Mr. Speaker, a topic of this sort is so wide-ranging and so complex it is difficult to know how to make best use of the time available.
I taped and watched the presentations that were made last night by the various parties as we introduced this debate. It strikes me that in this debate and in the work that has been done, there are an enormous range of suggestions and an enormous number of targets. Some want to look at changing the issues that have to do with the Senate. Some want to look at issues that have to do with matters that are outside of this chamber. Some want to deal very specifically with the rules of the House themselves, and there were some interesting, very specific comments on that.
I want to step back though for a minute because I think part of the problem that we have is that we are maybe trying to address the wrong problem. We keep coming back to this debate. It was not that long ago when we had a debate of this sort. I thought we had done some of these things. One more time we are back here trying to figure out how to modernize the House of Commons.
It is true to say that some of that will require some specific changes to the rules. However, if we really want to tackle this task, we need to spend a little time thinking about what is the problem that we are trying to fix and perhaps spend a little time thinking about how did we get to the point where we want to change this. Then maybe we can come back to looking at some of those things that we might want to change.
From one perspective, despite all the angst that we feel about how this place works, it is hard to argue that Canada as a country is not doing well. Relatively speaking, looking at other countries around the world, we have a high standard of living. We have a civil society that functions quite well. These things are the result of this structure of governance. Therefore why are we so upset about it?
At the same time we have, and I am certainly one of those who feels there is a profound need to reform this place, a growing sense of alienation from different parts of the country. We elect parties. Canadian citizens elect people to represent them who do not want to be part of this country. We elect people who have party positions that profoundly reject the values of other parts of the country. I think that is a reflection of an underlying dissatisfaction with some of the ways in which the country works.
It is also a reflection of the inability of the House to perform one of its prime functions. When I am asked to speak about this place, I describe the House of Commons, in its best sense, as an enormous values clarification exercise for the country. When I came here as an urban member from the City of Winnipeg in 1993, the first thing I was confronted with was the codfish crisis on the east coast. It was something I knew very little about, had very little expertise in and had very little interest in until I was drawn into that discussion because colleagues of mine needed some assistance in sorting out what was a very critical issue to the Canadians that they represented. I have worked with them because frankly I want their support when I have a problem with drought in my area of the country.
It is that process of articulating and establishing that consensus. We talk often about the great Canadian consensus. That is where the House adds real value. We suffer when we allow that consensus building process to become too narrowly focused. In many ways that is at the heart of part of the problem that we feel here.
At the beginning of the government House leader's remarks, I heard a comment that is another part of the problem. He said that we were trying to modernize problems which began with the previous government. There was a sense that somehow these problems were the result of the actions of an individual or a group at one point in time.
It is popular for the other side of course to blame this on the predelictions or the inclinations of the current Prime Minister. I have had my own concerns about the positions taken by the current Prime Minister and I have written to him regarding those issues, starting about four years ago.
At the same time, the problems that we must deal with began a long time ago. The report of the standing committee of the British House of Commons, that last looked at this issue, addressed a concern about effective control over government expenditure going back to 1919. It looked at proposed post-war reforms. The British House of Commons has been going through much the same thing as we are, trying to figure out how, in a modern society, a chamber of this sort can hold the government to account.
I am often drawn to a report written by C.E.S. Franks at Queen's University. This particular paper was written in May 1999. He looked at some of these issues and made the following comment:
Compared with other major Westminster style parliamentary democracies, and particularly that of Britain, the Canadian Parliament is government/executive dominated and more highly partisan. In fact, the whole Canadian system, and the provincial governments as well, are executive centred rather than parliament centred, and highly partisan and adversarial as well.
He goes on to explain a development that is kind of interesting when we reflect on what we are trying to accomplish. He talked about a country that essentially did not have a representative chamber. It did not have a democratically elected form of government in its beginning. It was run by a strong public service coming out of the British colonial office. As the country matured and as it began to develop representative bodies, consultative bodies, and finally the development of the Canadian Parliament, the latter came on as an adjunct to what was already a well established executive.
While the Canadian and British styles of government are executive centred in their nature, the Canadian version is even more centered on the executive than would be the case in the Westminster model. We see that when we look at Westminster. We see the actions of its committees and the things it is able to accomplish. It is not uncommon for a government bill to fail in the British House because members reject it. It is certainly common for members to be highly independent in their activities on select committees.
Another thing that Mr. Franks pointed out is something that I had not thought about much until I started to reflect on our history over the last 30 years or so. I would like to read the quote and then come back to how I interpret it. He said:
In comparison with other western legislatures, the Canadian Parliament is characterized by short-term, amateur members.
That is an interesting comment when we think about it. There have been three big wipeouts of this chamber since the second world war: 1958 with John Diefenbaker when he came in and replaced the majority of members; 1984 with Brian Mulroney; and 1993 when we came to office. We came from a small opposition party and went to a large governing party. A lot of the traditional opposition parties disappeared or were greatly reduced.
A lot of members came into the House with basically little experience with the place. What experience they had in political life tended to be experience built around debate in the process of election, which is highly partisan, highly charged, and highly focused on trying to prove that the other person is wrong. As a result, we carried a lot of that kind of activity to the floor of the House. Committee meetings, instead of being collaborative sessions of colleagues with an interest in seeing good government, became mini versions of question period.
I often wonder how public servants must feel when they sit in front of a committee to make presentations and are basically like set pieces to an ongoing debate, one party trying to prove that the other party is either too right wing, too left wing, too irresponsible, too corrupt, or too whatever. The business we get charged with, which is to attempt to articulate to the government the values that we would like to see represented in legislation or in the operations of the government, gets largely lost.
In an environment like that, where there is more external management, it is easy for members to be relatively irresponsible, relatively casual in their relationships to committee work because it has no consequence, nothing much happens as a result of the activity of committees.
It does not mean we cannot all point to positive experiences. I have had some good experiences in committee. Some committees have done some pretty good work, but by and large, the lack of regard for committee work has caused a lot of members to stop putting a lot of time and energy into it. Members are not unintelligent when it comes to the use of their time. They will spend their time and will focus their time, energy and intellectual capacity in areas where they think it produces the greatest return for the people they represent and the issues that they are concerned about.
I want to add another set of forces. It is interesting to note, and Marleau and Montpetit reference it, the creation of the government House leader. I believe it started casually in 1944 and was formally introduced in the Standing Orders in 1946. As depicted in Marleau and Montpetit, the Prime Minister of the day would come to the House each day and say here is the stuff we should work on, here is the piece of legislation, and then would leave. Then the whips of the various parties would sort of work it out, have their debates and then come to conclusions. If a cabinet minister wished to get something passed or worked on, he would be in here talking to people, working on the debate and trying to build upon the atmosphere that existed in the chamber to get important legislation passed.
The arrival of the position of the House leader meant that the process of negotiation delegation was largely passed over to somebody who became more of an operative expert. How something was passed through the House became more critical rather than worrying about the substance of it. The value of passage became more important than the value of the debate.
However, there are other forces at play here. If we graph the size of the public service in Canada, as a metaphor for the change and complexity, during the period between 1901 and the beginning of the second world war, the size of the public service did not increase that much, between 30,000 and 50,000 members, excluding military personnel because obviously there were bump ups during the war years. Post-war, it increased at one point to a total full time equivalence of about 400,000. It has declined a bit since then but, if we think about that for just a second, that difference in the government, that was at one time relatively small to one that is enormous, produced all sorts of different levels of complexity.
Added to that there were massive and continuing changes in the technology of communication. In 1952 television was introduced in Canada. By 1957, 85% of the country was covered by television. However, television is an interesting phenomenon because television tends not to focus well on groups. It tends to focus well on individuals, debate and aggression, as opposed to reasoned discourse.
It did a couple of things. Prior to the introduction of television, the local member in the riding would be subject to a lot of the interaction with local constituents and the Prime Minister would be someone whom one would see occasionally. All of a sudden the Prime Minister was introduced into everyone's living room. John Kennedy was considered to be the first television president in the U.S. It is fair to say that Trudeau would be the first equivalent, the first television-savvy Prime Minister in Canada. That produced, without any changes in the rule, an increased focus on the individual through the hot medium. It produced an increased focus on that office on the executive side, and greatly increased the power and authority of the centre.
Another thing also occurred. Technology began to get more broadly introduced and it has had a major impact on the pace of life. Many people have written about the compression of time and distance. Before, when people wrote cheques on their bank account they might have had a week or two before the money was actually taken out of their account. Today, it happens immediately. If we sent a document overseas it might have been a month before it actually got there, today it is faxed overnight. That compression of time has greatly increased the response demands on all of us. We see it in our daily life all the time. It has increased that need for response on government.
What has the impact been on a deliberative chamber like this one, where people need the time to sit, talk, work out that consensus, clarify those values to come to that compromise, and come to that Canadian consensus? It has been essential in order to meet those demands of the incredible pressure for a response this place has been increasingly subject to. New tools, new rules, new changes in the Standing Orders have all served to move things through the House faster.
We still have a tool called closure. If members go back into the history of this place they will find that it was used once around 1932 and I forget why. It was used once during the pipeline debate in 1956 and once during the flag debate in 1966. Closure had that kind of frequency.
Time allocation was introduced in 1972 to assist with the need to get useful information through the House. It was used on average twice a year during the 1970s and about six times a year during the 1980s. I have not checked the statistics recently, but it was over 12 to 15 times a year in the 1990s. There is talk, and I heard the House leader refer to it, about the British practice of using time allocation on almost everything. The British and members of this House have this tremendous pressure from the community and the people they serve to have a decision. They cannot wait. They need to have some kind of a result from this place.
The problem is that we have not challenged ourselves to reform the House. It is not about the minutia of what time do we stand up or sit down on this thing. It is about how this chamber becomes more relevant in the lives of Canadians. How do we engage in those important public debates? How do we work in real time so that we are working at the speed of a decision that is required in a modern economy? Instead, we pride ourselves on the arcane nature of this place, so that we can sit around and have sober debate, and become increasingly irrelevant to Canadians. It is not because people have some sort of desire to take authority away from the chamber. It is because the public must have a decision.
I heard members on the other side talk a lot about regulation and the tendency of government to use regulation. When I was a public servant in Manitoba I was in charge of writing a piece of legislation. I asked the drafters to write clauses that put important decisions into regulation rather than putting them in the body of the bill. It was not because I had any thought about the structure of power and authority in society or the nature of legislative bodies. It was because if a neighbouring province changed its legislation I needed to respond. I could not wait the year and a half or two years it would take to get the bill through the legislature.
Over time we have seen a migration of the power, authority and the influence of this place move away to other forums. It is not because of nasty desires or nasty intentions of individuals. It is because of the real need of a modern organization to respond more quickly. The profound challenge to us is to start to get our heads around how this place must change to function more effectively in real time.
There is a substantive issue at the heart of this. It lies behind the attempts to deal with some of the rules. I was about to say there is too much authority centred in the executive. There is too much authority assumed by the executive. The reality is this place has enormous authority if it chooses to exercise it. I would argue that if we actually exercised all the authority we have there would be such a public outcry against it because we would grind everything to a halt using our normal practices.
We need to erase some of the precedents and practices that have tended to make it too easy for the centre to become the articulator of values for the country and the ultimate decision makers on all things. We must rebalance that power relationship and that is not an easy thing to do.
I used to study children's rights legislation. I remember a report from a professor at Dalhousie University who said that a right cannot be bestowed upon someone without taking it away from somebody else. The professor said that power is a zero sum game.
It is much the same here. If the chamber were to assume more power and authority, then that would have to come from some other place. There will always be resistance. I believe it is something worth doing. We must be clear about what we are trying to do.
I note that there was a comment by the House leader that there is a willingness in the chamber to allow us to revisit the subject and talk in more detail. I will forward some of my suggestions.
Committee membership and the length of terms that members are appointed for should be examined. We should do away with the striking committee practice of forming committees every September. I believe that a member should be appointed to a committee and the committee should be functional at least for the period from the throne speech to prorogation, if not for an entire parliament, so that there is some consistency in the operation.
Some changes that need to take place internally are really caucus decisions. I know that our caucus is working on this and I suspect that others are as well. Perhaps we can visit those changes in a further debate, but the real challenge to us, with your indulgence, Mr. Speaker, is to think through how we can modernize this chamber so that it begins to function in a way that makes us able to play a role in the important decisions that the country has to make.