have never had in the House, that is, the temptation of unlimited time. He used it well in going after the government for the perfidy of this motion.
I was particularly struck myself by the way in which the government House leader attempted to use, or misuse shall we say, the McGrath committee report of 1985 to justify what he was doing yesterday when he moved Motion No. 2.
For the benefit of those who do not know what we are debating and do not know what we just imposed closure on, and because I actually had some Liberal members ask me prior to the vote what it was they were voting on, let me just say that this is a motion that would enable the Speaker to select amendments which would come to a vote at report stage rather than having, as is the practice that has developed, all the amendments that are submitted by members put to a vote.
Motion No. 2, which would have the effect of eliminating the strategy used both by the Bloc and the Reform in the last parliament, is a motion which comes forward by itself without any other parliamentary reform and is a measure that is designed to address only the government's concerns in this regard. It is one of the reasons why I find it so offensive. It is not parliamentary reform when only the concerns of the government are addressed.
Motion No. 2 would correct a problem that the government sees as a problem, and a problem that I think we all see as a problem. However, the problem is that this is not the only problem and it cannot be solved all by itself without creating a whole lot of other problems.
Let me just quote from the McGrath committee. The government House leader referenced the fact that I am the only surviving member in the House of that special committee on reform of the House of Commons, the only one left on the parliamentary reform island. It says this on page 38 of the McGrath report:
We believe that the report stage is not used constructively. The report stage was introduced into the legislative process as part of the procedural reforms implemented in 1968. One of the results of those reforms was the reference of the majority of bills to standing committees following second reading. The report stage was designed to provide opportunities to members not involved in the committee stage of a bill to propose amendments when the committee reported the bill back to the House. Thus, an MP that was not a member of the committee dealing with the bill would not be deprived of the right to propose amendments. It was also designed to enable the government to introduce last-minute technical amendments. It was not envisioned, however, that the report stage should provide a means of reopening the entire committee proceedings.
So far so good. I would say the government and the opposition are literally and metaphorically on the same page here when it comes to report stage, but then the committee report goes on to say:
The practice of using the report stage as an obstructive tactic—
This is something which the government objects to and has now moved to address as a result of the report stage becoming an even more obstructive tactic than it was when the McGrath committee reported, because when the McGrath committee reported we had not had the experience of hundreds and hundreds, or indeed thousands, of amendments being moved. Rather, we had only experienced report stage with perhaps 150 to 200 amendments.
Going back to the report:
—has developed because of the frustration of the opposition parties with the manner in which controversial bills are frequently dealt with at the committee stage. The report stage has become, in the words of one member, a vehicle for vengeance, a method of retaliation against what is seen as a stubborn refusal by government to make any concessions to opposition views when amendments are proposed in committee.
The recommendations we propose regarding the report stage should be seen in the overall context of reform of the legislative process.
There are the key words: the recommendations we propose. They went on to propose something like what the government House leader has put before the House, saying that the recommendations
should be seen in the overall context of reform of the legislative process.
However, what we have here is one recommendation, isolated from the overall legislative context the McGrath committee talked about, and proposed as a measure adequate in and of itself.
My argument today with the government is that this is totally out of keeping with the recommendations of the McGrath report, because what was the overall context of reform of the legislative process that we find in this report and in the context of which the McGrath committee said it would be okay for the Speaker to resume the power of selecting amendments for voting at report stage? The context was part of an overall package of parliamentary reform in which the committee process, particularly that process having to do with dealing with legislation, was to be de-partisanized as much as possible.
In fact, legislation would not go to standing committees at all. Legislation would go to special legislative committees which were to be chaired by chairpersons who were selected from a panel of chairpersons selected from all parties. We actually tried that for a while. That system was in place here for a number of years and a number of opposition members developed good reputations as good and fair chairs of committees.
It was that context of sending legislation off to committees that would be chaired in some cases by opposition members, but in all cases by people selected because of their known reputation for fairness. That is why they were selected to be chairs of these special legislative committees, instead of having been selected as standing committee chairs often are now, that is, because of their loyalty to the government.
These would be committees on which we would not have parliamentary secretaries acting as coaches to the government members, telling them what to do and playing the role of thought police and reporting back to the minister in case anyone had an independent thought. These were to be entirely different sorts of committees. They were to be committees that were seen as a departure from the very kind of system we now have and which we returned to at a certain point in the eighties as a result of the fact that the Mulroney government got tired of parliamentary reform and took back some of the reforms that it had been willing to try in the early years of its mandate.
The current prime minister suffers no such idealism, either early or late in his mandate. He is not even willing to give things a try. What we have here is an attempt by the government House leader to do exactly the wrong thing when it comes to parliamentary reform, to address only those things that are of concern to the government and to dress it up as if it is a concern of all parliamentarians.
Of course it is a concern of all parliamentarians that we should be reduced to the spectacle of voting throughout 24 hours or 48 hours. I do not think any of us felt good about that, either physically or in terms of how we thought the Canadian public viewed that particular exercise.
However, it remains the case that this does arise out of legitimate frustration on the part of the opposition, even though I did not agree with the Reform Party's position on Nisga'a and I did not agree with the Bloc Quebecois when it came to Bill C-20, the clarity bill. That is beside the point as far as I am concerned. The fact is that the government was not willing to permit the kind of debate that both these parties thought was appropriate to the significance of those particular issues.
I recall that when it came to Bill C-20, the clarity bill, the way in which the government conducted itself on that particular issue was particularly abhorrent. We not only suffered closure here in the House, but we suffered closure in committee. We were given only a couple of weeks to consider a tremendously significant piece of legislation with respect to how our country might some day be negotiated away, God forbid. Yet this was all supposed to happen within a very short time framework. Witnesses who should have been heard were not. Members of committee from the government side were openly lamenting the fact that they could not do their job properly.
It is in response to all this that from time to time the opposition decides it is going to use whatever procedural loopholes exist to wreak a certain kind of parliamentary and political vengeance on the government. It is not that effective. It is not something that yielded the Bloc a whole lot more votes in Quebec, as far as I can make out, in the election on November 27. Nor did it did lead to a breakthrough on the part of the reform-alliance party. These things do not have any great political virtue in the big picture.
However, here we are talking about parliamentary reform. We are talking about parliamentary culture. It is wrong for the government to insist that only its problems, only its frustrations with the current set-up, are the ones that must receive immediate attention. I am disappointed that the government House leader did not try to craft even a small package. It would not have had to cover the whole gamut of parliamentary reform and all the things that we could properly be considering if we were trying to put together the package on parliamentary reform. However, it could have addressed some of the concerns members of the opposition have, for instance, with respect to time allocation.
In the dying days of the last parliament there were discussions about creating some kind of mechanism whereby if the government wanted to move time allocation on a particular motion, at least the minister responsible for that piece of legislation would be answerable to the House for a couple of hours as to why it was so important that this legislation had to go through right away. That might have been one thing the government could have done. There are others.
One of the things we find is that in some respects not much has changed, because I am using the language of the McGrath committee of 16 years ago all over again. Significant legislation is not dealt with properly in the House. In fact, there seems to be a kind of inverse relationship. The more significant the legislation is, the less properly it is dealt with.
If legislation dealing with dog licences were in our jurisdiction, we would take all kinds of time with that. The legislation would be given to a committee which would take its time, call witnesses, hear from dogs, whatever. The committee would travel around the country. However, if it is something like the clarity bill or the Nisga'a agreement or the Canada pension plan reform, and the list goes on, if we have two days of debate, wow. Imagine two days of debate in parliament. We would have two days of debate on something significant, but four days of debate on something insignificant.
That is the record of the government. The more significant it is, the more the government wants to whisk it off, get it off the floor of the House of Commons, get it into committee and turn it over to the trained seals. The government will not be open and will not listen to amendments. Then it will bring back the legislation and expect the opposition to be in a good mood when we get to report stage.
We are not in a good mood by the time we get to report stage, if we have had time allocation on second reading and if we have had a committee process that has been time allocated itself, as it was with Bill C-20. We are not in a good mood by the time we get to report stage and we should not be. We have a right not to be because we do not feel that things have been dealt with properly. Sometimes we see the kind of tactics the government is moving now to address.
I am not against, in principle, the Chair having the power to select amendments. I never have been. I signed the McGrath report. I have cited other instances. On other occasions I have argued that the Speaker should have this power. I have also argued, Mr. Speaker, that you, the Chair, should have the power to do something about the abuses against parliament committed by the government, not just by the opposition. The Chair should have the power to refuse time allocations, if that time allocation comes at a time when there has not been sufficient debate.
If the motion had some balance to it, if it had given the Speaker discretion over government abuse, government tactics, government misuse of procedural loopholes, at the same time as it did the same for the opposition, then maybe members might have heard a different speech from me today. Instead we have this lopsided thing.
This along with electronic voting is supposed to be parliamentary reform. Close a major loophole for the opposition, bring in electronic voting as pursuant to what was promised in the throne speech and the government has its package. I hope that is not all there is to it. I have some feeling from the government House leader that that is not all there is to it. However, it would be hard to come to any other conclusion on the evidence at this point.
That is why the NDP is very much opposed to this particular motion and we hope others members of parliament are as well. Perhaps somewhere on the government side somebody will decide that he or she wants to make a speech in favour of balanced parliamentary reform instead of just defending this one-sided, unilateral, dictatorial, measure which has been introduced by the government House leader.