Mr. Speaker, trying to fit my thoughts into 10 minutes will be a bit of a trick, so I hope members in the ensuing five minutes will help me clarify my thinking with some of their questions.
The House is everything that members in the debate today have said it is. It is an enormously important place in the life of the country and in the lives of Canadians. It is the place where citizens have a voice. It is the place where rights are decided and arbitrated. It is the place where power is balanced and mitigated. It is the place where authority is exercised on behalf of all Canadians.
I am quite excited about the debate and quite pleased we are headed down this road. Frankly, I like the device that has been chosen. I want to thank all House leaders for the vehicle they have created because I have a lot of respect for them. They have a lot of knowledge about this place and they are applying themselves to the task. I hope we will have opportunities for members to meet with the committee and to present ideas that are hard to fit into a 10 minute speech.
I will step back a bit from the specifics of some of the rule changes that have been discussed today. I will try to position the debate in a somewhat different context.
A friend recommended I spend time preparing for the debate by reading the annotated rules of the House. They are a fascinating read. Rules are normally not terribly interesting to read.
When the rules that govern this Chamber were first created in 1867 and they were trying to figure out how they worked, they brought in a clause that existed for a long time which said that if they did not have a rule to cover something then the rules of the mother of parliaments would apply.
As we read this we also see the evolution of our society. The Chamber is a reflection of what we are as Canadians. The rules were written before my province, Manitoba, existed as a province and had representation in the House, and before Alberta and Saskatchewan were formally provinces. The rules existed before the advent of the automobile, the airplane or the telephone, and certainly before the fax machine and the Internet.
Each time changes in the external community put pressure on this place and made changes to the environment that the citizens we represent live in, the House had to adapt. It has adapted, and tracing that adaptation is an interesting read.
The question I raise today, though, is whether we are at a point in time on which we will look back in 20 or 30 years and say it was a far more revolutionary period than perhaps we ever realized.
Canadians have some advantages. Some of the foundational research on communications, communication theory and communication policy has come out of the work of Canadians. One of my favourites was an economist by the name of Harold A. Innis who, during the last century, started writing about the economy of the country and was drawn into the question of the power of communication.
Innis wrote a book called The Bias of Communication . He delivered a lecture in 1947 to the Royal Society of Canada regarding his research. He started the lecture by saying:
I have attempted to suggest that western civilization has been profoundly influenced by communication and that marked changes in communications have had important implications.
What Harold Innis was saying, if I can translate it to the year 2001, is that the Internet changes everything. His research dated to the early days of clay and cuneiform and traced how, as successive civilizations acquired the ability to assemble information and extract knowledge from it, the ruling classes were able to monopolize the information. Then a new technology would come along and disturb the system and a new power structure or a new elite would emerge.
Historically these things have happened in dramatic fashion through wars and revolutions, but also in other ways. The rise of the modern democracy was built largely around the printing press and the availability of information, which has enabled people to develop the intellectual tools and knowledge necessary to participate in the management of their country.
When we were concerned in the 1970s about dictatorships in Central and South America, there was a fellow who said to send them books instead of guns because an educated populace demands a democratic solution.
Why are we here today feeling that this instrument of democracy no longer functions, when Canada has an educated populace? Canadians are literate, well read and engaged with their government. Why are we concerned about a loss of credibility of this place?
I will give another reference, an American reference. It is from a fellow by the name of Jerry Mechling who said the same concern is being raised in democracies around the world. It is not just a Canadian problem. The issue arises throughout the industrialized world where democracies exist. By the way, Jerry Mechling will be speaking in Ottawa next Wednesday night. Here is how he begins one of his pieces on the changes brought about by communications:
We are entering a period of historical change comparable to the one that inspired Hamilton, Madison and Jay to pen The Federalist Papers in the late 1780s. Their task was to define a constitutional vision for a new kind of political community: a federal democratic republic. The challenge for leaders today is to define an economic, social and political vision for a new kind of society, a knowledge based society, and leadership will be crucial.
I have thought about that a lot. I certainly support a lot of the suggestions people have made here about the changes that could be made to the rules to shift the power balance between the executive and the House. I agree with the leader of the Conservative Party when he says that when parliament works well government works well. Accountability is an important part of the functioning of any good organization.
I also agree with the analysis that says authority has over time moved to the executive. However I will put that in context. There is a tendency here to personalize that, to say it was something the current Prime Minister or the past Prime Minister did, or that it was part of some invidious plan on the part of somebody. I do not believe that is true at all.
I offer this analysis. The pace of change in society has been accelerating throughout the lifetime of mankind but never as rapidly as in the last few decades. Bill Gates, in his recent book, talks about this decade as the decade of velocity. The most important challenge in our society is trying to manage the rate of change and deal with the incredible decisions placed upon us not just as a government but as a society.
If we look at what has happened with large organizations, many large companies that were in existence a decade or two ago no longer exist today. A number of the largest companies in the world today did not exist in 1980. The rate of change is enormous. One response to the incredible velocity in the external community has been for governments to remove decision-making from the floor of the House. They have done so not for malicious reasons but to facilitate decisions and serve citizens because this place moves too slowly.
When I was director of child welfare in Manitoba, we wrote clauses enabling regulation because it was the most efficient way to get changes to reflect the changing needs of our citizens. I am not saying it was the best solution, but it was the only solution available. The shift in power from the House to the executive has been, in most cases, an attempt to meet the challenge imposed by those whom we serve.
The challenge is not to simply revert to an earlier stage. It is to figure out how this place can reform so that it moves in pace with the rest of society. In achieving this reform, therefore, the critical issues are those of electronic services, of getting information out earlier and of more efficiently and effectively interacting with the community we serve.
The rule changes being debated here are also important and they are like the rule changes we find in the annotated history. They need to be done. The process is a competent one and I am delighted that it runs by consensus. However the bigger change, the one we must all get our minds around, is how to make this place work at the same speed at which our citizens move. How do we make this place respond to the pace of life in the communities we represent?