moved:
That a special committee of the House be appointed to consider and make recommendations on the modernization and improvement of the procedures of the House of Commons;
That the Members of the committee shall be the Deputy Speaker and the House Leaders of each of the officially recognized parties, provided that substitutions may be made from time to time, if required, in the manner provided for in Standing Order 114(2);
That, notwithstanding any Standing Order, the Chair of the committee shall be the Deputy Speaker and the Vice- Chairs shall be the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons and the House Leader of the Official Opposition;
That the committee shall have all of the powers granted to Standing Committees in Standing Order 108;
That the committee shall not adopt any report without the unanimous agreement of all the Members of the committee;
That the committee may recommend to the House texts of new or amended Standing Orders;
That the committee may make recommendations for changes to relevant statutes and, if it does so, such recommendations shall be deemed to have been made pursuant to an Order adopted pursuant to Standing Order 68(4); and
That the committee shall present its final report no later than Friday, June 1, 2001.
Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak today about government Motion No. 3. I will not read the motion now but, I will concentrate my time on talking about what I see as modernization of House rules.
I would like to begin my comments by outlining the parliamentary initiatives that have already taken place since November 2000, since the last election.
I will begin with measures that have recently been approved by the Board of Internal Economy. Funds for political parties represented in the House have been reallocated to take into account the new standings in the House following the last election. This provided an additional $900,000 in funds which would have otherwise lapsed for items such as party research, caucus services, whips' offices and so on.
Members office budgets have been increased by $20,000 per member of parliament to cover items such as additional staff salary expenses, office rents and so on.
The members of parliament housing allowance has been improved by $3,000 to cover higher accommodation costs that MPs face in the Ottawa housing market, which is of course very tight. Hon. members were having some difficulty making ends meet with the previous budget.
The motion before us today builds on these improvements and follows up on the commitment made in the Speech from the Throne to strengthen the institution of parliament.
I will mention two initiatives that have already been addressed, namely the resolution of the report stage issue just clarified before the House of Commons by Mr. Speaker, and the announcement I made together with the leader of the government in the other place some days ago about increasing the research capacity for the Library of Parliament by an amount of $986,000 per year. All of these are improvements to strengthen this institution.
Today's motion proposes to implement a commitment in the Speech from the Throne to improve the rules of the House of Commons. The terms of the modernization committee are set in the motion that was read by Your Honour moments ago.
The Chair and hon. members will have noticed that this committee will only report on items where we have unanimous agreement. In other words, where we agree there will be a change. Where we do not, it will be the end of the discussion. That is an excellent formula. It was not one that I thought of myself. I give credit to other hon. members with whom I have consulted. Members across the way proposed this formula for reporting. For that, I congratulate them.
I also want to thank all hon. members for accepting to put this motion before the House in the terms that we have today.
Finally, the committee will report no later than June 1 in order to enable the House to deal with the matter expeditiously.
I am one who believes we can only make large changes, if we achieve them they will be large changes, in the initial part of a parliament. After that it is simply too difficult to do so. As we get near an election it is effectively impossible to change the rules of parliament. I have been in enough parliaments to know that the older a parliament gets the more difficult it is to modernize the institution. Therefore, these changes must be undertaken at the beginning of parliament.
I and other members of the proposed modernization committee will be interested in what members of the House have to say on the proposed changes. From my part, I would be willing to support a further debate in the House on an evening. As a matter of fact, all House leaders have already been consulted on this and have informally agreed to do just that.
As members will know from experience, the House of Commons has had five political parties since 1997. Some members may recall that the so-called pundits of parliament in 1997 alleged that the House would not be able to function at all. They called it the pizza parliament, the House divided, divided into several parties. They said it would be chaotic and unproductive. They have been wrong, thanks in large measure, to the co-operation that I have received from House leaders on all sides of the House, through the excellent chairmanship of this institution, through the excellent staff supporting us and, it is never said around here, largely through the good and constructive behaviour of members of parliament on all sides of the House.
The House has worked well in the last two elections. I submit that we have made dozens and dozens of changes to the standing orders, proof that the House simply could not function under five parties.
There were not provisions for five parties when I became the government leader in the House in 1997. We all had to sit down, which we did, and we made the changes necessary to reflect existing conditions in the House.
At the risk of quoting myself in my first meeting with my opposition counterparts in 1997, I told them that we had been elected to make parliament work and that nobody had been elected to make parliament not work. I am glad to say that I truly believe that is the attitude they all took.
That is one of the reasons a modernization committee, which includes House leaders of all parties as well as the Deputy Speaker, has good prospects for agreeing to further improvements to House rules. Of course, ultimately everyone has a veto if anything is proposed that they do not like. A modernization committee of House rules will be successful because all House leaders have worked closely with their caucuses and they all have excellent records of achievement.
I have already met with interested members of the government caucus, and I intend to do so again throughout the modernization committee's mandate between now and June.
To review this, I would like to have another debate like this a few weeks hence in the House as members gather their thoughts on the subject. I would also like to have another meeting with my own caucus colleagues, plus of course all the informal meetings we have with one another around here.
Another reason I am confident about the committee is that it draws on the very successful work of a very similar committee, practically identical as a matter of fact, in the United Kingdom.
The official opposition leader and I were privileged to appear before what they call the U.K. modernization committee earlier this year. We both testified before that committee. We were impressed by the U.K. committee's organization and by the quality of its work. I hope we are equally successful in this House.
Let me identify and offer for comment some changes I would like to see. Perhaps some members will argue that many of the things I am about to suggest would be more beneficial for the government, although not everything I say will do that. Everyone should enter the debate with an open mind and enumerate things that they think will work better for them and hopefully for the other side of the House. As we sit together, after listening to several hours of contributions from members, we should be able to improve the rules.
Let me give the House a few ideas to start. First, we have at present a committee room with television facilities. I understand that we have the equipment and facilities ready for a second one. Why not have another room on Parliament Hill fully available with television facilities for the benefit of members of parliamentary committees who want to avail themselves of it? With two such committee rooms and proper scheduling, I am quite confident that virtually any committee that wants to have its proceedings televised will be able to do so.
Second, why can we not have greater use of committee teleconferencing? Every time we have committee teleconferencing now, the committee must come and ask the House to do it. I do not believe that is necessary. In 2001, with the excellent committee chairs and vice-chairs that we have, committees should be able to decide whether they want to teleconference with witnesses throughout Canada.
Canada is the second largest country in the world and the most technologically advanced country in the world, if I can brag a bit. There is no reason we cannot make it easier for Canadians to have video teleconferencing and to testify before parliamentary committees. It would enable committees to work better.
Let me touch a bit on the estimate process. In 1993 the government announced it wanted to work with members of parliament to improve the estimate process. In addition to the estimates we now have a provision whereby we identify the propose future years expenditures. Together with my colleague the President of the Treasury Board, I would improve on future years expenditures to ensure more information is made available to members of parliament. Hopefully, then, greater use would be made of it by hon. members.
I would now like to turn to interparliamentary relations, which are very important. We have close relationships, of course, with the parliamentary associations of a number of countries, and I encourage all hon. members be involved with these associations.
I for one believe we should never have to apologize for our relationships with other countries. If this means being criticized occasionally by the media for flying off to some other country, that is too bad. It goes with the territory. We live in a country that depends on international trade, that depends on international relations, a country that believes in multilateralism, so let us then participate in interparliamentary relations with other countries.
It is high time as well for us to think of entering into interparliamentary relations with the provinces, something not much developed in the past. Why are there no interparliamentary relations between Ottawa and Quebec City, between Ottawa and Toronto, between Ottawa and the other provinces? One of my party's backbenchers made that suggestion to me a few days ago, and I thank him for it.
I will talk about changing some of the rules of the House.
The Leader of the Official Opposition in the House proposed that candidates for the position of House of Commons' Speaker at the start of a session have a chance to speak before the House prior to a vote. Why not? I would be prepared to develop a similar idea, which was suggested by the leaders of the opposition in the House.
Another suggestion, this time is one of my own. We have Standing Order 57, called closure or time allocation motion. To date we have had to vote at 11 p.m. under this standing order. It is outdated and a holdover from when parliament sat until 11 p.m. every evening. It is not modern. It does not reflect the fact that the committees sit early in the morning. It should be modernized, as we did at report stage not long ago.
Why not say 8 p.m., 8.30 p.m., 10 p.m., but definitely not 11 p.m., the present time. It is much too late and does not serve any purpose. The members are not productive at that hour and it does not improve the quality of the debate to sit until 11 p.m., when members have been here since 7 a.m.
I will talk briefly about concurrence motions for committee reports. We could consider restricting committee report concurrence motions. Right now they are moved in a rather haphazard way and do not seem to do very much. Why not have a measure to restrict concurrence motions until after the government has responded to a committee report? How can we concur in a report if we have asked the government to respond to it? If we concur in it there is no need for the response. There is a contradiction in the rule which needs to be clarified.
Sometimes an hon. member will ask for concurrence in a committee report when the committee itself never asked that the report be concurred in. That is another contradiction that needs to be modernized.
With regard to committees, just so that members do not think I want all this to be to the advantage of the government, we have right now a provision where the government has 150 days to respond to a committee report. That is too long. Some 150 days later no one here even remembers what the original committee report was about. I therefore propose to shorten that.
I should like to offer the following thought. Why not make it 120 days or 75 sitting days, whichever is less, because it could sometimes cover the summer period in which we do not sit for many months? By having the shorter of the two provisions we would reduce the time for responding by as much as one-third.
Why not make routine procedural committee concurrences votable but not debatable? I am referring to such issues as committee travel. If a committee wants to travel to hear witnesses in British Columbia, Newfoundland or anywhere else, right now we virtually need unanimous consent of the House. That is not reasonable and it is not modern. Why can we not have a measure where we could vote on it?
If we need a higher threshold than a simple majority we could use a reverse vote, such as the measure we have for extending hours where 20 or 25 or whatever number of members can rise and prevent it if they want.
Right now effectively any one member has the ability to stop a committee from doing its work if it must go outside Ottawa to hear witnesses. We can modernize that. I have offered two or three different formulas.
I will talk about opposition day motions. I notice the Leader of the Opposition is with us. I invite him, and others of course, to think about the following because it affects the official opposition more than anyone else. It affects all oppositions parties, albeit to a lesser degree.
Why not examine whether the mover should be able to split the time on an opposition motion and produce an amendment that makes the motion unamendable? That was started by way of a loophole in 1994. It did not exist before that. I do not believe it advances debate. We used to be able to amend a motion over here and make it acceptable to a greater number of members and thereby pass it. It is very difficult to do that now.
Another thing is the notice provision. Right now it is 6 p.m. Hon. members want us all to have an intelligent debate on important issues facing the nation, yet we are informed at 5.45 p.m. that we must discuss the future of agriculture in Canada or the future of criminal justice or the future of anything else. We then have about 12 hours to get the entire bureaucracy and the government ministers and everyone else organized to respond to issues so important to the nation.
If we are serious about dealing with issues that way, hopefully we could back up that time and make it, say, 10 o'clock in the morning. Whenever the House meets in the morning it could be tabled at exactly that time so that all members would know at once and could prepare to respond on the following day. These are just ideas, but they could advance debate.
I will introduce a few more. We could update the procedures for reinstating government bills in a new session. We do not have that now. We did adopt it for private members' bills. It was an initiative by the former House leader of the then Reform Party. However we did not do it for government bills at the time. I think it should be the same for both cases.
We also need to address the issue of programming the work at committee to ensure that committees are able to function better. The referral of estimates from the House to committee is a votable motion right now. It does not do anything. If we did not vote for it, it presumably would mean that we would deal with the estimates on the floor of the House, as if we could do that. It is left over from a bygone era.
Why not look at the time for the leadoff speeches? Is it the modern way of doing it?
Right now we have a curious situation in the parliamentary calendar. We have one week off in March, which means most members do not have March break at the same time as their families. If we came back one week earlier and took two weeks off in March, most provinces would probably coincide with it three years out of four, or something like that. What would be wrong with that? We would not lose any House time; it would make things work better.
With respect to deferring the votes, we defer them now until usually the end of government orders.
Why do we not have votes at exactly 3 o'clock on Tuesdays when most members are already here? We could add whatever time is lost, perhaps 10 or 15 minutes, to the end of the day. As all members would already be here, the whips could just walk in. At the end of the day, members could do everything else that they have to do when the House adjourns. If members had committees or other business to attend to, they would then not need to return to the House at the end of the day to vote.
Why not formalize the procedure whereby whips supply votes for their colleagues in the House? Again, it requires unanimous consent within a party, but we could formalize that procedure.
Hon. colleagues on the other side of the House have looked at having a mini question period immediately before the government House leader, or any other minister for that matter but generally speaking it is I who does it, invokes time allocation. This could be a 10 minute period where members could ask the government to explain its decision to invoke time allocation. In the mix of all that, I do not object to doing that. It is accountability.
It has been suggested by the opposition House leader that the appointment of the Clerk of the House could be subject to a vote in the House. I would not object to that. Right now it is a government appointment made under my recommendation.
With regard to question period, the British house has thematic question periods three days a week: Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. It would be a radical change around here, but we could at least try a thematic question period one day a week, perhaps on Fridays. Members from both sides of the House could reduce their numbers, if they wanted to. We could have differing themes each Friday, such as industry, treasury board, finance and so on. The themes would always be designated by the opposition in a way similar to the designation of opposition days and with the same apportionment for political parties. Each party would be allowed to choose a theme. It is an idea that I am willing to discuss with colleagues.
A second chamber has been proposed for discussing other issues. Australia and the United Kingdom have done that. Australia's is called the main committee and the United Kingdom's is called Westminster hall. They both deal with local and private members' issues. They have adjournment debates that are similar to the ones we have at the end of the day, except that they do not necessarily require a question to have been raised previously. They only require a notice to be put on the order paper. Their members can discuss issues important to their constituents but perhaps not always important enough to make it to the national agenda. It is important for us as local members to be able to do that.
As for private members' business, the committee could examine the conclusions of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs on the subject. At present, members of parliament wonder which items should be votable and non-votable.
Some feel that every item from private members' business should be a votable item, while others disagree. If we make them votable, that will mean that fewer members will see their particular items come before the House, of course, because votable items require longer debates than non-votable ones.
I would like the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs to provide advice to us. We could then refer the issue to the modernization committee for further review.
I have given a few ideas to kick-start the debate in the House. No, I have not talked about the constitutional convention of supply. No, I have not reformed the Senate today. No, I have not rewritten the constitution in the last 20 minutes. I am not proposing to and I never said that I would. What constitutes confidence will not be discussed here by me. Others can, if they so choose, but that is a constitutional issue and has nothing to do with the rules of the House. That is outside the parameters of what is here.
I have kept my remarks to what I think will be constructive in starting the debate on improving how this institution works. I hope all hon. members will do the same during the rest of this day. In the next few minutes I will probably have to leave the Chamber for a few minutes, but I intend to be here for several hours later this day to listen to the contributions from all honourable members on this subject.
I am looking forward to the work of the committee. I am looking forward to a second debate a few weeks hence in the House. I am looking forward to meeting with my own caucus colleagues. If caucus colleagues of other parties would want me to listen to their ideas, I would make myself available to do that too.
I hope to be able to contribute something between now and June 1, along with everyone else, to make this place work better. That being said, the House is not hopelessly defective. It is a grand institution. It works well but it can work better. I ask all colleagues to work together with me so that we can contribute to making this great institution even better than it already is.