Mr. Chairman, it is an honour to speak on this topic. I will preface my remarks by saying that if we looked at all the problems we have in the country today, if we talked about health care, about jobs, what is the one that is the most prominent, the one that is actually the most important, the route that actually can effect change and help the people of our country? That problem is the problem of democratizing this House. In my view, there is no challenge or problem in our country today greater than that of making this parliament a democracy.
In 1993, like many members of the House here today, I was elected. We came here motivated by largely the same reason: to improve the health and welfare of Canadians. What motivated us to come here, to leave our personal lives aside and to maybe take a financial hit, was to improve the health and welfare of the people we dealt with on a daily basis.
Maybe we saw people living in their cars because they were homeless. Maybe we were struck by individuals who needed health care and were waiting months to get a test to determine whether or not they had cancer, waiting for far too long. Perhaps we saw the conditions that aboriginal people live in, squalid conditions in many cases, that are unthinkable in a country like Canada. Perhaps we saw an education system that did not provide the education our children need. Perhaps we saw an economy that was declining and slipping far below those of our competitors.
Whatever our motivation, every person, to a man or to a woman, came here to make our country a better place. We came here with that in our hearts. We knew this was not a democracy. We came to change that. We came with hope. However, instead of finding a House of Commons we found a house of illusions. With the large change in the numbers of people that we had in 1993 and the hope that engendered in all of us, rather than making the changes which we had a narrow chance of doing, we saw this place, rather than getting more democratic, becoming less democratic.
This speech is not for the members in the House but for the public out there. It is for the few hearty souls out there who I hope are tuning into CPAC and listening to what my colleagues are saying here today, and I hope they bring it forward to their MPs, to the Prime Minister and to every single elected person that they know in this institution.
For those changes required in the House are changes that will enable us to help them. Those changes will enable us to reform our health care system, to improve our economy and to make this a land of opportunity, a place where we could start to achieve our potential rather than being hit below the belt.
The public may or may not understand that the House of Commons is not a democracy. It is a place that is controlled with a viselike grip, where the members from political parties are controlled by leaderships, where they are used as little more than voting machines and as bodies that attend committees, and hopefully we have a palpable pulse when we do that.
What a waste. What an abysmal waste of the incredible talent that exists within the House, for every man and woman in the House has talent, skills and passions that they came here to apply for the betterment of the people in their communities.
Can it be done? Absolutely. What needs to be done? First of all, let us look at the structure. Bills basically come in a standard form right into committees. Minor changes are made and they are rubber stamped all the way through.
In regard to private members' business, the public would find it extraordinary that an MP puts forth a bill and works very hard on it but only if his or her name is selected out of a big vat with 300 other names in it will he or she be lucky enough to be able to introduce that bill. Whether it is votable or not is the jurisdiction and the choice and the decision of a number of fellow committee members. Why we have private members' bills that are not votable is extraordinary and completely absurd. That is what is happening now.
MPs are not allowed to innovate because innovation is called freelancing, freelancing being a pejorative term to suggest that the individual who is trying to use his or her skill to build a plan is a maverick, a lone wolf, a rebel, not part of the team. When a member is accused of not being part of the team, a member unfortunately becomes polarized in regard to his colleagues. A member who tries to work with members from different political parties is again frowned on as being perhaps not one of us.
At the end of the day, how do we make change? How do we actually do our job? The most important aspect of that job is to help the people on the ground who may not have a home, who may not have health care, who may be unemployed, who are not eating well or who live in squalid conditions. The only way we can change that is if we reform this place so that we can use the collective talent in the House and apply it to those areas.
Why have we seen the death of innovation, particularly over the last two years? Why has this place been so restrained and constricted that individual members are frowned on if they work together? It is frowned on if they try to innovate, if they try to step ahead, if they lead from the front. Why do we have a structure like that?
Why do we not tap into the extraordinary potential that we have in the people in our country who are not members of parliament? Few of us in the House are experts on anything, just as I am an expert on nothing, but all of us are wise enough to find the best people in the country and find the best solutions not only within Canada but outside Canada and apply them to the problems of the nation.
When I spoke to my constituents a week and a half ago about this, they found it extraordinary that there were so many obstacles to trying to innovate and bring ideas to bear on the problems that are important at their dinner tables.
We need to allow innovation in the House, so what can we do? First, and I am probably repeating things that have been said before, free votes have to take place. Second, free votes have to take place but if the government loses a vote it should not be a vote of non-confidence in the government. That would require a very simple rule to be implemented by the government. It could be done overnight. No bill, other than a money bill, should be matters of a vote of confidence in the government. On all other bills if the government loses a vote, then the government had a bad bill and it can take it back and fix the problem. It should not have to lose power.
In regard to committee structure, I was at a committee meeting about the free trade of the Americas and spoke to a person who was putting forward a very heartfelt intervention on the free trade agreement. She asked me why the committee was studying the free trade agreement weeks before the actual meeting in Quebec City. I said to her that surely she did not expect the committee meeting to have any meaning. I told her that her assessment was perfectly right. The purpose of the committee was to keep MPs busy. That was what it was for. It was not meant to use her considerable talents in a meaningful way. What a tragedy.
It breaks my heart, as I am sure it breaks the hearts of all members in the House, to sit on a committee listening to brilliant suggestions and solutions and heartfelt interventions on the part of members of the public in regard to fixing an important problem in our country and to know full well that it at best will become a report that will get one day of press coverage and then be tossed on a shelf with thousands of other reports to collect dust.
Health care is a case in point. We are to study it again after having studied it in 1995. Nothing has happened since then. There was a blue ribbon panel in 1995 that studied this most important issue affecting Canadians, a matter of life and death, and what happened to it? Nothing.
In regard to aboriginal affairs, there was an eloquent, lengthy $60 million study with umpteen constructive suggestions to help the group in our society that is most impoverished. Has anything been done about it? Nothing.
A solution would be to give committees more independence and get parliamentary secretaries who are really whips for the government off committees. Bills should go to committee in draft form so that the public making interventions can actually mould and craft the bill into something effective and reasonable. They should do this along with members of parliament from across party lines. We could use our collective talents and collective wisdom to build a really effective bill rather than having bills come from the ministry and made by the minister's lawyers. That would make a good bill. The bill would go back to the minister and he or she and his or her people could carve it up. However, ultimately in this process the bill would be superior because it would have tapped into a greater potential within our country and within the House.
All private members' business should be made votable. Every individual MP should have at least one bill votable per term, bar none. Each MP should also have one private member's motion votable, although that is of less importance. Also with respect to private members' business, why has the government gutted our legal tools? We have only four lawyers compared to the more than 80 provided to the government to deal with bills. The 250 plus MPs who are not in cabinet need more than four lawyers to help them with private members' business. We need to invest in this so individual MPs can have access to these legal tools. This would do much to improve the House of Commons.
In closing I can only ask the members of the public who are listening tonight to please get involved in this process. I can only ask them to come to the front of the House of Commons and demand change, demand that we make the House a democracy. With the same vigour and zeal, in a non-violent way, that people protested the FTAA in Quebec, although that was misguided, Canadians should be coming to the House and demanding that we make private members' business votable.
I challenge members of the public to do that because if they work with us then we will make a change that will benefit not only the people of Canada but will certainly benefit the House and make it a nimble, vigorous institution that will make our country in the 21st century much better than it is today.