Mr. Speaker, thank you for your forbearance in the chair. I believe I am the last sheet to be hung here. I commend you. I suspect you will be chair of the committee contemplated in the motion and I gather the deputy clerk is slated to be clerk as well. Your presence late this evening indicates your commitment to this process.
I am also pleased to have seen the general quality of the debate and the spontaneity of most of the interventions contra the normal practice of too many members reading scripted speeches. Let me just say as a parenthetical remark that one parliamentary reform we ought to consider is the adoption of the rule of the Westminster mother parliament prohibiting verbatim reference to scripts for speech making in the House and allowing members to speak from their minds and not those of bureaucrats or their staff.
I wish to say at the outset that one of the reasons I chose to run, to represent my constituents and to serve in this place, for which I have enormous respect as something of an amateur student of parliamentary history, is precisely my great concern about the deterioration of democracy in Canada and the vitality of this institution.
There has been much commented on today but scholars such as Donald Savoie, a leading political scientist at the University of Moncton, three years ago published a book called Governing from the Centre: the Concentration of Power in Canadian Politics in which he quoted an anonymous member of this current government's cabinet as saying that the cabinet was nothing more than a focus group for the Prime Minister's Office.
He said that the House of Commons was nothing more than a talking shop. In a sense he confirmed what we have always known, what the late Right Hon. Pierre Elliott Trudeau said, that members of parliament are nobodies 50 feet off the Hill. I suspect that many people would agree that members of parliament outside the executive branch are essentially nobodies on the Hill today.
For that reason I want to very pointedly argue that this has led to a kind of cynicism about this institution and, as my colleague before said, political institutions in general. Cynicism is a very corrosive thing when applied to institutions in a political culture that require trust and active involvement on the part of the citizenry.
As long as people, voters, taxpayers and citizens regard this institution as a futile talking shop, a de facto electoral college for the executive branch, their faith in democracy and democratic institutions will be undermined and we will see the consequences of that.
In other words, we cannot take democracy for granted. It is a system that has evolved. This constitutional monarchy, with a democratic legislature and a representative legislature, is a system that has evolved over centuries of struggle. It did not arrive overnight.
There is nothing to guarantee that it will exist in perpetuity. Neither a written constitution nor a judiciary filled with good intentions will preserve the democratic spirit of this constitutional monarchy. All that will guarantee that in perpetuity is the will of the citizenry, and we corrode that with the kind of centralization of power which exists today.
In an historical perspective, for centuries the commoners in this tradition fought the crown to obtain the power to represent their interests, particularly the power of the purse. Over centuries, from the 14th century right through to the 20th century, that power was devolved from the crown into the legislature, into the Commons.
In the latter half of the last century in this parliament we have seen the delineation between the crown and the legislature blurred. Essentially the ancient power and prerogatives of the medieval crown which were exercised with great authoritarian zeal in British monarchies have now been usurped by the prime minister. The prime minister, who acts in the name of the crown, has become a modern monarch for all intents and purposes.
For that reason I am very concerned about the terms of reference and the title of this committee which calls for recommendations on the modernization and improvement of the procedures of the House of Commons.
Virtually all changes in the standing orders over the years which have diminished the prerogatives and powers of individual members and the opposition parties to delay bills, to force further consideration of them, to add amendments, have occurred in the name of modernization, efficiency and improvement.
The one mention in the throne speech of modernizing parliamentary practice was electronic voting. What I heard was the government whip, a position with which you, Mr. Speaker, have some familiarity, wanting to reduce the time it takes for members to vote so as to remove from the opposition parties one of the few opportunities they yet have to filibuster government bills to which they are strenuously opposed, a tactic which has been employed by this and other opposition parties.
With electronic voting, a modernization, an efficiency measure, we would take less time to vote. That is precisely the problem. Time is one of the very few levers at the disposal of the opposition to slow down the otherwise unrestrained juggernaut of government legislation.
I send out a very strong caution to my colleagues at the outset of this committee. We do not need to modernize this place. We need to rediscover the ancient prerogatives which reside in this place that we have allowed to be diminished by the executive branch amending the standing orders year after year, decade after decade, and by convention centralizing power in the hands of the executive at the expense of this legislature.
We do not need to modernize this place. We need to reform it, and reform it in a radical way. The Latin root of radical is actually roots. We need to go back to our roots. Radical reform means going back to our history, and that means understanding that we are individual actors, individual moral actors in this place as legislators, and not cogs in some wheel created by the executive branch.
One of the principal ways we could do this is by ending the absurd charade of the confidence convention. I heard the government House leader say that it would require an amendment to the constitution. That is absolute nonsense.
The topical issue even in today's National Post by professor emeritus of political science Jack McLeod, says:
It is a mistake to believe the power of party discipline is carved in constitutional stone. Parties were not mentioned in the original BNA Act of 1867. For that matter, neither was the nature of the Cabinet, the powers of the prime minister, or in fact the basic principle of responsible government.
There is absolutely no reason why the government could not, as previous governments have in the past 20 years, regard motions or bills defeated as simply motions and bills defeated, and not as measures of confidence in the government. It is a ruse by which the whip maintains otherwise total control of his or her caucus and it is an aberration amongst the parliamentary forms of government, our sister parliaments in the Commonwealth. Even our mother parliament allows far greater latitude in freedom of voting than we do in this place.
My colleagues and the official opposition have outlined a whole series of potential reforms, 21 to be precise. I will not be exhaustive in listing all those, except to say that the power of the free vote would be the most significant to wield.
In closing, I also hope that the special committee will not limit its purview so narrowly as to preclude consideration of broader democratic reforms which would require the involvement of the House, such as the adoption of recall measures, citizen initiated referenda measures and electoral reform, so that we could have a lower house that would actually reflect the plurality and diversity of political views in the country.
If we seize this opportunity with courage, we may actually be able to see a revival of the democratic spirit in this place. That is my hope. Unfortunately, based on history, that is not my expectation.