Or ditto, yes.
“--about the previous committee, the committee on procedure and House Affairs”.
But assuming that this does not happen, assuming that it is a different set of recommendations, we now have a problem. The House is now faced with, not one, but two committees which both have, although perhaps different cross-sections, a majority of their membership reporting back with two different sets of conclusions and to the degree they are different, they are necessarily in conflict.
What do we do? Do we adopt one? Do we adopt the other? I am not sure how one would engage a concurrence debate in the House. It would certainly be interesting to deal with that, but it is hard to see how this improves anything.
Finally, I have one last point. I will just note that in her haste to put together some amendment, any amendment, to make it appear that the Liberals actually have some kind of plan at all, other than simply to avoid talking about any actual issue or at least any actual policy proposal, the Liberal deputy House leader produced a proposal for a committee which will have 11 members instead of the normal 12 who are assigned for special committees.
This is as a result of a negotiation that took place among all the House leaders at which she was present. We would always have 12 members for our special committees, and the reason for that was to ensure that we would not find the situation in which, if it is chaired by an opposition member, a tie vote would be cast between the government members and the opposition members. That is not an accurate reflection of the actual makeup of the House, but in their haste to put this together, she seems to have overlooked that point, and I think it once again points to the panic that the Liberals were in as they pulled together this amendment to their own motion.
Let me talk a little bit about the experts we have heard from. They are a very impressive cross-section of Canadian academia and the constitutional experts who have dealt with this problem and the surrounding issues dealing with Canada's unwritten constitution, that part of the constitution which we have inherited from Great Britain, the powers of the Governor General, the conventions regarding the advice that is given to the Governor General by the Prime Minister, and the conventions regarding where else the Governor General can turn, not for advice in the formal sense, advice meaning effectively instruction in the formal constitutional sense, but rather for other opinions and perspectives. This includes people who have served as advisers to Her Excellency and Her Excellency's predecessors on various political issues in the past.
For example, we have heard from Patrick Monahan, a very distinguished scholar who has advised Her Excellency in the past; Peter Russell, emeritus professor, who likewise has served as a vice-regal adviser. We heard from Nelson Wiseman, who has written extensively on these matters; from Thomas Hall, a former Clerk of the House, who had some very insightful comments; Bradley Miller, who presented to us just two days ago and who has written on the specific issue of conventions. That is the unwritten but generally accepted rules that govern us under the Westminster system. Andrew Heard talked to us, and we could go on.
I will note that as recently as last week, we came to an agreement to invite Professor Hogg to come back and testify before us. Inevitably that will be this autumn. Professor Hogg has also been an adviser to the Governor General and is one of Canada's leading constitutional authorities. As early as last week, the presupposition from the Liberals was that this committee would be meeting and continuing its hearings in the autumn. We will not have gotten to the point where we will sit down, collate the information and try to actually produce the report. We would still be conducting hearings in the autumn.
As befits any hearings into as serious and technically complicated a matter as this, it cannot be done quickly or easily. All of these factors show, first, good work is being done by the current committee and therefore there is no need to supercede it; second, it is just silly to talk about superceding it or replacing it; and third, I think they speak to the main theme that I am addressing today, which is just the disorganization and confusion of the Liberals.
Although the Liberals may not have thought it themselves overtly, I think in their heart of hearts they are starting to come to the conclusion that they really are no longer the natural governing party of Canada, a party that is capable of governing a country. They are really an opposition party that just opposes for the sake of generating attention to themselves, and they have done this without unfortunately having taken the steps that are necessary to be an effective opposition at the level of ideas.
I think there is a role for parties that are in opposition that do not have a real expectation of forming a government. I, myself, was a member of such a party back in the early days of the Reform Party when we did not think we would be forming the government in any immediate point in the future, but we did believe that we could intelligently and effectively advocate ideas. The Liberals have not quite mastered that yet.
I would suggest there is a long history of the CCF that Liberal members could examine which might guide them in this matter. I would suggest they start with comprehensible proposals like the one the leader of the NDP moved back in March, rather than incomprehensible ones such as the one the opposition leader moved. I would suggest they develop ideas and they stick to those ideas consistently and then perhaps they can serve that role.
If the Liberals want to demonstrate that they are capable of governing, which is a legitimate role they had in the past, then they have to start showing that they can conduct themselves in a businesslike manner. They certainly have demonstrated quite the opposite here.