Madam Speaker, I will try to squeeze my remarks into the 20 minutes that are available to me. Let me see if I have it straight. We are gathered here to debate the right of the opposition in this case to force the entire House of Commons of Canada to spend hundreds of hours voting on important motions like changing a period to a comma.
If I understand what I am listening to, that is what we are doing right now. I have some sympathy for that debate. Some members may not know that I was the opposition house leader in the legislature of Manitoba. Certainly the member for Winnipeg North Centre knows this. I have great sympathy for the opposition and its need to have tools that allow it to force accountability.
To that extent I listen to the debate with some sense of concern. In every place, whether it is the legislature of Manitoba or this great chamber, there are two conversations that go on. There is the conversation that goes on here with the TV cameras turned on, with the lights on and with Hansard turned on to record all of our remarks, and then there is the conversation that takes place in the corridors, behind the curtains and in the coffee shops.
I do not know a member of any party who thinks it is a good idea for us to spend hundreds of hours standing and sitting to vote on frivolous motions. When we get away from the hot atmosphere here and the attempts to embarrass each other and all that kind of silly debate, I have not heard anyone who feels it is a productive use of our limited time to spend the time we do on issues of this sort.
I want to put some of this in context. I too worry about excessive use of time allocation. I too worry about the tools the government has available to drive legislation through without proper examination or proper debate. I too worry about a House where one side becomes so powerful that it need not take into consideration any other opinion.
There is legitimate concern that this parliament, like legislatures and parliaments around the world, has evolved into a tool that permits the government to do exactly that, to impose its will on parliament without having to give proper consideration of debate on the other side.
However to every action there is a reaction. Oppositions have resorted, in part because they have limited tools available, to these rather frivolous and extreme kinds of actions to make their case, to a point where it makes all of us look silly.
I heard one member earlier talk about the Nisga'a treaty tool in an attempt to give some dignity to the fact that we sat up here day and night for about 40 hours. I think that member's claim to fame was that he actually voted on every amendment because he could run in and out to the bathroom.
Before I get into some of the solutions that I think exist to this problem, let me try to provide a bit of a context and be quite serious about it. I spend a lot of time thinking about it, as I know other members of the House do. I have had very lengthy and, I think, fruitful conversations with the House leader for the New Democratic Party, who is one of the more experienced and distinguished members of the House. He has spent a lot of time here and is very thoughtful on these issues. I respect his advice.
The first question is how do we get here? I would argue that there are whole bunch of forces at play. One of them is that the speed of life, the speed of business, the speed of change, the need for decision, everything in the external world is moving faster.
Bill Gates, in his most recent book, describes the decade that we are now in as the decade of velocity, the decade in which the major challenge to everyone will be to manage rapidity, the speed at which things have to happen. This just did not occur at the millennium. This increasing speed has been going on throughout our lifetime. It has been going on throughout history and has accelerated to a pace where changes take place within the context of one generation. They are intergenerational. They are multiple changes within a single generation.
As a result, there has been enormous pressure on the institutions of government to respond quickly to changing circumstances in the external world and to changing circumstances in the communities within which our citizens to whom we are accountable live.
Over time, slowly but sequentially and invidiously, the governing side of the House has adopted a series of tools that allow it to move its agenda forward faster and allow it to clear it quickly. It is worthy of recognition that this has taken away some time for thought. It has taken away some tools that the opposition had to force more debate and to slow down the speed with which something could happen.
I believe the debate on reform of this chamber is an important one. It is a debate that needs to go on now. However, I do separate it from this motion. One of the reasons I feel comfortable doing this is that we have commitments now. To talk about reform is not idle chatter. It is not a hopeful thought. It is in the Speech from the Throne.
In the Speech from the Throne, the government said it recognized there was an issue. In fact let me read it because I think it is important to focus on this part of it.
One of the things I admire a great deal about our current Prime Minister is this workmanlike, piece by piece, step by step approach to solving problems. There is no fancy banner waving. There is the problem and how we are going to find a solution. That is what I see here.
The throne speech states:
The institutions of Government will continue to be strengthened. Since 1993, the Government has taken a range of measures to enable members of Parliament to more effectively represent the views of their constituents.
In this new session of Parliament, the Government will make further proposals to improve procedures in the House and Senate. Among other measures, voting procedures will be modernized in the House of Commons and, to assist parliamentarians in carrying out their duties, the Government intends to increase the resources of the Library of Parliament to better serve the research needs of standing committees of the House and Senate.
It did not stop there. The next day the Prime Minister stood in the House and in his speech, his personal commitment to the House, he said:
Like any human institution, the House of Commons is not perfect. It can be strengthened. Over the years many changes have been made to improve parliament and more will be made to bring parliament into the 21st century.
The House leader is working with his colleagues from all parties on reforms that will make the House work even better for the benefit of all Canadians—
That is a commitment. That is not idle backroom chatter. I am satisfied with that.
The member for Winnipeg North Centre mentioned some of my feelings about this in her speech. She wondered how I could be defending this motion today. I am very comfortable defending this motion. I am tired of being part of a process that looks so foolish, so stupid and has common Canadians scratching their heads saying “What are you guys doing?” This is a bogus procedure. It is one that destroys good work. It wastes important time of which we have too little. I have no qualms at all about getting rid of it.
What is the tool we have chosen to moderate it? We did not say it cannot be done because report stage motions are an important tool. What we do in this motion is reaffirm power and authority already held by the Speaker. We do not give it to the government or to the government House leader. We give it to a colleague who has been elected by all members of the House and who has a majority support in the House.
That colleague is not charged under the motion simply to dismiss opposition motions. The Speaker, as the speaker in Westminster has done, is empowered to examine those motions. If the Speaker feels the government is being too harsh and too forceful in driving things through, he or she can allow all sorts of motions, or if it is felt they are frivolous, he or she may dismiss them.
It empowers one of the modern day democratic reforms. It was not that long ago when the House finally got itself together enough to take an individual who used to be an appointment of the government's side and said “No, we are going to give this person power independent of the government”. That is the position that the motion adds to.
I want to reflect a little on what may come now because I heard a couple of things. I could close my ears to the silliness which I thought was coming. Actually maybe that is a bad word to use. I will apologize for using that word. I do not mean to demean the comments of other members in that sense. Having been in opposition and having been forced to sometimes stand and criticize things I felt positively about, it is very hard at times to feel comfortable doing that. I realize members are trying to protect a principle of accountability. However, what they are trying to defend is something that is so frivolous. They have to be very hard in their hearts to do that.
I tried to pick that apart and hear some of the other things that were being said. There was a comment about the recent vote on the ethics counsellor. There is a saying that a friend of mine has on a poster on his office wall. It reads “For every complex problem there is a simple answer and it is wrong”.
That is the problem which arises when we approach changes in the House lightly. We can all see one little thing that we think is important and needs to be changed. We can all come up with an answer on how to change that one little thing that bothers us at this moment in time. That is not how the House got where it is today. That is not how the rules, the procedures, the precedents and all the things that allow us to work in the chamber have evolved. It takes time. It takes thought. It takes reflection.
This is the place in our country that manages power and authority in the lives of all of our citizens. This is the Chamber in this country that gives citizens their rights. This is an important debate which should be approached carefully and thoughtfully. It needs to be approached with the full involvement of all members of the House. However it has to work both ways. We all have to recognize the demands being imposed upon us externally. The House needs to modernize.
I would like to add another dimension to this issue. I will go back to Mr. Gates for a minute. Mr. Gates talks about the tremendous impact that new communication information technologies have had on the world. He calls it the 1980s, the decade of quality. As these new tools became more ubiquitous and more people used them and feedback loops were developed, people could begin to manage in real time the quality process that affected their business, or manufacturing, or service organization or whatever.
He calls the nineties the decade of re-engineering. As these tools got more robust and as the accumulation of data got stronger and the ability to strike knowledge from that data got stronger, suddenly we saw in very large organizations very similar changes. It was like a stepping down into flatter, faster organizations moving certain kinds of decisions out to the periphery of contact with customers and clients and drawing some kind of information into the centre to involve senior management more directly in decision making. These were radical but important changes. These were changes that increased service quality, product quality and lowered costs.
If I can take members back a step to that little paradigm I would ask them what the quality movement meant for government. It happened in the external community. Where are the quality circles, the service feedback and the client operation improvement systems in government? They do not exist.
What has re-engineering meant in government? God knows there have been enough consultants running around the country selling packages on re-engineering usually trying to bolt crude private sector models, which continuously fail, onto public institutions. Government is a fundamentally more complex organization than the largest business.
What is the restructuring, the re-engineering, the change that has taken place in government? As the world has speeded up and as this tremendous change has taken place in the external environment that affects the lives of everybody we serve, how has this institution changed? The answer is, it has not.
Re-engineering in government since the late eighties and up until now has meant privatization. It has meant separating those things that government delivers from government.
I was an advocate of it when I first came here. I chaired the transport committee when the ports were privatized. I bought all the arguments. I thought we could put them out there so they could be fast and responsive. They could deal with the community, respond to local conditions and all those wonderful service things. What were we really saying? We were saying that government was too slow, too stupid, too inept to be useful in the lives of Canadians.
That is the challenge to us. I am talking about every single person in the House. I am talking about this institution. I am talking about every single Canadian because this place affects every single Canadian. The challenge that confronts us is how we make the instruments of democracy more useful for everybody. That is the debate we are starting. I suspect it is a debate that is going to go on for a long time because it is a huge challenge in governments all around the world.
The problem I have is the attempt here to personalize this. This is the Prime Minister's issue. This is the House leader's issue. That is nonsense. This is an issue that every democratic government on this globe is struggling with and failing in right now.
There is a huge challenge, a much bigger challenge than anyone really fully comprehends yet. I am excited about it. Let us debate those changes.
Let us debate the ways in which we get adequate examination, accountability and control over the important instruments that affect the lives of Canadians. We should stop debating the importance of this entire House standing and sitting for 400 hours to change a comma. That is silly. We all know it is silly, so let us stop it and get on with what I believe will be the most important piece of work the House does in this decade.