Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order as to the fundamental nature of the way the House functions and the way that you, Mr. Speaker, allow that smooth processing function to go on. My point of order is specific to Bill C-45, which the House now has before it.
I am rising on a point of order that is indirectly related to Bill C-45 insofar as I am hoping to influence your decision-making on the so-called grouping of report stage motions, which the House will receive tomorrow morning as debate begins at that stage of the bill. I will be asking you to allow for a recorded division on each motion that you select for debate, rather than grouping many of them together and having a single vote applied to more than one distinct question moved by various members of the House. Essentially, I will be making the argument that it is not for the Speaker to limit the ability of MPs to make distinct choices on how to vote on distinct questions.
For Canadians watching at home who are not familiar with our somewhat antiquated and perhaps even arcane practices, it may seem odd that I even have to make this request. I suspect that most Canadians would intuitively think that the Speaker could not have the power, and should not have the power, to require MPs to choose a single vote on multiple distinct questions. I do not think so either and I am going to ask you, Mr. Speaker, to avoid doing so for the report stage of Bill C-45 as well as to set the precedent for how Speakers deal with this matter in the future.
As you well know, Mr. Speaker, you, like your predecessors, are in the habit of grouping motions in amendment at report stage for debate and voting when there is a large number of motions on the notice paper. That has often been the case with omnibus bills, such as C-45 and C-38, which the House studied last spring, by their very nature.
The government decided to put hundreds of clauses in a single bill, and the House and its members are being forced to study them as a single block. That is their choice, not ours, and I am sure it is not your choice either.
I will quote directly from your explanation, Mr. Speaker, of the report stage groupings of Bill C-38, which took place on June 11 of this year. Your explanation to the House was as follows:
—motions to delete clauses have always been found to be in order and it must also be noted have been selected at report stage. These motions are allowed at report stage because members may wish to express views on a clause without seeking to amend it. As is the case on such occasions, I have tried to minimize the amount of time spent in the House on this kind of motion by grouping them as tightly as possible and by applying the vote on one to as many others as possible.
While I am now raising an objection to this practice, Mr. Speaker, I know that you were simply following what has been done by the House and others on such occasions. However, when I looked into the written explanation for this practice, the practice that is written in our guidelines and practices for this place, I was somewhat surprised to find very little in the way of direct guidance for you as Speaker. In fact, what I found was very simply a passage in the Annotated Standing Orders of the House of Commons, on page 272 under Standing Order 76.1(5). To be clear, this is not the Standing Order itself, but rather, the explanation of it. All that is said is the following:
The Speaker determines the order in which the motions will be called and the effect of one vote on the others (for example, if the vote on one motion can be applied to another motion). The purpose of the voting scheme is to avoid the House having to vote twice on the same issue.
That is very clear. Even in this annotation to our Standing Orders, the intention of those groupings is to avoid having the House vote twice on the same issue.
There is also a similar explanation in the House of Commons Procedure and Practice, second edition, which I will, from this point on, refer to as O'Brien and Bosc. On page 784, it states:
—the Speaker...also decides on how they will be grouped for voting, that is, the Speaker determines the order in which the motions in amendment will be called and the effect of one vote on the others. The purpose of the voting scheme is to obviate any requirement for two or more votes on the same issue.
It is pretty clear in its intention and its practice. To avoid voting more than once on the same thing is essential for the House.
Here is the problem. The groupings that you, Mr. Speaker, created for the government's last large omnibus bill were not, in my view, limited to preventing multiple votes on the same issues. Groupings were made to have only one vote applied to completely different clauses in the bill, each of which constituted a separate and distinct issue for the House to address, which is in fact our guideline in our practices, not a suggestion but an actual strict rule and guideline.
It is the government, with the help of its lawyers in the Department of Justice, that has told the House that it deemed each of the clauses to be distinct issues, not us in the opposition. If they were the same issue, they would be in the same clause.
I submit that in the ongoing effort to review and improve the living tree of our procedures and practices, saving MPs from voting on the same issue is not what Speakers have been doing during the report stage groupings. It seems to me that they have been treating motions at report stage as a nuisance and one that should be severely limited, rather than as what they are, as was referenced in the practices before.
I find this somewhat disturbing. If these motions are legitimate questions that the House is meant to deal with at report stage, the final stage, surely MPs should have a choice on how to vote on them. As it stands, MPs are forced to make one single vote on a multitude, sometimes dozens, of individual questions, which are separate in their concepts and ideas.
A clear example of this practice comes again from your report stage ruling on Bill C-38 from June 11 of this year. Motion No. 143 is a motion I know you, Mr. Speaker, remember well. It read that Bill C-38 would be amended by defeating clause 68, good old clause 68. In your ruling, Mr. Speaker, MPs were told that with regard to Motion No. 143, the choice to vote yea or nay on that question would apply to 47 other individual questions, which MPs had moved and you, as Speaker, had selected for debate in the House.
Those questions were: clauses 144 to 146, 149, 151 to 153, 156, 158, 170, 172, 174, 175, 177, 179, 194, 208, 201, 211, 213, 215 and 217, 222 to 224, 226, and 228 to 230, and 232 to 249.
It is impossible for one person, even a person as wise as the Speaker of the House of Commons, to be sure that all MPs share the same opinion on each of these 48 motions. The Speaker may be reasonably sure with respect to the members who moved the motions, and perhaps, by extension, the other members of their party, but in the case of members of other parties or independent members, that assumption cannot be made with the same degree of certainty.
The people watching these debates at home or in the gallery may get the impression that we are entering a dark maze known to some as the Ottawa bubble. In the interest of clarity, I will refer to the example given previously and provide a useful example of the possible repercussions of vote grouping.
In your grouping, Mr. Speaker, Motion No. 143 moved to delete a clause that makes a correction to the simple heading in the French version of an existing law. That is all it did. It seems to me that some members may not want to oppose that change and would therefore tend to vote against the motion. However, that choice applies automatically to Motion No. 144, a completely different idea and concept. It asked to delete clause 69 of Bill C-38. Clause 69 changed the definition of a navigable water and penalty under the act in question, which the same member could easily wish to support.
Just to be clear, we voted once in the groupings that were made by your Chair. One motion on changing the heading in a French version of the bill was also connected to the very definition of a navigable water. It is clear and obvious that a member of Parliament may have two different opinions on those ideas, yet was only being permitted to vote once. That goes against the rules and practices of the House.
As a result of those groupings and nothing else, I am afraid to say, MPs were forced to make a single choice, yea or nay, despite the fact that they would be voting against their conscience no matter which way they voted. It puts members of Parliament who try to represent their constituents into an impossible bind. Whichever way they vote, they end up voting against their conscience. That is not and should not be permissible.
I believe, and I hope you will agree, Mr. Speaker, that the man or woman in your chair should not make a decision that puts any member in a position where they are forced to make such an impossible choice.
In that way, the question of MPs voting against their conscience is one that has been raised before. In fact, the House recently spent a day debating an opposition motion that reminded us all of what the current Prime Minister had to say on a similar matter when he was the one rallying against the anti-democratic agenda of the then Liberal Canadian government, rather than driving the agenda as he does today.
In the Prime Minister's point of order of March 25, 1994, and this quote has become quite familiar in this hall, he said:
—in the interest of democracy...How can members represent their constituents on these various [ideas] when they are forced to vote in a block on such legislation and on such concerns?...We can agree with some of the measures but oppose others.
The Prime Minister was right then. He is in fact wrong now to create these omnibus bills. However, you, as the Speaker, are obligated to maintain the ability of members to vote their conscience.
You will know, Mr. Speaker, that at the time the Prime Minister was objecting to the very existence of omnibus bills, an objection he no longer seems to hold because he has created many and some of which are large.
Speaker Parent then ruled against the point of order, as many others have in similar circumstances, because the objection was being made to the vote at second reading or another vote on the general progress of the bill.
I will quote from Speaker Parent's ruling from April 11, 1994, which was in direct response to the current Prime Minister. He stated:
However, it is the view of the Chair that in the adoption of a second reading motion the House gives approval in principle to a bill...then moves on to the consideration of its specific provisions in subsequent stages.
This is the stage we are at right now.
He continues “Hence, while I cannot accept the hon. member's request to divide or set aside Bill C-17”, which was an omnibus bill by the Liberal government, “I can suggest to him and to other members that should they so wish they may propose amendments to the bill in committee or at report stage and in so doing have an opportunity to express their views and vote on the specific sections of the bill”.
Therefore, in Speaker Parent's ruling, when ruling against the current Prime Minister in his effort to throw out the omnibus bill altogether, because it represented an effort to have MPs vote at cross-purposes to their conscience, he said that there was an opportunity that would come later, at report stage, in which amendments could be moved with respect to those specific sections of the bill and then not be encumbered by it anymore.
This stiff rejection of our current Prime Minister's concern is explained in Beauchesne's Parliamentary Rules & Forms, sixth edition, at page 194, citation 634, which states:
—the practice of using one bill to demand one decision on a number of quite different, although related subjects, while a matter of concern, is an issue on which the Speaker will not intervene....
That is correct. That is the ruling on omnibus bills and the nature of omnibus bills. We are talking about something quite different now and much more nefarious.
Mr. Speaker, at this point in my speech, I would like to emphasize a fact that may seem obvious to you. I am not arguing for or against the validity or even the value of omnibus bills. That is not my point.
You and your predecessors have clearly decided that we would have to deal with such bills, for better or worse. The issue I am raising today is simply the individual right of a member of Parliament to vote according to his or her conscience on issues before the House.
Given the Prime Minister's previous objection to a single vote on a bill that covers a number of issues, I hope that he will support my position on the fact that a single vote on several distinct elements of a bill forces members to vote against their conscience.
Even if the Prime Minister does not agree with my submission, and no longer agrees with himself on this point, there have been many rulings that point out the importance of the rights of members to vote on diverse components of a bill, which are its individual clauses at committee and now report stage.
In his ruling of May 11, 1977, Speaker Jerome stated:
I think that an hon. member of this House ought to have the right to compel the House to vote on each separate question.
He went on in the same ruling of that year to say:
—a member ought to be able, if he wishes to attempt through motions to delete under Standing Order 75(5) to isolate those sections which he feels ought not to be amended or that ought to be voted upon separately, without offending the principle of the bill.
That is exactly what will happen at report stage on this bill.
Finally, in that same ruling:
I think that would give the hon. member and other hon. members an opportunity that they should enjoy, to put their position on the record, which I think ought to be known, and also to require others in the House to vote in respect of that position....where a bill is presented...which contains amendments to several different areas of the law although all connected to criminal law, a member ought to be able to use some procedure at some stage of the bill to cause the House to make separate decisions on those very subject matters.
In his decision of June 8, 1988, Speaker Fraser stated that members have the ancient privilege of voting on each separate proposition before the House. It is indeed an ancient privilege and one that we, all the other members of this institution and myself, must jealously guard.
The problem is that the grouping of report stage motions presumes that one can predict the intentions of members with respect to specific matters that have already been identified as being legitimate and substantive. Perhaps this may seem intuitive, but I would like to say that only in exceptional and extraordinary circumstances should someone be authorized to presume how members will vote on a motion before the House.
Given that omnibus bills have been routinely introduced by this government, these are not exceptional circumstances.
Speaker Milliken, your predecessor, Mr. Speaker, made this point clear when he was addressing the use of Standing Order 56.1 to presume the outcome of a vote in the House, and he said:
The effect of the motion adopted pursuant to Standing Order 56.1 was to predetermine the results of all the votes following the first recorded division. It is clear to the Chair that this application of the standing order goes well beyond the original intent, that is, for the presentation of routine motions as defined in Standing Order 56.1.(1)(b).
The standing order has never been used as a substitute for decisions which the House ought itself to make on substantive matters.
It cannot be replaced. There is no rule in the House that allows us to circumvent the right of any hon. member to have a clear and concise vote on individual subject matters. I will continue with the quote:
In the meantime, based on close examination of past precedents and the most recent use of Standing Order 56.1 as a tool to bypass the decision making functions of the House, I must advise the House that the motion adopted on June 12, 2001, will not be regarded as a precedent. I would urge all hon. members to be vigilant about the use of this mechanism for the Chair certainly intends to be watchful.
The regrouping of report stage amendments for the purpose of voting presumes the very same thing: how MPs will wish to vote on a question before the House. This is a right that the Speaker made very clear should be protected with vigilance.
The introduction to chapter 12 of O'Brien and Bosc sums up very well the current reality of majority governments. On page 527, there is a quote from Parliaments in the Modern World, by parliamentary expert Philip Laundy: “The principle underlying parliamentary procedure is that the minority should have its say and the majority should have its way.”
In my opinion, this means that, in a majority Parliament, the government has the right to get through its legislative agenda, and the opposition has the right to slow passage of legislation in a reasonable manner.
Having a distinct vote on each question put forward by MPs that is clear, distinct and admissible, surely falls under the umbrella of what should be considered reasonable.
In fact, the truth is that the government is directly responsible for any delay that it perceives to be unnecessary in this regard. In this and all pieces of legislation, the government decides how many clauses it wishes to include. This was not a choice by the opposition. This was not a choice by you as Speaker.
The government drafted this massive bill with so many clauses contained. In all this, in all pieces of legislation, the government chose which to include. In Bill C-45 there are now 516 separate clauses, each of which contains a separate legislative change, either to amend or eliminate entirely an existing law or to create a new one. Each is a distinct issue that must be dealt with on a distinct and individual basis.
When MPs move to delete that clause, it is an altogether different question than moving to delete another clause entirely. If it were not, they would be the same clause in the first place.
For the record, I am in full support of the Speaker's right to not select particular motions for the House to deal with at report stage. Motions that are vexatious or clearly dilatory, such as moving to turn a comma into a semicolon, should not be selected because it is a waste of Parliament's time. However, deleting individual clauses of a bill is a right that MPs can, and must be able to, exercise. To speak plainly, they are not a waste of time. Casting a distinct vote on each one is an ancient right of which all MPs should be able to avail themselves and it must be protected by your office, Mr. Speaker.
Deleting a clause of the bill is debatable and therefore a substantive motion. O'Brien and Bosc remind us, on page 782:
Since motions in amendment at report stage are open to debate, they fall into the category of substantive motions...
There is no question there. The effort to delete a clause is a substantive motion. Surely, MPs should be making a decision on these substantive motions individually, rather than as a group.
In conclusion, I wish to present my arguments. Although I may be giving the impression of wanting to ascribe to you the responsibility for this very serious problem, I am keenly aware of the fact that you are following what has been done by previous speakers in such matters. I do not want Canadians who are watching to believe that this is a problem specific to your tenure as Speaker of the House of Commons.
In fact, I know that you believe that the Speaker should not influence the manner in which the House of Commons deals with an omnibus bill such as Bill C-45.
On June 11, in a ruling on a point of order questioning the legitimacy of this type of bill, Mr. Speaker, you cited Speaker Fraser's ruling of June 8, 1988, on page 16257 of Debates, saying:
Until the House adopts specific rules relating to omnibus Bills, the Chair's role is very limited and the Speaker should remain on the sidelines as debate proceeds and the House resolves the issue.
I submit that the practice of forcing MPs to make a single vote on multiple individual questions is not written in the rules of the House, by which you as Speaker are bound. Rather it is a practice followed simply because that is the way it has been done before. However, this clearly is not a justification for the ruling.
In my view, the government's use of omnibus bills, with many hundreds of clauses, sets the table for these groupings. However, given the government, and only the government is responsible, I believe that the Speaker should allow the omnibus nature of their initiative manifest itself in all aspects of the process, including the opposition's right to use the tools of the House to delay, however temporarily, the passage of the bill.
You, Mr. Speaker, have the power to right this wrong and to unburden members of this chamber from making a single choice on multiple questions. I am asking you to exercise that power when you rule on the process for the House to follow at report stage on Bill C-45.