Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to participate in the debate. I hope that when students of parliament look back on this day, or look back on the committee that we are striking today, they will see it as the beginning of a process which went some way toward reforming parliament in the way that so many of us want parliament to be reformed.
I deliberately used the word reform, even though I know the official name of the committee is the committee to modernize parliament. This is a conceptual concession that we all made to the government House leader because he would rather talk about modernizing the House of Commons than reforming it. I would rather talk about reforming it than modernizing it.
One of the things that will be critical to the work of the committee is the tension between modernization and reformation. Modernization can have its own merits. There are things that we can do more efficiently. There are things that we can change to make our lives around here less awkward or irritating, but reform of the House of Commons is another matter.
When I talk about the reform of the House of Commons, I am not just talking about tinkering with the standing orders in order to make things more efficient. I and I think a lot of members of parliament are talking about redistributing power within the parliamentary system and within the parliamentary culture.
Any parliamentary reform worthy of its name will have as its object and as its result the redistribution of power so that the powerlessness which so many members of parliament feel, both individually and collectively, will be adequately addressed. If the committee fails to do that it will have failed miserably. It may indeed fail totally because from where I sit and given the fact that unanimous consent will be required for anything to come forward from the committee, if there is not some redistribution of power then there will not be any committee report.
There is only so much power one can redistribute by changing the standing orders in any event. It will not be that there is some big change we can make in this place by changing the standing orders, but we can do a number of things both symbolically and practically to give members of parliament, as individuals on committees, collectively as committees, and individually and collectively in the House of Commons, a bit more freedom, a bit more distance from the influences which now often prevent them from acting with the freedom many of their voters would like them to exercise and which many members of parliament would like to exercise themselves.
The first thing we need to do is to change our view of delay. It seems to me we have been caught up in kind of a very modern notion that everything should happen quickly and efficiently. One of the things we have missed in all this is the importance of delay.
Delay is not just obstruction. Delay is not just being miserable or partisan. When something important is being done by the government, delay is an important aspect of democracy so that things can be dragged on in parliament, to use the pejorative. Things drag on here until such time as the opposition, the media and others can help Canadians to know what is going on here, what the government is about to do, what the government is up to, so that they can then respond and give some feedback. At a certain point the opposition has to make judgments about whether the task has been achieved or whether it is now overachieved and delay is counterproductive.
All those kinds of judgments were operative when I got here in many respects. They have been removed from this place. If something is important, boom, we have time allocation within a day or two. Then it is off to committee instead of letting the debate go on, having the debate noticed by the media because it is not always noticed right away, and playing a kind of parliamentary chicken with public opinion. That has disappeared. We have time allocation far too often and far too easily without any thought being given to what it is doing to our parliamentary culture.
On behalf of the NDP I will certainly be interested in a number of ways in which we could restrict the use of time allocation or make its use more beneficial to parliament. We could give the Speaker more authority. We could have a system whereby time allocation motions would have to be debated, as they were in the past. We could have some special responsibility that the government would have to exercise by having a minister explain for 30 minutes, an hour or something why the government wanted to move time allocation. There should be some price to be paid by the government for use and particularly overuse of time allocation.
By was of reaffirming the role of parliament and the role of members of parliament, we need to restore the Chamber to its proper place in the business of the nation. In recent days a number of questions of privilege and points of order have been raised having to do with the fact that so much takes place outside the House, that the media are given special privileges in terms of knowing about things before the House is notified, before documents or legislation is revealed in the House.
We need to go back to a time when the House was used more often for ministerial statements and was place where announcements were made, where policy was announced.
That happened in my parliamentary lifetime. It did not happen enough. This is an old debate, but there was a time when ministers made more ministerial statements than they do now and the opposition was able to respond. The media and others came to the House to find out what would happen on a particular issue, for example, an announcement by the minister of external affairs.
I say that with due respect to my colleague on my left who is now the leader of the Conservative Party. When he was the minister of external affairs I remember him making these ministerial statements in the House because I was his critic at that time and I remember responding to them. That does not happen very often any more and we need to have more of that.
That is related to another issue which perhaps the committee cannot completely remedy on its own by just amending the standing orders: the fact that this is one of the few parliaments in the world where treaties are not ratified in any kind of mandatory or regular way.
Canada is the only NATO country that had no debate on changes to the NATO treaty which expanded NATO to include three other countries. All other NATO countries, 14 out of 15, had debates in their national parliaments, but in Canada it was by order in council and that was it. That is not good enough.
We need to make this place a place where important decisions are taken and ratified. These sorts of take note debates that we have do not cut it. We will have one on the free trade agreement of the Americas next week. We will debate it without the text. We do not even know what we are debating. We could not get the government to promise when there actually is an agreement, and hopefully there will not be, that it will be debated and ratified in the House. We need to restore the place of the House of Commons in the life of the nation.
We also need to improve the standing committees of the House. Here is where we can begin to chip away at the false culture of confidence which the government and its members hide behind. They were doing it the other day when they were giving explanations for why they did not vote for the opposition day motion with respect to agriculture.
I say, for heaven's sake, the McGrath committee recommended in 1985 that all language of confidence be taken out of the standing orders because it used to be there with respect to opposition day motions, and it was taken out. It was taken out 15 years ago. Yet 15 years later we still have government members saying that they would love to vote for a motion but they cannot because it is a matter of confidence. That is procedural BS.
There is nothing in the standing orders that prohibits any government member from voting for any opposition day motion. The only thing that prevents them is the political culture which exists within their own party and the political culture which exists within the larger political culture. People do not want to be blackballed. They do not want to put themselves in a position of being disciplined or being set aside in terms of career or whatever.
We could change the culture of confidence or the convention of confidence, if we want to call it that. We could change it tomorrow. If 25 members of the Liberal Party rose and voted against the government on any given piece of legislation or opposition day motion, as long as it was not a budget or a throne speech debate, we would have the Prime Minister in here the next day explaining parliamentary freedom.
He would be explaining about how it was not a motion of confidence, how they were to move a motion of confidence later that afternoon and how the bill that was defeated would have to be revisited at another time or be redrafted. This happens in other parliaments. It happened in this parliament years and years ago. There was a very good article in the newspaper today by Jack McLeod who pointed out that this used to happen with some regularity a long time ago in this parliament.
We need to return to the kind of culture where prime ministers do not regard each and every jot or tittle and piece of legislation as critical to their parliamentary or political egos. The same goes for opposition leaders. If we do not do that we will not be addressing what the Canadian people find inadequate about this place.
We could start in committee. We could start by going back to the recommendations in the McGrath committee and saying that when people are appointed to committee they are appointed for the duration of a session or perhaps the whole parliament.
Let us start with a session. They could not be removed by their party whip no matter how they voted. No matter how smart or stupid or independent or whatever they were, they could not be removed. They would have the power to replace themselves if they were absent, but there would be no more parliamentary goon squads. There would be no more pulling all government members off committees and putting in a bunch of people who do not know what they are doing and are just doing what the parliamentary secretary gave them the nod to do.
That brings me to another matter: taking parliamentary secretaries off committees. That was recommended by the McGrath committee. It was tried for a while and then dropped because governments did not like it.
Another is non-partisan secret ballot election of chairs, not just government members for chairs but opposition members. We all know who are the good chairpersons in parliament. Why can we not elect those people to chair our committees? Why can we not elect those people to make committees work the way people want committees to work, instead of having the chairmanship of committees sometimes regarded as a perk or a step on the way up the government ladder?
That is not to say we do not have good chairs of committees. I see the member for Davenport, who has always been an excellent chair, but I have been on committees with some real losers too, real losers who should never have chaired a committee no matter what kind of committee it was.
We could start with the committee process by giving individual members more freedom from their whips and by electing chairs at the beginning of the life of committees that have the respect of members of the committees.
When committee reports come to the House we need to show more respect for the work of the committees. I have seen far too many unanimous reports of committees absolutely ignored by government.
One report that comes to mind, which has always been a special irritant for me, was from the standing committee on transport which considered the VIA rail cuts of January 15, 1990, and came back with a unanimous recommendation to the House that it was a wrong and terrible thing to do. The Conservative government of the day, just so the Liberals do not think I spend all my time on them, ignored that unanimous recommendation of the committee headed by Mr. Pat Nowlan. I think I have said enough about committees for now.
We need to look at revising the standing orders to reflect the fact that we have five parties in the House. This is more of a caretaking thing, but it has been a number of years and we still have not done it.
For instance, we have a routine with respect to the first round of speeches. The standing order says what the first three speeches will be. That is there because when the standing order was written there were three parties. We now have five parties in parliament. Is it not about time we adjusted the standing order so that it now says five speeches because there are five parties? A parliament that is not capable of updating of its standing orders is hardly worth the name.
There are a number of other things having to do with amendments and subamendments on motions, having to do with the throne speech, the budget, et cetera, which do not make any provisions for the fourth and fifth parties to contribute by way of amendment. These things have to do with updating the reality of a five party parliament.
Perhaps we could so amend the standing orders that we would not have to change them to reflect the number of parties. I am sure there is language that would allow the standing orders to be interpreted from parliament to parliament, without having to be changed, to give equality to all parties in respect of the things I have mentioned.
Those are just a few things. We will bring many more things to the committee process. I am very hopeful this will be the beginning of something that in retrospect will be regarded as a bit of a breakthrough, but I also remain skeptical.
I hope the government House leader will try to look at the issue a little deeper than he did today in his remarks. Most of what he had to say was directed toward making this place more efficient, more modern and more convenient for members. He talked about televising committees and that sort of thing.
We will look at that sort of thing, but the quality of democracy does not ride on whether we televise committees. The quality of democracy in this place rides on the quality of what we are televising, not on the fact that we are televising it. Of course it is a moot point whether the broadcasting of committees will increase the quality of what goes on in them or whether it will reproduce the kind of silliness we see here in question period when people are looking for the clip.
Much damage has been done to democracy in the country by looking for the ever diminishing clip on the national news. Do we want to reproduce that in committee, or do we want to think very hard about changing our committee structure and our committee culture first and then maybe having something that would be more worth broadcasting?
On a matter that is critical to our discussion here the government House leader said he did not want to talk about the matter of confidence. He did say he was open to other suggestions, which is fair enough. Nothing he raised would in any way call into question the way the confidence convention is interpreted on that side of the House or, for that matter, interpreted generally sometimes. He said it was a constitutional question, so he did not want to get into it.
I do not think it is a constitutional question. The only thing that is constitutional is that the government must have the confidence of the House. That is a constitutional matter, which is fair enough, but within that constitutional stipulation there is all kinds of room for interpretation and all kinds of precedent because ultimately, 99 times out of 100, the matter of confidence is a political matter, not a constitutional matter. It is a political matter that can be changed by political agreement and political action. If this committee can do anything to change that it will have done Canada a great service. That will certainly be one of the things I will be looking for.