Debates of May 22nd, 2013

Motion That Debate Be Not Further Adjourned

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

All those in favour of the motion will please say yea.

[Some hon. members]

Yea.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

All those opposed will please say nay.

[Some hon. members]

Nay.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

In my opinion the yeas have it.

And five or more members having risen:

Call in the members.

(The House divided on the motion, which was agreed to on the following division:)

Vote #687

Extension of Sitting Hours

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

I declare the motion carried.

The House resumed from May 21 consideration of the motion, and of the amendment.

The extension of sitting hours

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, it is with pleasure that I rise and address what I believe is a very important motion that members really need to understand.

Apparently we now have a government that wants to work a little harder. The Conservatives say that is what this motion is all about. Well, they are not going to fool the members of this chamber. They are not going to fool Canadians. This motion does not have anything to do with working a little harder.

One of my colleagues asked why the government had decided to bring in this motion at this time. I think it is important for us to start talking a little about that and about the motives of this particular government in terms of the timing.

In the 39th Parliament, before a Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, the Clerk of the House of Commons made comments on the cost of running the House. As a part of that cost, about two weeks of extended hours is budgeted for. If the House were to deem it necessary to sit additional hours, and it knows it is going to sit additional hours, then there is an expectation that in fact it would have been budgeted for.

What we have found is that the government did not do that. The government House leader never approached any of his colleagues to say that they could anticipate sitting additional hours because we, the government, “want to work a little harder”.

It was not budgeted for. One could ask, as my colleague from the Atlantic region has pointed out quite correctly, why do we now have this motion before us for extended hours?

One of the reasons we have this motion is because of what I would classify as inappropriate behaviour, and because the government, through the Prime Minister's Office, is in a bit of dilemma right now. What the government may really be trying to accomplish is an exit from the House of Commons a little earlier in the hope that maybe the opposition would be more open to rising early due to having extended hours at this time in the legislative calender.

The government is hoping that at the end of the day we will get out a little earlier in June. This was not an issue. It was not being talked about. There was no formal discussion amongst House leaders, no formal discussions about if we do this or that in looking at extended hours.

The government House leader, possibly and most likely, after serious discussions with the Prime Minister's Office, came to the conclusion that what we need to do is lose a little bit of focus on what is happening in the Prime Minister's Office and to try to maybe change the channel.

We in the Liberal Party are not going to buy into that. We are committed to working hard. We are going to work just as hard and, I would ultimately argue, even harder than the government to ensure that there is a higher sense of accountability inside this chamber.

However, a lot has happened over the last week. Yesterday I stood in the chamber and made the suggestion that we should be having an emergency debate. What we are really talking about is the most senior official in the Government of Canada, the chief of staff to the Prime Minister, providing a substantial cash gift to a sitting parliamentarian.

This raises a whole host of issues in terms of whether this arrangement was fully compliant with the rules of the Senate, the Conflict of Interest Act, the Parliament of Canada Act or even the Criminal Code. These are very serious allegations, that Senator Duffy was promised by the Prime Minister's Office that the Senate committee would go easy on him if he kept his mouth shut. That is what was alleged to have happened here.

We are talking about the executive branch of government paying a parliamentarian to stay quiet and in return promising an outcome of an independent Senate committee. These are serious allegations. In the last two question periods, since we have been back in session, this has been the focus of all the attention. The Liberal caucus has focused its questions solely on that issue. We are the only party that has done this. We recognize there is something seriously wrong with this picture.

We cannot choose to believe that this is just something in which one individual, Nigel Wright, took upon himself and did not share any thoughts whatsoever with the Prime Minister's Office. We just do not believe it. He is the chief of staff for the Prime Minister's Office. There is a lot more to this than what the government is letting on. Therefore, we believe there is a need for the Prime Minister to come clean.

However, now the Conservatives have come up with the idea that they want to work hard. We in the Liberal Party have been working hard for Canadians ever since the last federal election and prior to that. We will continue to work hard and fight for the middle-class jobs and try to prevent the government's behaviour of continuously hiking taxes, such as the net tax increases the Conservative's have imposed on Canadians. We recognize what the important issues are for Canadians, and one of those issues is what has taken place in the Prime Minister's Office today.

When the government says that it now has a motion to have extended sitting hours, is it an attempt to try to get the opposition to bow down and say that we agree to exit early? This is not something that is going to fly with us in the House. At the end of the day, the Conservative government and the Prime Minister need to be held accountable for the actions that have occurred over the last number of weeks, and we are committed to doing that.

When the government House leader brought forward this motion, he said that it would provide for extra hours, that it was about managing the votes and that it was about the concurrence motions. This is how he sold the motion that we have been asked to vote upon. However, if the government were really sincere and genuine in wanting to deal with House business in an orderly fashion and it had nothing to do with issues such as the scandal that we have seen come out of the Prime Minister's Office, then the government House leader would have sat down with the opposition House leaders, the New Democrats and the Liberals, and talked seriously and fairly about how we could, in an orderly and timely fashion, have an agenda to pass whatever legislative agreements. That is what should have happened.

If it was deemed among the House leaders that we still needed to had those extra sitting hours, then fine, we would not need to have this type of debate, which is time limited, because there would have been an agreement put into place.

The government could have dealt with its legislative agenda in a fairer fashion, in which opposition members would have been afforded the opportunity to possibly prioritize bills and say which bills most concerned them and wanted to ensure there would be adequate debate on them. If it meant, in order to allow that to take place, there had to be extended hours, then there would be extended hours. A lot depends on what the true legislative agenda of the government is.

We have seen a change in government, from the minority days, when there was a higher sense of co-operation in things that took place in the House to this brand new Reform-Conservative-paranoid government. I suspect we could probably use a whole litany of adjectives.

The current majority government and its agenda is absolutely unacceptable. It says one thing and does another. It says that it is decreasing taxes, and that is not true. It is increasing taxes. It talks about being conservative in managing our finances well. It has taken surpluses and turned them into deficits. When it talks about democracy, no federal government in the history of Canada has been more anti-democratic in terms of presenting—

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Trudeau, King.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

The member can name all the prime ministers she wants, she will not find one prime minister.

All we have to do is look at time allocation and understand what it is. Time allocation is the limiting of the ability of members of the House to stand and address the legislative agenda. No government prior to the present one has used time allocation as a tool to pass legislation as much as this one.

Let us take a look at the 2012-13 budget bills. There are two of them. In fact, those two bills consisted of 1,000 pages. I am talking about the omnibus bills that were brought forward by the government. We cannot blame the backbenchers for not really understanding it, because I suspect it was never explained to them. These two bills were being used and manipulated by the government. It was using a budget as a back door to pass a legislative agenda. Numerous bills that should have been stand-alone bills were snuck through the back door of these massive bills.

The Prime Minister of Canada, back in the days when he was in opposition, and hopefully he will be back in those days in a couple of years, talked about one omnibus budget bill that consisted of 160 pages, not a 1,000 pages. This is what the now Prime Minister and then leader of the opposition had to say:

We can agree with some of the measures but oppose others. How do we express our views and the views of our constituents when the matters are so diverse? Dividing the bill into several components would allow members to represent views of their constituents on each of the different components in the bill.

He asked government members, in particular, to worry about implications of the omnibus bills for democracy and the functionality of Parliament. He was right back then. Imagine what he has done today with the Conservative-Reform majority government. He has swallowed those words. That is the type of behaviour we have seen from the Conservative majority government. It has gone out of its way to limit debate in the chamber.

Does anyone know how many times I have had the opportunity to stand on the issue of time allocation alone? One of the Conservatives asks how many. One would need more than two hands to count as I believe it is now just over 30 times we have had time allocation since the last federal election.

What about the issues we are talking about? We could talk about the Canadian Wheat Board. Time allocation was brought in on that even though the farmers in the Prairies were denied the opportunity in law that they were supposed to have in a plebiscite. The government wanted to not only silence the farmers on the Prairies, but to silence members in the House of Commons too, so it brought in time allocation.

Whether it was the pooled pension plan, copyright legislation, the gun registry, back to work legislation, financial systems review, some of which are relatively simple pieces of legislation, both budget bills, free trade agreements like with Panama, Canada Post, Air Canada, first nations accountability, the government brought in time allocation after time allocation. It is a government that uses time allocation as a tool.

When we talk about democracy, we need to recognize the importance of the House of Commons and what takes place inside it.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Order, please. I appreciate that the members are anxious for the time when we might be going to a different part of business here. I am sure members want to hear what the member for Winnipeg North has to say. I can say that from the amount of noise in the chamber even I am having difficulty myself. Therefore, I would ask members that if they wish to carry on conversations, to please take them out into their respective lobbies.

The hon. member for Winnipeg North has the floor.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I can appreciate why the backbenchers are a little antsy with regard to what they hear. We cannot blame them. This could be one of the first times they have actually heard that. We can see they too are a little nervous in what is happening in the Prime Minister's Office and the whole Nigel affair. I would be nervous too if I were them because the truth will come out. It might take a little while, but the Liberal Party and the leader of the Liberal Party are committed to get to the bottom of this and will get to the bottom of it.

I was in the immigration committee and the Minister of Immigration made a decision to hijack a private member's bill. We just had a Speaker's ruling on this issue. The Minister of Immigration took a private member's bill in committee and literally changed the scope of the bill. Is this a new style of government we can anticipate? Is this a new idea for the current crop of ministers, that they wait for a private member's bill to get to committee, then hijack it and put their own legislative agenda in through that mechanism? It is a way for the government to not have to invoke time allocation because there is already a set form of time allocation agreed upon by all parties under the private members' bills process.

We have a government that is constantly in search of ways to try to shuffle through its agenda.

I will conclude with this thought. When I look at the motion presented today and those four points, what really gets me is that the government is trying to give Canadians the impression that the purpose of the motion is so it can work harder.

The Liberal Party does not need anymore motivation than what we see happening in the Prime Minister's Office today. We have and will continue to work hard in representing Canadians and holding the government accountable.

I would ask the government House leader to reflect on his responsibilities as a government House leader to work with opposition House leaders so we can see a more orderly, democratic, timely passage of what takes place in the House of Commons. We wait for that dialogue to start.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, I listened carefully to my hon. colleague's comments, and I found them astonishing. He is trying to suggest to Canadians that the reason the Liberal Party is opposing the motion is because it feels we are trying to get out of this Parliament early, and for that reason he feels his party has to oppose it. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are scheduled to sit until June 21. We are merely saying that we want to add additional hours of debate, something the opposition parties have been clamouring for this entire session, so we can address the pieces of legislation we have on the order paper.

One of those pieces of legislation that I want to speak to quite briefly, and ask my hon. colleague a question about, is Bill S-2, the matrimonial property act, which would allow aboriginal women on reserve to have the same basic rights that every other woman in Canada has. Could the member tell me why his party is opposing it? It would seem to be a no-brainer that every Canadian would agree to, and yet the Liberal Party and the NDP oppose allowing aboriginal women on reserve to have the same basic matrimonial rights that every other Canadian woman has. We want to debate that. We need extra time to try to convince the parties opposite to support it.

Could the member opposite please tell me why he wants to deny aboriginal women the same basic human rights that every other Canadian woman has?

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I am going to pick up on the member's comments with regard to the government wanting extra time. If the government genuinely wanted extra time, why did the government House leader not approach the opposition parties, both the New Democrats and the Liberals, and say the government would like extra time to pass things on its legislative agenda and to work with the opposition parties to facilitate timely passage of legislation? Just adding hours would not guarantee that the government's legislative agenda would pass.

The government could do more by co-operating with the opposition parties rather than continually assaulting democracy inside the chamber. A lot more can be done through co-operation, and that is something the government House leader—

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

We will try to get one more question in.

The hon. member for Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing.

[Carol Hughes, NDP, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I agree with some of the member's comments about the government's intention to not allow full discussions to happen, especially when it comes to its accountability and transparency. The member should know about this, given that his Liberal government tried to circumvent the situation when it was in government with respect to the sponsorship scandal.

On that note, I would like to ask the member if he believes the Conservative government is probably going to put more time allocation on bills, which would mean we would not even have the debates the government says we would have with this motion.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I do not necessarily agree with the member's first point. We have to recognize that time allocation in one form or another is a legislative tool that has been used by all political parties. Even though the NDP has never been a federal government, it has formed provincial governments where even it has used time allocation.

The member needs to recognize that the new Conservative-Reform majority, and I underline the word majority, has incorporated time allocation or closure as part of the ongoing process of passing a bill. That is totally unique to the present government. It has never been done before. I spent many years in opposition in Manitoba, a good part of the time when the NDP was in government, and I understand the difference between abuse versus a tool that should and could be used, if it is used properly. The Conservative government abuses the rule.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

The hon. member for Winnipeg North will have five minutes remaining for questions and comments when the House next returns to debate on the motion.

Motion

The House resumed from May 8 consideration of the motion.

Anaphylaxis

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

It being 5:30 p.m., the House will now proceed to the taking of the deferred recorded division on Motion M-230 under private members' business.

Call in the members.

(The House divided on the motion, which was negatived on the following division:)

Vote #688

[The Speaker, Conservative, Andrew Scheer]

I declare the motion carried.

The House resumed from May 9, 2013, consideration of the motion that Bill C-463, An Act to amend the Income Tax Act (travel expenses), be read the second time and referred to a committee.