Debates of March 21st, 2001

Modernization Of House Of Commons Procedure

[Stockwell Day, Canadian Alliance, Okanagan—Coquihalla, BC]

Mr. Speaker, that is an interesting ruling which I respect, although I am not familiar with it. I will just make observations and not reflect pejoratively in any sense.

The nation observed a motion by opposition members to endorse something that was proposed at one point. That something was a promise by the Prime Minister and the government that we would have an ethics commissioner. It was a promise taken from the red book. We took the words verbatim because we agreed with the proposal. I have said as opposition leader that where possible we will agree with and support the government on things that are good for our nation. We took that promise verbatim and made it a motion because we agreed. We wanted MPs to be able to vote freely. I will just make the observation that the Liberal MPs voted down their own promise.

That is the type of freedom that we are looking for in the House of Commons to restore the confidence of Canadians.

The concentration of powers in the PMO is not irremediable. It is not part of the Canadian Constitution. It has developed as a convention, a disciplinary habit that has diminished the role of all duly elected MPs.

This concentration undermines democracy and the respect the Canadian population has always had for its elected representatives. Each member of this House has the responsibility to stand up and be heard, to show that the principles of democracy are dear to him or her. MPs have a duty to show that democratic principles are more important than the carrot and the stick, than reward and punishment.

These things are more important. Standing for democracy is more important.

When the parliament opened, our first task was the duty of electing a Speaker. It makes a big difference to the House of Commons and to the Canadian people when the Speaker is perceived as someone who is fair to all parties. We believe that is the case here. The election of a Speaker by members of the House is something that most Canadians have taken for granted, even though it is actually a fairly recent convention.

There is a story from our past concerning the election of Speaker that I believe serves as an example to the members of the House of Commons. It is a story that shows that members are not, and do not have to be, helpless pawns in a parliament ruled by the Prime Minister's office. It was back in 1827. I know, Mr. Speaker, that you would be familiar with this not because you were ever near that particular era, but because you are a student of these things. It was the Assembly of Lower Canada that elected Louis-Joseph Papineau to be its Speaker.

When Papineau asked the governor for official approval, the governor refused to confirm his appointment. The members of the Assembly of Lower Canada did not submit humbly to this. They refused to elect anyone else and they stuck to their guns. It was difficult, and it took courage.

The government had to interrupt its activities. Nothing happened for a year, but eventually democracy prevailed. A new governor confirmed Louis-Joseph Papineau as Speaker.

The Prime Minister and others might argue that the machinery of government control is more important than the members of parliament themselves. However we have to remember that these constituents whom we represent are more important than the so-called machinery that comes out of the office of the Prime Minister. The people of Canada are more important than the machinery. Government should be for people, not people for government. Sometimes and too often in this assembly, it is the other way around.

We hope the creation of a special committee to make recommendations on modernizing and improving these procedures will be a first step. However, the real change we are calling for demands far more than what a committee can deliver and more than what a committee can recommend. What we are asking for, I believe, is going to demand character and virtues like courage.

We could wait for three or four years until the Canadian people decide to change the government, but we know that in that period of time many more Canadians will be asking themselves why they should bother to vote when their MPs cannot even speak for them once they arrive in Ottawa.

We can wait for the next election or we can act as MPs ought to act, and start exercising the power that is ours, in order to get some changes made.

If we show that we really want to do our job here in Ottawa, the Canadian public will understand.

We need more free votes in the House of Commons. We have to abandon the convention, and this is not a constitutional issue, that any losing vote for the government is a vote of non-confidence. We need to address that.

Let us give real power to committees and allow members of committees to elect their own chairs instead of having the Prime Minister make the appointment. Let us have the chairs and the vice chairs elected by secret ballot, just as the Speaker is now elected. It is good for the Speaker, it should be good for the chairs.

Let us allow private members to bring bills that actually come to a vote without having to pass through a party dominated committee process.

I know many of my colleagues from across the aisle share my concerns. They would like democratic reform to proceed just as we do. The MP from Toronto—Danforth, as a good upstanding Liberal MP, said “Parliament does not work. It is broken. It is like a car motor working on two cylinders”. Another Liberal MP and former Quebec cabinet minister said “Being in the backbench we are typecast as if we are all stupid. We are just supposed to be voting machines”.

We need to change that. If these MPs have the bravery and the courage to talk about change like that then we need to embrace that change.

Government members and opposition members alike know that the people of Canada want us to do better. They want us to deliver true change and real democracy. We have a list of things that have to be done.

When the hon. member talked about the changes he wanted to see, I was waiting expectantly. I was thinking he was going to make some recommendations for change would break the ground for democracy and usher in fresh breezes of freedom to the House of Commons. I thought that when Canadians heard the Liberal House leader speak they would say “That's fantastic”. He unleashed to the Chamber just moments ago the waves of freedom which would cause us to surge onto the beaches of democracy. Let us listen to those.

He wants to move closure from 11 p.m. to 8 p.m. Now there is a democracy breaking move. How about this? He said “Let us deal with restricting a committee report concurrence motion”. I wonder if he said that when he was out on the hustings. Did he stand before constituents who were talking about freedom and say “We will bring something in to restrict a committee report concurrence motion?”

I am not trying to diminish these tiny moves but they should just be mere shadows of changes that are far more monumental, the shadows of changes that will bring true democracy into the House and restore for Canadians the sense that they own this place.

I close with the words a wise person said to me the first time I was elected. I was quite jubilant that particular night. As I was leaving the party which was going on, he said “I want to know if you know the definition of the word instant”. I asked him what the definition was. He said “Usually it is the time it takes an elected member to go from representing his or her constituents to representing the government”.

We need to remember that. We need to think of our constituents and think of freedom and democracy in this place.

I agreed to share my time, and I thank members for agreeing, with the member for Fraser Valley who has also been a leader in the area of true democratic reform which will vitalise the process in Canada and send a message to all Canadians, including young people, that the government truly is here to work for them.

[Chuck Strahl, Canadian Alliance, Fraser Valley, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I want to zero in specifically on why there needs to be a special committee, which the motion we are debating today would set up.

The regular standing order review which is required under Standing Order 51 is taking place this evening. We will be debating which standing orders should be changed.

If we look at the mandate of the committee that will be reviewing this, there are seven paragraphs in the standing orders outlining the responsibilities of the committee. Parliamentary reform is only one of those responsibilities. If parliamentary reform is the priority which I think all members of the House would like to make it, then the time is right for a special committee dedicated to developing proposals to modernize this place.

In the last parliament the process to reform the rules began with a similar debate to this one, on April 21, 1998. The Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs was supposed to take the wisdom of the debate and come up with proposals to reform the House. The committee did not get around to considering parliamentary reform until October 2000. Then the election came and time ran out. In other words, it just did not happen. Not a single standing order change proposal came to committee, made it through the House and became a change that we could enjoy in this 37th parliament.

The last major reform done in the House of Commons was done by a special committee chaired by James McGrath. The member for Winnipeg—Transcona frequently refers to the work of that committee. I am convinced a special committee is required because a special job like modernizing parliament requires a single focused committee to get the job done.

As a member of the proposed committee, I look forward to working with a smaller committee. The McGrath committee emphasized and recommended a smaller committee. The McGrath committee report stated that the committee should focus more on the task at hand, be less partisan and work toward consensus much easier.

I am convinced that a smaller group is more productive than a larger group, as long as the committee reflects the proportionate party representation when it comes to speaking time, questions and comments, witnesses and so on. One of the recommendations I hope we will eventually see is the creation of smaller committees that look after the speaking time and weighted votes. I believe this can be achieved in the days to come.

The other interesting aspect of this committee is the fact that its report must be unanimous. If we are to reform parliament in a meaningful way, and not just in a way that strengthens the executive, both the opposition and government must buy into the proposals. Ramming through changes under closure, as the government did not so long ago, will not work in the long run. This is inviting the opposition to find ways to get cranky with the government. It also invites the opposition to find loopholes in the standing orders to express its frustration. Surely that is not what we should be spending our time doing.

We should be spending our time in this committee and in this debate today trying to find ways to come to unanimity on important changes that give power to all parliamentarians, not just the executive branch.

I remember when the government's famous Motion No. 8 was on the order paper in the last parliament. That was a knee-jerk reaction by the government. The motion was not intended to address opposition grievances. It was simply intended to punish the opposition. The government House leader, who normally enjoyed a co-operative opposition for the most part, faced a revolt on this motion that even his skills and his majority could not have handled. I believe the Speaker would likely have ruled Motion No. 8 out of order if it had been debated.

That draconian measure eventually was dropped because of the realization that we could not have meaningful reform in this place if it was going to be done unilaterally. The House would have been consumed with routine orders of procedure unless the government had the co-operation of opposition parties. No one, especially the government House leader, would have liked to see that happen.

I also believe that the timing of this committee is right because the spirit is right for change. My party has a number of proposals already on the table. Our last batch of proposals were released in a document entitled “Building Trust”. It has taken me personally by considerable surprise because literally thousands of people have requested copies of it. I cannot believe there is that much interest in parliamentary reform.

It is an indication that not only is the time right for members of the House to begin fixing parliament, but Canadians are calling for it and the media are willing to communicate it, for maybe the first time. Members of parliament can actually get cachet on this subject and can get traction on this subject back home, where people are saying that parliamentary reform is long overdue.

The latest series of proposals, which I will be releasing tomorrow morning, builds on the original building trust document. I will be contacting all members of parliament to get them to talk about what I guess we can call “building trust plus”. It is a series of proposals that includes everything I released in January, plus much more. I would like to quickly go through some of the specific proposals I hope to take to the committee. Hopefully we can have unanimous consent to bring them back to the House by June 1.

The building trust document talked about: free votes; the ethics counsellor becoming a true officer of parliament; the process of how the Speaker is elected; the creation of a new privacy, access and ethics committee, which I think would be in all of our interests; how the appointment of House officers is done; and the appointment of the clerk as an appointment of the House instead of an appointment of the executive, and so on. There is a whole series of proposals which I think would strengthen the role of parliament instead of just strengthening the government.

There are other things I would like to throw into the mix. We should have more of the opposition party members chairing committees, like they do in England. When I told them in England that virtually every single committee is chaired by the government, they just could not believe it. In England, a third of the chairs of committees are given to opposition members. This would make committees so much better in the sense that people would understand that our duty in committees is to discuss the subject matter, not to have political diatribes. If the government shafts one committee and the opposition is chairing the other committee, it could be tit for tat. There is no value in making committees dysfunctional because there is an interest in making them work. Sharing the committee chairs with the opposition means sharing some of the power, but it also means balancing that power in a way that reflects the true representation here in the House.

As well, we are keen to televise committees. I know eventually we are going to have a new committee building in these precincts, but in the meantime anything we can do to televise more committees, to show members of parliament busily doing some of the grunt work of parliament, is a good thing, and we should encourage it.

In regard to the way the government responds to committee reports, I know the government House leader would like to have an automatic response, but I would point out to him that in the new government of Nunavut, for example, when a committee tables a report in its legislature and the minister does not respond within a certain number of days, it is deemed adopted. Instead of restricting the report, saying that concurrence is as if there had already been a debate, and the government being given unlimited time to respond, in Nunavut they say that the minister has to do that report's bidding unless he or she tables a response to do otherwise.

In other words, it is negative option billing on the minister. He or she responds to the committee's recommendations or it is a done deal. That strengthens the hands of committees. It strengthens the value of the report. Ministers who say they will just ignore reports will find out that their departments have been given direction by the House if they have failed to react within an appropriate time.

We have a lot of recommendations on closure. I have always said that the government at times will use closure if some shenanigans are going on in the opposition and it has to move that way. On rare occasions it is understandable. However, in return, the government should have to produce the minister to the House of Commons for a period of questioning on why it has restricted debate, on why it thinks debate has gone on long enough, on whether it has encouraged enough diversity in debate, and on why something is so time sensitive that it has to go through the House in such a hurried fashion. In other words, a minister should have to be accountable for bringing in a closure or time allocation motion. We have some specific proposals on that matter which I will be happy to bring forth.

We also want to bring forward changes in how the estimates are handled. There are good proposals from an all party committee on how to improve the estimates process. Right now the estimates are set in stone. The government brings them forward and members cannot change anything. If members change anything the government considers it a non-confidence vote. That is why the all party committee, including the current government whip, has proposed changes, which I agree with and which will allow members of parliament to move funds around within a department, not to spend more money but to allocate funds according to the committee's wisdom.

That again strengthens the role of committees. It strengthens the role of the Liberal backbenchers and allows estimates, the real spending power of parliament, to be brought forward not just for scrutiny like they are now, but for actual direction to the government. What a breath of fresh air it would be for Liberal backbenchers to actually have that kind of input.

We want to also talk about things like the order paper questions. This is a technical thing on how those questions are answered and how timely the answers are. I know that the government House leader will be keen to do that.

We want to look at the parliamentary calendar. We want to decide on what is the best use of our time here in Ottawa. Can we make better use of Fridays? Instead of having attendance that is in the 20% to 30% range on Fridays, can we make better use of that time so the people who are in attendance in the House on Fridays have meaningful debate on meaningful subjects? Perhaps private members' business could have more pre-eminence. We can make better use of our Fridays in the House and I look forward to that debate as well.

On the subject of private members' business, in the Alliance Party we want any private members' business drawn for debate in the House to receive a vote. Too often people have put a lot of time, energy and effort into bringing forward private members' bills and, for whatever reasons, there are no votes. They are debated for an hour and then go off into the ether and are never heard of again. Members who have put time into a private member's initiative should know that there will be a vote and a decision at the end of it. We encourage all members to allow not just the debate but a vote to occur on private members' business. I think members on both sides of the House would look forward to that.

Again I want to emphasize that it is my belief that smaller committees will be more efficient committees. We need to look at committee structure instead of expanding committee membership to 17 or 18. Sometimes a joint committee has 25 or 30 members. How on earth can there be meaningful time for individual members on a committee of that size? We need to reflect the proportionality of the House, restrict the number of members on the committee, and look after the questions of voting and question and comment time. In other words, the time should reflect the proportionality. Let us find ways to deal with this.

Let us not just make the committees ever bigger. They are inefficient and a poor use of time and they do not do any better job of reflecting the reality of the House as far as numbers go. Often people get so discouraged that they quit attending because they never get a chance to speak.

I look forward to this special committee. I am grateful for a chance to sit on it. I look forward in the weeks ahead to all members feeling free to talk to all House leaders about what is on their minds in order to make this place work better for the benefit of all of us and the Parliament of Canada.

[The Deputy Speaker]

I wish to remind the House that the following three members will have a maximum of 20 minutes, and their speeches may be the subject of questions and comments for a period of ten minutes.

[Michel Gauthier, Bloc, Roberval, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am particularly happy to speak today on this question.

First, I find it especially interesting that we can have a debate in this House in which all members may freely express their views on the standing orders requiring change or improvement in order to make our work in parliament more effective.

In this regard, it is a debate without party lines as such. Members may be creative, identify the irritants they see in the standing orders and propose solutions. It is no doubt with interest that the House leaders will consider what will happen here, what the members will present, and this will no doubt be very useful in improving our debates.

Second, I want to thank the government House leader, who was kind enough to guarantee that no change to the standing orders would be made without unanimity among the House leaders. If everyone, does not agrees on the benefit of a change, there will be no change.

I have already seen changes to the standing orders not made unanimously. It is extremely irritating to the members of a party when the rules change unbeknownst to them, without their having either the desire or the possibility of agreeing to the change. I therefore thank the government House leader.

I am, however, of the opinion that we, the House leaders of other parties, need to be responsible. There is always a certain give and take involved.

Although the government House leader is offering us this possibility of blocking changes that do not suit us, we must still be reasonable and must sometimes make an effort to compromise in order to obtain positive results, instead of seeking the slightest pretext to never agree with anything and end up with a reform that is really no reform at all.

We are all aware that the standing orders of the House of Commons need to be improved. We are all aware that certain avenues exist on which, I believe, we can reach agreement fairly readily.

In this connection, I offer my co-operation in advance to the hon. leader of the government in the House and I want him to know that I will be pleased to try to contribute a great deal of positivity and open-mindedness and in a spirit of respect and promotion of the rights of all members of parliament, not on any partisan basis but on the basis of what I would call respect for the elected representatives that we are.

Certain principles, however, must underlie the reforms to the standing orders with which we will be involved and the work of the committee on which we will sit.

It must be understood that the standing orders of the House of Commons do not exist in order to make people's lives difficult and to stop them from expressing themselves. The rules that govern a Chamber like this one, a parliament, are there to allow a fair power relationship between the opposition and the government. A parliament where the government already enjoys an absolute majority, as is the case here, is fully capable of making decisions without having rules allowing it to do so without any interference whatsoever.

Of course there are rules so that the government can govern—and it is ultimately the objective pursued—but there are also rules allowing the opposition to slow down the government in its decision making process. When we feel that a decision is bad, we can slow down the government, we can make things more complicated for it, we can even question some bills on which there is no consensus, particularly when opposition parties work together and pool their resources.

If I say this, it is because it is significant. Our colleagues must realize that when a parliament no longer gives opposition parties an opportunity to prevent, through extraordinary means, the government from quietly proceeding with its bills and reforms, there is no parliament anymore. From the moment that a government enjoys an absolute majority, there would be nothing left to stop it, regardless of the initiatives that it may take. Such a situation would not be good.

When the public realizes that parliament no longer allows its elected representatives to slow down or block certain government initiatives, the opposition organizes itself at another level. Democracy moves to another sphere, because people realize that it is game over in parliament. People organize themselves in the streets, they hold rallies and use other means.

Whether we are government or opposition members, as is the case on our side of the House, it is in everyone's interest to ensure that the rules of the House give us some power to influence things.

I also want to discuss the spirit of the debates that take place in a parliament such as this one. We have been in a democratic system for a long time and this is probably why we tend not to realize the richness of democracy, because we have been using it and sometimes abusing it.

There is one vital problem, when the government enters a debate in the House and the idea from the start is to carry the bill to term. I cannot stress enough how important it is for the government to listen to opposition members and to consider what is proposed. I know no members in the House who do not want to improve bills, in many respects, according to what their constituents ask them to do.

All too often, unfortunately, the debate, the period between the time the government introduces a bill and its passage and the reading stages, second reading, report stage, third reading, are viewed all too often by the government as a necessary evil. The time between introduction and passage is a period of time that varies in length. It should be considered an extremely rich and fertile period to allow the government to improve its bill.

We know that bills are not prepared by the members of the House. They are prepared by impressive teams of officials. I am aware of all the responsibility borne by the ministers and all the teams and armies of officials, who come to them with initiatives, bills of 100 or 150 pages, who explain their initiatives and, finally, who try to promote their way of seeing things.

Ministers are sometimes obliged, not only in this parliament, but in all parliaments, to fight their own machine in order to say “The government does not want to go so far with this particular bill”. There are epic battles between ministers and their own machines.

What needs to be understood is that government and opposition members alike form a kind of team, which sometimes has to do battle with armies of public servants. Our role is to make sure that the concerns of our constituents are expressed in the House. It is to take what the administrative machine proposes and say “That does not make sense. That should be in a particular order, or that should be done this way”. Our role is to amend.

The rules of debate which we are going to amend, the standing orders, the practices and procedures will have to be amended such that the period of exchanges between government members, ministers and opposition members allows productive review, improvement and adaptation of what an extremely powerful administrative machine has pushed all the way through to parliament. This is the spirit in which I intend to work.

Naturally, I would like to talk about time allocation motions. If there is one thing which worries me, it is the extremely frequent recourse to such motions. Whenever time allocation is moved, I know that this is a convenient way for the government to move things forward.

But should the government have the right to use a time allocation motion if a bill has not been debated more than 12, 15 or even 20 hours at most? It is not normal for the government to bring forward, after two or three hours of debate, a time allocation motion. Really now. That makes no sense. Is anyone ready to admit that there is nothing excessive about debating an important bill for three hours? As I have said, they are churned out by officials and we have to absorb their content, take them apart, analyze them and express our views on them.

The time we take here to debate bills gives the general public the opportunity to find out about the ones that concern them, to organize a lobby, to tell their MP “Hold on there, Mr. Member, we want to meet with you because there is a bill before parliament, before the House of Commons, and we want to see this or that change to it, because it causes us this or that problem”.

The time allowed for discussing a bill must, therefore, be substantial if we are to do our jobs properly, if the public is to have time to react if there is something about it that does not suit it, and also if we are to demonstrate that the real objective of government is to improve a bill.

If this is not borne in mind, obviously things never move fast enough; they will never move fast enough. Perhaps in a few years the government will find an hour's debate on a bill too long and will invoke time allocation. That makes no sense.

The government has to return to fairer proportions on this. It must agree to the effort and sacrifice needed to allow members to debate. I am going to try to convince my colleagues, the leaders, that the government should not be able to bring forward time allocation too quickly in order to ensure quicker passage. This is perhaps one thing that needs to be looked at.

However it should not be used after three hours of debate, because the government House leader is in a bad mood and knows debate will probably be extended, so he brings forward a time allocation motion. This is not what parliament is about, this is not the point of a time allocation motion. However this is the way they now use it, unfortunately. I do not want to offend anyone and start a quarrel when we are having a positive debate on the rules, but everyone knows that the number of time allocation motions more than doubled from one government to the next.

So, at some point, it is time to be reasonable too, and I think that this is the time to have a look at this. I think the government House leader, a generally reasonable man, should want to look at this business honestly and give his opinion. I intend to raise issues in any case.

Perhaps it should not be usable until a certain amount of debating time has passed, and perhaps in exchange it could be made easier to pass, not take so long, or some such thing. There are some points that need looking into.

As for electronic voting, I do not want to come across as someone who is opposed to change, since I am in favour of modernizing the way we vote, but I do have certain reservations. That will most certainly be discussed in that committee.

There is a certain nobility and an infinite democracy in the fact that a member has to rise here in this House before the cameras and say in essence “I, Michel Gauthier, the member for Roberval, vote for or against this bill”. There is a responsibility that goes with that.

So much so, that when a motion is presented that is an important one, not that there are any that are unimportant, but one that holds particular importance from a policy point of view, then we, and all parties have all done so, require a member by member vote, not applying one vote to another, as you specialized in at the time you were whip of your party, Mr. Speaker. Things go faster if that is done, and in many cases it is convenient for everyone. In certain cases, however, members were required to stand up.

I think we should find a system which would ensure that, to a certain degree, the act of voting would be one of courage. Otherwise, a member will become completely anonymous. We do not yet know what the system will be but he will come and press a button, or he will be in his office and vote with a card—we do not yet know what the system will be—and it will show “Michel Gauthier, Roberval”, “Yes or No”, or “For the motion” or “Against the motion”, or whatever, and it will be much less onerous for the member. It is this that worries me.

I know that we must move forward, but we must continue to require that a member have the courage of his convictions and be able to say publicly, “I voted for that, and I was not ashamed to do so”. In certain cases, as we know only too well, members are sometimes absent for certain votes. They prefer not to be recorded as having voted for or against certain motions, particularly when they must toe the party line. This is because voting is an important act. If, when modernizing voting, we decide on electronic voting, we must come up with the best process possible, but it must be the one that makes members of this House as accountable as possible.

In addition, there are certain standing orders I wish to touch on briefly, because I see that my time is running out.

I do not think that the standing orders should be changed if, for instance, we do not have the support of two thirds of the members. It seems to me that the rules which govern us are too important to be passed by the government alone. That is the problem. The problem is that sometimes the government majority represents a large number of the members and there could be changes to the standing orders which only the government, not all opposition parties, wanted.

Perhaps it could be proportionate to the number of parties, or whatever, so that a change to the standing orders would have to reflect a certain consensus or unanimity in the House. Finally, there is no point dreaming in technicolour. They should talk about a consensus or a vote in each of the parties, I do not know, but some mechanism must be found. This question requires attention.

Opposition days are important to me. I am going to try to convince my colleagues in this regard. There are not many opposition days. When a party presents a motion, by regulatory subterfuge, we have to prevent our motion from being diluted or substantially changed. We are obliged to divide our time, to present the motion, to speak ten minutes, to say “My colleague will speak during the ten minutes I have left”. The other colleague rises and presents an insignificant motion to prevent the motion from being amended, diluted or transformed significantly.

It seems to me that opposition days are held to enable each party, and we all have our own days, to speak to an issue that interests us.

I think, therefore, that the government should agree to allow an opposition motion to be amended only by the party presenting it so that there is no need to resort to subterfuge to protect a motion. We do it indirectly, and that complicates things. Why not be honest and let an opposition day belong to the opposition, be it the Bloc Quebecois, the Canadian Alliance, the NDP or the Progressive Conservative Party, and let each party be master of its motion, which may no longer be amended at any point during the debate. This is something to look at.

We are also going to talk about the coverage of debates and about emergency debates that should, in my opinion, all be voted on. The reason a matter is discussed in this House during an emergency debate is that it is something important. What could be more natural than to ask parliament to decide? I think this ought to be addressed as well.

In closing, as fair as the chairs and vice chairs of committees are concerned, we should take a page from the book of the Quebec national assembly. Half of all committees are headed by a member of the government party, and the other half by someone from the opposition. The vice chairs are the opposite. If a government member chairs the committee, then the vice chair is from the opposition and vice versa. This would provide more of a balance for a healthy democracy.

I have already experienced this in the Quebec national assembly. I can tell hon. members that it works very well, gets a large number of MNAs involved, and gives rise to some extremely interesting situations as far as the dynamism of the debate and the operation of parliament are concerned. Instead of having all but two committees chaired by someone from the party in power, I would like to see a better balance.

These are some of the matters we will be looking at, but my point was mainly to stress that we must approach all this within a perspective of openness and intelligence, hoping to see parliament operate better and better, and that all MPs, not just those in government, will be able to do a more effective job in this House.

That is the spirit which will govern my contribution.

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of Public Works and Government Services]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for his very positive intervention in the House. I would like to ask the member a question on the issue of chairing committees.

Under the present situation there is a designated number of members from each party on committees. In the event an opposition member became the chair of a committee, it would appear to me that it would put the opposition at a further disadvantage, in terms of having the sufficient numbers to pass motions, because it would be giving up one more opposition spot.

Is the member suggesting that, in addition to providing for more opposition members, additional membership of opposition members should have to be provided for to maintain the parody that they presently have with regard to committee membership?

[Michel Gauthier, Bloc, Roberval, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am not an expert on how committees work, but it does not take much good faith to know that the system is not unrealistic, because it does in fact exist.

If the system did not exist, I would agree with the hon. member that this would perhaps cause complications. However this system already exists in the Quebec national assembly and has many benefits, including that of making all members, including opposition members, accountable.

I do not know by what means they manage to solve the problems the member is raising, but I think that a reform such as the one we are undertaking should get us thinking about what is done elsewhere and what works well.

We have officers in the House, and I take this opportunity to pay tribute to one who was formerly a member of the Quebec national assembly. When I was a member, he was a committee secretary, and a good one at that. He is much more familiar with the way committees work than I am.

In my opinion, we have the resources and the opportunity to go and see what is being done elsewhere, and it would be in our interest to be open to such things. It is more motivating and more interesting for everyone, and leads to good involvement in the work of committees.

That having been said, implementing such a system could mean some difficult times, but since nature abhors a mess and since parliamentarians are intelligent beings, I imagine there will be certain adjustments and amendments and gradually the adjustment will be made.

On that score I would not worry. My suggestion to the hon. member would be that we at least see how it is done elsewhere. It would perhaps be in our interest to use this method here, because it would perhaps be to everyone's benefit.

[Bill Blaikie, NDP, Winnipeg—Transcona, MB]

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.

Points Of Order

[Hedy Fry, Liberal, Secretary of State (Multiculturalism)(Status of Women)]

Mr. Speaker, today in question period I made reference in my answer to an incident in Prince George, British Columbia. I would like to clarify it because I had to leave the House early and was not here for the discussion. May I have the opportunity to do so?

[The Deputy Speaker]

Is that agreed?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[Hedy Fry, Liberal, Vancouver Centre, BC]

I am responding to the point of order. In British Columbia there have been incidents of hate crime, including cross burnings. I know of this because I was contacted immediately that these incidents occurred by the mayor of Prince George.

In my position as Secretary of State for Multiculturalism I funded the mayor to set up a task force right away. The community was duly concerned and duly appalled at the incident and demanded to take immediate action, so I funded the mayor to hold a task force. The task force met and came out with some remarkable and courageous recommendations which the mayor is implementing.

What I am highlighting is that these incidents occur. In my role as secretary of state I am often very astounded at the rapidity with which municipalities and communities take action against such things. It is my role to sometimes assist them with resources. I did so, so I know very clearly and personally of the incident in Prince George.

I was recently in Prince George, where I met with the task force and congratulated the mayor and the people of Prince George for taking immediate action on incidents that could happen in communities anywhere in Canada.

[Joe Clark, Progressive Conservative, Calgary Centre, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on the same point of order. I heard the minister speak in the House. She referred to crosses burning as we speak. Her response did not address that question.

It would be in the interest of everyone, and it certainly would respect the spirit of this parliamentary debate, if she simply apologized and withdrew that inaccurate remark.

[Hedy Fry, Liberal, Vancouver Centre, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I would be very pleased to remove the piece, as we speak. Sometimes when we speak in the House of Commons we put some of our phrases before and after.

However this was a recent incident. What I meant to say was that as we speak things are happening around the world and in Canada and in Prince George that are changing things. I would be very pleased to withdraw the phrase as we speak and say recent.

[The Deputy Speaker]

I accept that withdrawal.

[Deborah Grey, Canadian Alliance, Edmonton North, AB]

Mr. Speaker, the secretary of state talks about making sure racism does not happen. We appreciate that because it is a dreadful thing.

What she said today was very clearly that they were burning crosses in Prince George as we speak. She has given some sort of half-baked withdrawal, but she slammed—

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh.

[The Deputy Speaker]

I consider the matter closed following the withdrawal by the minister. If it is on another issue and another point of order, the hon. member for Provencher may rise.

[Vic Toews, Canadian Alliance, Provencher, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a new point of order arising out of the comments the hon. member made.

The hon. member may well have withdrawn, and I am not clear whether she did in fact withdraw, the comment that crosses are now burning in Prince George. However the issue is not simply a matter of withdrawing the words. It is a matter of apologizing to the community because she slammed the entire community and that needs to be withdrawn.

[The Deputy Speaker]

Order, please. I still consider the matter closed. We all take each other's words as being honourable. When one of our members withdraws a statement, as was the case here, then I accept the withdrawal. I am prepared to move on to another matter as of now.

The House resumed consideration of the motion.

Modernization Of House Of Commons Procedure

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Parmiamentary Secretary to Minister of Public Works and Government Service]

Mr. Speaker, we just heard from the hon. member for Winnipeg—Transcona. Members will probably know him well because of his long service to the House, and in terms of a thermometer of earned respect he has certainly earned a great deal here.

He raised an issue about chairs of committees. I would like him to know, and I think most members in this place would agree, that all parliamentarians win when we have good, solid chairs in our committees. I tend to agree with his assessment.

He also postulated that delay is an important aspect of democracy. I agree with him there as well. Even though he is quite right that at this point that it looks like a process of fine tuning and tinkering with standing orders, with the hon. member participating on the committee I am sure important things can happen and I hope he will pursue them.

My question for the member has to do with the spirit. He started his speech by saying we should not be going through a process of tinkering. What he said we should instead be doing, and he was spot on, is talking about the issue of redistribution of power.

I believe the member is absolutely correct. That is exactly what is on the minds of opposition parliamentarians. They want to redistribute power, because in our parliamentary system, constitutional obligations, et cetera, the power is vested in a majority government elected to govern. The opposition has a role to play—and maybe the hon. member will comment—and the role of the opposition, in my view, is to deliver blows that would tenderize a turtle. I do not believe they have a mandate to govern, yet the member is quite right, and I know where he is coming from: redistribution of power is the issue.

If constitutionally a majority government is required to deliver on a mandate, would it in fact be in the best interests of our parliamentary system to structure its affairs in such a way that a government would be pre-empted in any way from delivering on a mandate, which it was democratically elected to do?

[Bill Blaikie, NDP, Winnipeg—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I am not trying to be nasty about it, but if this is the sort of level of insight about parliament on the government backbench, it is no wonder we do not have the rebellion that we should have over there.

I was not talking about redistribution of power between government and opposition, although I think there is room for that. I was talking about redistribution of power between the PMO and the cabinet, the cabinet and the caucus, the government and its own backbenchers, the executive and the House of Commons. If all the member heard was me talking about redistributing power between the government and the opposition, I have to go back and read my speech, or perhaps he should go back and read my speech, because that is certainly not what I was concentrating on.

To return to what I said at the beginning, real parliamentary reform has to do with redistributing power in a number of ways around here. One of those ways is between government and the opposition, because over the years much more power has come to reside with the government as opposed to the opposition than used to be the case. I am not asking for something that never was or never could be. I am asking for something that used to be. I am asking for a return to some balance, where the opposition has much more power to hold the government to account than it now does. I do not think that is a violation of any kind of constitutional theory about government.

The government is accountable to parliament. When people go to the polls they do not just elect a government; they elect a parliament. It is out of parliament that governments come. It is not just majority governments. The member said in his question to me that we must have a majority government in order to fulfil this constitutional mandate. No, we do not. We just need to have a government that has the confidence of the House, and that could be a minority government, a coalition government or a number of different combinations, many of which would be much more sensitive to and responsive to the opinions of the opposition and the opinions of the government backbench than what we now have.

We need a situation in which the government does not have as much power to punish its own members and to override the opposition, so that there is some need there for agreement and co-operation. That way other points of view get into the mix and they get into amendments that are accepted rather than rejected. We get better legislation and better policy as a result.

[Peter MacKay, Progressive Conservative, Pictou—Antigonish—Guysborough, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I commend the hon. member, the House leader for the New Democratic Party. He always brings much logic and common sense to the debate. He is a long serving member of the House. That is not to infer he is long in the tooth. He is well respected by all who know him.

My question to the hon. member is with respect to the devolution, if you will, of some powers, even to the Speaker on occasion. I specifically refer to instances where omnibus bills are put before the House of Commons, where legislation is mixed and mashed together in an incoherent fashion, where members of the opposition most times—and this is equally applicable to members of the backbench—are forced to vote against a bill they are predominantly in favour of or, similarly, to vote for something they cannot reconcile.

Would it be fair to suggest that there are occasions when the Speaker might be empowered to intervene and to divide omnibus bills? Similarly, are there occasions when the Speaker might also be empowered to have greater discretion to turn down the use of closure or time allocation where it is not properly being exercised by the government, or to at least to call for a debate where the government should be called upon to justify the use of time allocation or the use of closure? I wonder if the hon. member would have comments on those suggestions.

[Bill Blaikie, NDP, Winnipeg—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, in regard to the last two suggestions made with respect to dealing with time allocation and giving the Chair more power, I did mention them fleetingly in my remarks about time allocation. It is one of the things I said in the debate. The government is very eager to give the Chair power over what amendments would be votable at report stage, but not so eager to give the Speaker power to hear motions of time allocation which, in the judgment of the Chair, come too early or before adequate debate has taken place.

The first question was on omnibus bills. This is probably an occasion for me to give a brief history lesson, without wanting to look too long in the tooth. Perhaps the Minister of Transport will remember this, and so would the leader of the Conservative Party. It was out of an omnibus bill that a first good wave of parliamentary reform came, with the bell ringing incident in 1982 that was in response to an omnibus piece of energy legislation. The Lefebvre committee was created.

Contrary to what the government House leader said earlier, the Lefebvre committee came at the end of a parliament. The government House leader said he thought that reform always came at the beginning of a parliament, but there was actually quite a bit of reform that came at the end of the parliament of 1980 to 1984 as a result of the committee that was struck out of the bell ringing incident.

The Minister of Transport was on that committee and will perhaps confirm to the government House leader what a wonderful job he did at that time in helping other members come forward with parliamentary reforms. Those reforms were built on by the McGrath committee. The first report of the McGrath committee basically said to adopt the Lefebvre committee recommendations.

[Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville—Musquodoboit Valley—Eastern Shore, NS]

Mr. Speaker, one of the problems Canadians have is the appointment of people, mostly political hacks, to very sensitive positions within various departments in Canada. Would the member agree that some of those people who are appointed should appear before the respective committee, with their CVs, for a peer review, in order for members to see if they truly are qualified for the jobs or are just political appointments?