Mr. Speaker, it seems appropriate, given that we are debating a motion which has as one of its goals a workable proposal for allowing all items to be votable, to remember that at one point in this place no private members' business was automatically votable.
I say that with particular significance given the fact that the Secretary of State for Latin America and Africa and the member for Burnaby—Douglas are in the House, and I am on my feet, and all three of us are the only surviving members of the class of 1979. When we arrived in this place, private members' business routinely came up for only an hour, was talked out and could only be brought to a vote then and there if there was unanimous consent. Generally that involved some kind of skulduggery on the part of people who were in the House at the time.
On the few occasions that things were passed with unanimous consent, they were certainly never voted on. They were only done if they were unanimously agreed to, and that was an unsatisfactory procedure. I say this for newer members of the House because perhaps it has been so long since that was the case that they no longer see the system that we now have as an improvement because what we have today has been the case since 1986. Fifteen years is a long time of doing things a particular way and we have found that it does not satisfy all members. There has been a recurring debate about the wisdom or even the possibility of all private members' business becoming votable items.
We in the NDP feel we can support the motion and intend to support it because we think it would be a worthy task for the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs to come up with a workable proposal. I register my skepticism about whether or not this can be done because it would seem to me that one of the things a workable proposal would involve, and this would be my concern with respect to making all private members' business votable, would be some kind of mechanism whereby the House would not be forced to divide on matters that would seem to be frivolous or not worthy of the consideration of the House of Commons.
The McGrath committee in 1985 recommended the procedure we have now. It was thought to be an achievement just to get six out of twenty items to be votable.
Having said that, the other perspective behind that was that there needed to be some kind of filtering or discerning mechanism to make sure that what came before the House for lengthier debate and ultimately for a decision was worthy of that kind of attention. Any kind of workable proposal would have to give the House, either by special committee, by negotiation or by some way that is not clear to me at this point, a way to make a discernment as to what should come before the House for lengthier debate and for a vote.
I wish the committee well in trying to do this. We are certainly not against the idea because this is something we have all been working on. It was part of the raison d'être behind the 100 signature mechanism, which I was skeptical about at the beginning and which ultimately did not work for a variety of reasons. Like a lot of reforms around here, they do not always work out exactly the way they are intended. They have unforeseen consequences, and that was the case with that reform.
However there has been a will, off and on, to try to come up with a better system than the one we now have. I am not standing here today to say that the system we have is perfect, but I am somewhat skeptical as to whether or not we can come up with a better imperfect system than the one we have. We shall see.
With respect to the idea suggested earlier by a Bloc spokesperson, if I understood him correctly, about devoting Fridays to private members' business, the member thought that Fridays were not exactly a highlight of the parliamentary week.
If he thinks the Fridays we now have are not the highlight of the parliamentary week, my fear for Fridays that would be used to deal only with private members' business is that they would make the Fridays we now have look exciting and well attended. We have to be somewhat more realistic about the number of members who would stay in town so they could catch a private member's debate on Friday morning or Friday afternoon.
Maybe I am wrong about this but one of the things we need to do, which would be much better to do and to some extent we do it already, is to embed private members' business in the ongoing routine business of the House so that people are here and so that it happens in a context where members are available and do not have to make a special effort for private members' business.
That is too bad in a sense. One would think, given a lot of the rhetoric about private members' business from many members and from all sides of the House, that people would be rushing in here to deal with private members' business. However anyone who has ever come to private members' hour knows that it is not necessarily the case.
I would like to put on record my own reservations. I am not necessarily speaking for my colleagues on this when it comes to the Friday analysis because it is not something we have taken a position on, so to speak. I am not sure that the notion of devoting Fridays to private members' business would work as well as some people think it would.
Some of the rhetoric that applies to developing a better private members' business model sometimes comes in the context of a larger argument for giving members of parliament more power as individuals. That is where we really have to look in terms of enhancing the role of individual members of parliament, both individually and collectively.
I say with regret that the modernization committee report which may be debated later today or tomorrow unfortunately did not really do that. It did not change the balance of power in this place so that members on committees, for instance, both individually and collectively, would have more power over the government and the cabinet and would have more independence. Those are the kinds of things that are all critical to empowering the private member, to empowering the individual member.
When the McGrath committee made its recommendations on private members' business, the recommendations with which we have lived for the last 15 years, it made them in conjunction with another set of recommendations having to do with committees that have not been implemented.
We should have taken the full spirit of McGrath and implemented it so that it was not just in terms of private members' business but also in terms of committees. Taking parliamentary secretaries or government coaches off the committees and keeping them off; giving members on committees, particularly government backbenchers, more independence from their whips so that they could not be removed at a moment's notice if all of a sudden they developed an independent thinking capacity or came to be critical of a bill or to see its inadequacies in a way that the government did not like; and changing the rules so that these people could not be yanked and replaced with others would go a long way toward giving individual members more power to do the kind of job that Canadians expect them to do when they come here.
I do not see any point in belabouring the debate. We are in favour of the motion. We hope the committee will be able to come up with a workable proposal. Of course we will do our part when the committee is engaged in that task.