Mr. Speaker, I want to speak briefly to the bill but I definitely will be supporting the bill brought forward by my colleague, the member for Mississauga South. He is a tremendous legislator who has a great understanding of the House, how it works and how it might be improved.
In such a complex system, items can sit around for years or fall between the cracks and people do not know they are there. They complicate an already complicated system. We do not need anything to make the system more complicated or to hold up the business of the country so anything we can do to streamline that and make it more effective I am sure all parliamentarians would agree.
The process for some bills is that after they receive royal assent from the Queen or the Governor General, they must then be proclaimed. Some of them come into effect on a particular date specified in the bill. Those are not the types of bills we are talking about today.
Other bills must be proclaimed by the government and, if that does not happen, then the bill does not come into effect. It could sit on the books forever which could cause a very confusing situation. In fact, years and decades later someone could proclaim a bill that was anachronistic, that had nothing to do with the times and it could be very dangerous, inefficient or not useful at all. This bill would simply clean up that situation.
A number of colleagues have already said that they wonder why that situation exists but the present system makes it possible to exist. My hon. colleague from Mississauga discovered that and came forward with this legislation to help fix that situation.
The legislation would provide that bills which have not been proclaimed after 10 years would no longer be in effect or be eligible to be in effect. The government could bring it back in the future but the legislation would allow a decision time of 10 years so that it would not be clutter and that it could not, perhaps by mistake or anachronistically, be brought into effect when it was not really meant to do so.
One thing we would want to be sure of in this process is that a bill would not be lost by accident. All of a sudden 10 years is up and the bills that might have been important, that might have been waiting for some important reasons that were mentioned by the members of the government and some other speaker to be proclaimed, they die because of the bill. However, the bill makes provisions for that. Bills will not just quietly die because a report would need to be made to the House after nine years. It also contains provisions to ensure that everyone is aware that this is about to take place and to give good consideration.
Once again, it would improve the system. When something is happening which people may not have been aware of or other exigencies or other important priorities have come forward and people have forgotten about it, the legislation would bring it back to the attention of the House that Parliament had decided to do something, that both Houses of Parliament had agreed and had passed all the procedures and for some reason it is still sitting there. The legislation would bring it to a decision point and a timely decision would be made so it does not just sit there.
At the moment about 57 bills have actually had royal assent but have not yet been proclaimed. Three of those are over 10 years old. We are not talking about a huge number of bills but there are enough that the bill is necessary as a housekeeping amendment to make Parliament and the legislative process more efficient.
I strongly support my colleague's bill and I hope the House will support it too.
I want to use the remaining time to float another concept that parliamentarians might think about in the future, which is that all legislation should sunset. There is legislation that is so old and anachronistic that it does not make any sense. Currently there are so many laws and the system is so big that the laws simply remain in force. There should be a provision that after a certain time, maybe 20 or 30 years, every bill would expire or would have to be renewed through a vote of Parliament to make sure it was still relevant.
Parliamentarians are very good at creating programs, legislation, expenditures and laws. However, they are not very good at getting rid of them when they are no longer useful.
This would affect virtually all departments and agencies of government. They would have to review what was in place and not let legislation just sit on the books. This could lead to all sorts of work, but on the other hand it would lead to a very timely review of ancient, anachronistic and useless provisions that had been created in a different era.
In the acceleration of the knowledge based world changes happen very fast and laws become outdated fairly quickly. This idea would provide a check and an update on everything the government has put into place. At some timeframe in the future all laws and programs would be reviewed by the appropriate departments and ultimately by Parliament.
This is something for parliamentarians to think about when improving the parliamentary system in the future.