Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Yellowhead. It is a great pleasure to rise today to address the motion put forward by my hon. colleague from Yorkton—Melville. I wish to unequivocally state my 100% support for the motion.
For the benefit of the vast audience out there in TV land watching the debate, I will begin by explaining what private members' business is and why it is so vital to our democratic process that the mechanism be strengthened from its current form.
In our parliamentary system the vast majority of time, resources and attention is devoted to government legislation. Bills introduced by ministers of the crown further the political agenda of the government of the day. However we as members of parliament are elected by our constituents to represent them here, rather than to represent this place to them, and to raise their issues of concern. As most of parliament's time is devoted to government legislation, our opportunity to act in a legislative capacity on behalf of the people we represent falls to the one hour of debate each day that is allotted to private members' business.
To give our audience an appreciation of the frustration that MPs feel over private members' business and the process through which it is chosen, I will briefly review it.
Hundreds of bills and motions are introduced in the House of Commons. Each one represents hours upon hours or in some cases days and weeks of research and work, but most never see the light of day. In order for a bill to actually be debated in the House, an MP's name must first be drawn from a lottery. The competition is fierce. There are 301 MPs with just one hour a day, one item per day, and approximately 135 sitting days per year. The math should be evident to everyone, particularly to my hon. colleague from Elk Island.
When and if a member's name is finally drawn, he or she can put forward a bill for debate and then the real challenge begins. Having beaten the odds and come this far, the bill in question is still not even eligible for a vote in the House of Commons. This means that we end up using the precious little time we have available to debate motions and bills which simply disappear upon the expiry of their one hour debate. Such non-votable bills and motions have absolutely no chance whatsoever of becoming law. It is debate for debate's sake and in my opinion it is a waste of valuable time.
If we as members of parliament want our issues to come to a vote, we must appear as witnesses before a special subcommittee to plead our case and argue why our bill or motion should be granted one of ten designations of votable status. The rules of the House explicitly ensure that most private members' business, if debated, does not get to a vote.
To make matters worse for opposition members, many of whom naively look to private members' business as their sole source of parliamentary effectiveness, the government maintains a majority of members on the subcommittee that decides which precious few bills become votable and which ones get to be a waste of valuable time. The government can use this majority to ensure that issues which run too contrary to the government's own vision have no chance of being subject to a vote in the House of Commons and therefore becoming law.
The very lucky items which, against all odds, are drafted, tabled, drawn, argued and finally awarded votable status go through a slightly different process. They get three hours of debate, one hour at a time, separated by about 30 sitting days, which means that in reality it takes about half the year just to get through the first stage of debate and come to an initial vote.
In the very exceptional circumstances when the government cannot force its own MPs to vote to kill a private member's bill, it has other levers to kill private members' bills more quietly.
First, if a bill passes second reading and is referred to a committee for further review, the government uses its numerical dominance of the committee to simply see to it that the item on the agenda mysteriously never comes up for consideration before the House has prorogued. The bill is thus buried in committee and never seen again.
Second, another famous tactic, one which the government employed against one of its own members in the last parliament, is strong arming its committee members to debate every clause of the bill and report the bill back to the House as a blank piece of paper. This actually happened, as the member for Mississauga East can attest. It is one of the greatest affronts to representative democracy that we have seen.
Third, failing even such draconian measures, if a private member's bill hypothetically manages to pass all stages of debate in the House of Commons, it must be brought forth for debate in the Senate. The Senate is faced with the same issue of whether or not it is to be given votable status in the other place. Our colleague from Scarborough Southwest has fallen victim to this sort of game in the previous parliament.
Finally, these measures are not even necessary. The whole private members' process is so drawn out that most bills and motions end up dying somewhere on the order paper when an election is called. I hope this summary serves to illustrate the absolute futility of the current private members' process. A mechanism which should be the greatest tool of parliamentarians becomes a joke.
The process is designed to be merely a show and to maintain absolute government control over what happens in the federal legislative sphere. Individual representatives of the citizens of Canada do not have the means to overcome government partisanship and to effect real legislative measures that matter to their constituents.
Private members' business has evolved dramatically since Confederation. We have tried models ranging from entire private members' days to the current system of one hour per day every day of the week.
Our current structure originates with the McGrath report of 1985 which established the votability rules and the lottery system that created the order of precedence for debate. The McGrath report summarized the state of private members' business when it stated:
The House does not attach any great importance to private members' business as it is now organized. Our proposals are designed to achieve a number of improvements in the way private members' business is dealt with. They would tighten the conditions of the ballot, widen the scope of private members' legislation, and ensure that some private members' bills and motions come to a vote.
It is evident that the democratic bar was already so low that a major objective of the single and greatest private members' business reform had to be to ensure that some private members' bills and motions came to a vote. The low bar has meant that the reformed system, with some minor subsequent reforms, has led to the mediocrity with which we operate today.
The single greatest impediment to the effectiveness of private members' business is votability. While other matters of procedure also require attention, I would argue that by the very act of making all private members' legislation votable we would be forcing the House to take private members' business seriously. Members would attend the debates and consult their constituents over the issues put forth.
Among the defenders of the status quo the same arguments tend to resurface. I will recount just a few. First, non-votable bills are useful because they raise awareness of issues. This argument is uneconomical. Why not raise awareness of important issues and give the House the power to pronounce upon them without having to repeat the process at a later time? Private members' business is scarce enough as it is.
Second, if all bills were votable, fewer bills would be considered because of the differential in debate time between votable and non-votable items. This argument is also an obfuscation. I believe that all members of this place would gladly see a reduction in the debatable time to a standard one hour if it meant their bills would have a hope of actually coming to a vote. This solution would increase the number of bills considered in the current structure.
Third, a democratically elected majority government should have control of the legislative agenda and not cede it to opposition members. Such an argument is an insult to opposition members and government backbenchers alike. The regional cleavages in Canada dictate that if private members' business is shut down then certain regions are effectively shut out of the legislative process.
Furthermore I would argue that if a government is scared of ideas and of free votes in the Commons it is no longer deserving of the right to govern. How much more legitimate can a government be than if it allows absolute freedom to debate and freedom to vote while still maintaining the confidence of members of the House?
Does general votability work? I want to point to a few examples. The Quebec standing orders state that apart from being referred to a committee before second reading “the general rules pertaining to bills shall apply to private bills”. The Alberta standing orders state that “the standing orders relating to public bills apply to private bills”. The Ontario rules state that the speaker is to put the question at 12 noon each Thursday for all private members' bills considered that week. They all get a vote.
I urge all members of the House to look upon today's debate as a golden opportunity to restore an important pillar of democracy to our assembly. In an age where power is increasingly concentrated in the Prime Minister's Office, and where party whips dangle carrots of travel or promotion in exchange for obedience, we must stand guard against allowing our House of Commons to become a technical afterthought to elite decision making.
We as individual members have the power today to support the motion and take back a part of the democratic power that has been bestowed upon us by our constituents and is a vital institution of the Westminster parliamentary system of which we are proud to be a part.