Mr. Speaker, today's debate is on the opposition motion, sponsored by my NDP counterpart, the hon. member for Burnaby—New Westminster. He suggests that the House change Standing Order 11(2) in respect to responses given to oral questions. That is not in respect to questions, merely in respect to responses.
Question period is fundamental to our system of parliamentary government. It is democracy in action. Canada's approach to the parliamentary questioning of the government makes the House of Commons a leader in the world for accountability. Simply put, there is no similar forum in the world as openly accountable as Canada's question period. Every single day, when the House of Commons sits, the prime minister and ministers are held to account for their policies, the decisions that they make and the actions of their departments. For 45 minutes, the opposition can ask any question on any subject, without any forewarning, without any notice at all.
Question period is also a key forum for providing members of Parliament and the public with information about the government's plans and priorities. That is unlike, for example, in the U.K., a country that has played a fundamental role in our own country's parliamentary evolution. Here, ministers are not given the benefit of a formal prior notice of the questions they may be asked. I know perhaps once a week a minister might get a warning from a member opposite, but the norm is no notice at all. Instead, ministers must come to question period every day prepared only with the sound knowledge of all the workings and policies of the departments for which they are responsible, ready to answer any and all questions, those foreseen and those unexpected.
The very nature of Canada's question period ensures that the debates are always topical and relevant. We have even seen an issue arise outside the House during question period and asked at that very moment.
In the United Kingdom, for example, it is different. In Britain, members of parliament often have to give up to two weeks' written notice of the question they plan to ask a minister in question time. In the U.K., each sitting day, but never Fridays, as we have here on Fridays, only some ministers are scheduled to answer questions. This, of course, significantly limits the range of subjects on which questions can be asked on any given day to just a minority of the full range of government responsibilities. The prime minister answers questions only one day each week and most other ministers even less frequently. The minister then arrives in the chamber of the House of Commons in the U.K. supplied with a prepared answer to a question that is often outdated. Supplementaries must be tightly relevant to the question put on notice.
In Canada, however, questions cover a broad range of subjects and departments, every day, without warning. The Prime Minister and ministers must be ready. The issues of concern to Canadians change quickly, and the questions put to the Prime Minister and cabinet members change just as quickly.
Furthermore, if a member is not satisfied with the answer to an oral question, he or she can pursue the question at greater length during the adjournment proceedings, which we all affectionately call the “late show”.
I have yet to have anyone point to any country with as much accountability as our question period here in Canada.
Our neighbours to the south have no question period that allows legislators to hold the president and his cabinet accountable. There is no forum to hold the administration and Congress directly accountable.
In the United States, there is no process at all like our question period, at any time, for the president and his cabinet to be held accountable by legislators.
I next want to turn to the actual wording of the motion before us. It states:
That Standing Order 11(2) be replaced with the following: The Speaker or the Chair of Committees of the Whole, after having called the attention of the House, or of the Committee, to the conduct of a Member who persists in irrelevance, or repetition, including during responses to oral questions, may direct the Member to discontinue his or her intervention....
This change, as I pointed out, would affect responses to oral questions but it would not touch the actual questions. This is yet another greatly cynical, one-sided proposal for the NDP. It wants to improve Parliament insofar as it helps the NDP, but not insofar as it would help the government, for example, to have more information on which to provide those answers. “Do as I say not as I do” has been the watchword for the New Democrats throughout this Parliament and here it makes yet another appearance.
Apparently, they do not want to be subject to the same rules that they want to see applied to others. The Leader of the Opposition would prefer to make question period a one-way street. He wants the rules changed to keep him from facing any tough questions or cold facts in the House about his own party's operations or policies. In reality, he wants to avoid facing any basic facts in the House, since he wants to ban repetition of answers. The facts will not change simply because an individual asks the same question over and over again.
If people watching this debate think that what is proposed is a simple fix, well, it is not. Let me quote a distinguished former speaker, Speaker Milliken, the individual who had the longest tenure in that big chair you are sitting on, Mr. Speaker.
On enforcing the concept that the NDP is proposing, Mr. Milliken told the Ottawa Citizen:
There’s nothing a speaker can do about that. ...what constitutes an answer? There’d be constant argument about it.
In fact, there would be points of order raised interminably at the end of every question period.
There has been a lot of recent commentary related to what the change is, and I will come back to the substance of today's motion in a bit, but why the change is being proposed is somewhat obscured by a recent event.
What people really need to understand about the NDP leader's motion is that it is an oversensitive reaction to efforts to hold the New Democratic Party and the Leader of the Opposition accountable on certain issues. The Leader of the Opposition wants the rules changed so that he will not have to answer hard questions or have the whole truth be known here in the House of Commons.
The Leader of the Opposition does not want to answer for the NDP misuse of House resources on inappropriate mail-outs. The Leader of the Opposition does not want to answer for the NDP inappropriate use of taxpayers' dollars in setting up unauthorized satellite offices, which, curiously enough, just happened to be at the same place that partisan NDP work was taking place.
New Democrats have been caught breaking the rules and abusing taxpayers' dollars, but most regrettably, they do not want to be held to account or for anyone to be even reminded of it, all of which is witnessed—