Mr. Speaker, the purpose of the debate on this motion is very specific, and that is what we must look at.
After everything that has been heard in the House recently, I think we have reached the point where the record really needs to be set straight. We must really dot the i 's and cross the t 's,because the impression is being given that the House, at some point, is being used by certain people not to improve the work of MPs in the House or in parliamentary committees, but to prevent debate.
I interpret this as the result of the fact that certain people often talk just to hear themselves speak, but no attempt is made to let others say how they think a bill could be improved. These people take advantage of a loophole in the Standing Orders to block debate.
I think that the House should allow all members to express their views in order to improve a bill.
The problem right now is that members keep accusing the government of wanting to gag the House, but there is no doubt in my mind that the House is run not by the government but by a Speaker elected by all members of the House.
The present government House leader, the leader of the government party and the leader of the MPs who are in the majority in this House, speaks on behalf of his members, as the leaders of all opposition parties in this House speak for theirs.
When the leader of the Liberal majority in this House rises and tables a motion, he does so on behalf of all members and not on behalf of the government, as there is a tendency to believe.
When ministers are in this House, they are answerable to the House. They are across the way from the members of the opposition, who can question them. It is not, however, the ministers of the government who run this House.
This House is, in fact, independent. It is run by a Speaker elected by all members of this House. There is, however, a standing order which establishes the framework of intervention for the entire deputation of this House.
We must ask ourselves: Is the House leader of the majority bringing in a motion to amend the Standing Orders of the House of Commons? No sooner asked than answered, and the answer is no.
The purpose of the motion is not to amend the Standing Orders of the House of Commons. It is to enable the Speaker to use the power vested in him, specifically to make a choice of motions, which has not been done for some time, a number of years, nearly thirty in fact, in the name of tradition.
The motion we are debating today has a purpose. It is not to contest, not to speak of closure and not to say that the House leader of the party with the majority wants to amend the standing orders. There is a reason this motion was introduced. The role of an MP is to take part in a debate, to improve a bill. We have established a procedure in the House and in all legislative assemblies in the provinces and the different governments for the very purpose of enabling members to intervene, to debate a bill or a motion tabled in a House.
The procedure is as follows. A bill is introduced, sent to a committee, a standing committee or the appropriate committee considers the bills clause by clause, motions are made and then a vote is taken in committee. When the bill is brought back to the House at report stage, we should not try to do what is indirectly impossible, because the amendments are to be moved in committee. The amendments rejected in committee must not be introduced in the House as well at report stage. In other words, we cannot do indirectly what we are not entitled to do directly.
This is when the Speaker can intervene to choose to permit or reject motions, to group motions. When we see, because the House has been around for a number of decades, what is being done today with the legislation on young offenders, for instance, we get to the point where we say “Enough, already”.
We can talk about the 3,133 motions in amendment that were brought in, 400 of which, namely Motions Nos. 2,646 to 3,029, were aimed at changing the date of the coming into effect of the act. These motions were moved by 44 MPs. At some point, given my age and my experience, I tell myself that I do not want to spend my time, and that is not what I was sent to this place to do, voting all night long, night after night, on trivialities.
We can talk about the motions moved by former MP Jean-Paul Marchand, Motions Nos. 2,657 and 2,658, proposing different dates for the coming into effect of the same provision of the act.
This is an abuse of time. I could go on. There are about 100 motions on the duration of a provision of the act. That is how things went during that whole debate. When we reach report stage and motions are brought in that have already been rejected in committee, someone must put his foot down.
That is when the Speaker must use the discretionary power that was vested in him upon the recommendation of a committee which reviewed the Standing Orders of the House of Commons back in 1968.
Since then—there had probably not been any abuse at that time—things have slipped. The sole purpose of today's motion is to reconfirm the power of the Speaker of the House to select the motions that will be debated at report stage. What we are asking today is that the Speaker proceed as he was expected to when the current parliamentary procedure was adopted, some 32 years ago.
The purpose of the motion is not to gag the opposition or to change the rules of the House. It only seeks to support the application, by the Speaker, of a custom, a tradition or at least an amendment to the rules intended at the time to allow the Speaker to keep things under control, to prevent debates from getting out of hand and to avoid having motions dealing only with punctuation symbols such as commas, semicolons, exclamation marks, question marks and periods.
This is what this motion is all about. In addition, motions must seek to improve the bill or to amend it to make it easier to implement, and not merely to interfere with procedure. For these reasons, I will support the motion of the government House leader.