Mr. Speaker, today I have the honour to present my ideas on the motion on oral question period. Unfortunately, the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons changed the motion.
The motion now reads “That this question be now put”.
He turned the question on its head. It is quite troubling that the government chose to proceed in this fashion.
Let me explain. When the words “That this question be now put” is on the floor, as is described in O'Brien and Bosc, page 650, “the previous question restricts debate and expedites the putting of the question..”. It does so in two ways.
First, the previous question precludes the moving of amendments to the main motion and, therefore, any debate that might have ensued on those amendments.
Second, the previous question can have the effect of superseding a motion under debate since, if negatived, the Speaker is bound not to put the question on the main motion at that time. In other words—
according to O'Brien and Bosc,
—if the motion “That the question be now put” is not adopted, the main motion is dropped from the Order Paper.
I will add, Mr. Speaker, that I will be splitting my time with the member for Hull—Aylmer.
So here we are. The House leader of the government side has made it so that we are going to have a vote later on, possibly tomorrow, at some point soon, where the government has used a procedural trick to ensure that the question “That this question be now put” will likely fail. By the traditions of this House, the motion then disappears.
The Conservatives do not want us to be able to discuss this motion. They do not want to be on record that they are opposed to question period actually serving its purpose, which is to hold the government to account. They do not want people to know that they do not want to be held to account.
The Conservatives came into power almost 10 years ago now, with much ballyhooed principles that they were going to hold the government to account, that they would be transparent, that they were going to put in acts, such as the Federal Accountability Act, which was supposed to make this place more transparent, more accountable. Well, the Federal Accountability Act did not go very far.
If we use the example of what we see in front of us with question period, we know for a fact that the Speaker right now is tied. He only has power over the quality of the question, and apparently not any particular power when it comes to the quality of the answer.
According to the House of Commons compendium, the question has to be within the administrative responsibility of the government; the question has to be brief, and the question has to seek information.
However, when it comes to the answer, we do not have a lot to work with.
We have Speaker Jerome, in 1975, telling us that the minister who is answering the question, or his representative, has a number of responses that are possible. He may answer the question. He may defer the answering of the question. He may take notice of the question. He may make a short explanation to why the answer cannot be furnished at this time, or he could say nothing.
The Speaker has to have much more control over what is being done in this place. The Speaker is there to ensure that the question is pertinent. The Speaker is there to ensure that the House has a certain decorum, so the question can be asked in a manner that is well understood. The Speaker seems not to be able to tell the answering side what the quality of that answer is going to be.
The motion in front of us, before it was superseded by the House leader's procedural trick, was to give the Speaker exactly that power, so he could intervene if a responder does not respond to the question properly, does not respond to the matter at hand. The answer should have to bear the same controls as the question. The answer should have to do with government business.
The answer should not be what the person's pizza preferences are. The answer should not have to do with whatever image pops into the head of the member answering at that particular moment. It cannot be questions about what a particular member may or may not have done in the last 100 years. The answer has to deal with government business. That is the point of having question period.
According to the compendium, when asked the question, “What is the point of question period?”, Speaker Jerome stated:
If the essence of Parliament is Government accountability, then surely the essence of accountability is the Question Period in the Canadian House of Commons.
The point of question period is to hold government to account. The point of the answers that we seem to be getting is to defer any responsibility. Conservative members do not want people to be thinking about what the government has done. They do not want people to think that the government is actually accountable to the representatives of the people.
The House of Commons is the place for the government to be held accountable. We have a form of government in this country called responsible government. Responsible government does not mean that the government is held responsible in any general fashion. Responsible government is the particular way that the House of Commons in the U.K., the House of Commons in Canada and other commonwealth nations have chosen to form government.
Responsible government means that the ministers are held accountable in the popular assembly, the place where the people are represented. The people, through their elected representatives, can ask questions of their government and expect to hear answers. We are not getting those answers. We have seen time and time again that the government does not seem to be in any position to give any answers.
The current government will spend enormous amounts of money to fly people across this country and around the world to make statements, for instance, on pensions, which it did in Switzerland and not in the House. Instead of giving answers when it comes to European free trade, it will fly European legislators around on very expensive trips, but again it refuses to answer questions in the House.
We need accountability and we simply do not have it. The motion before us is so that the Speaker will have the tools to ensure that the answers have to do with the questions and with government business, specifically the government business asked about in questions by members of the House.
Members of the House have a responsibility. It is largely the role of the opposition, but it is also the role of members who are not ministers or parliamentary secretaries, members who are in the governing party but are not members of the government per se. All members of the House who are not directly connected to the government have a role and responsibility to ask questions of their government to make sure that the government is being held to account.
When we hear questions on this side of the House, they are generally directed to a particular minister and certainly have to do with government business. If they are not, the Speaker controls it. When we hear questions from members of the Conservative Party, they are generally infomercials for the government's particular issue du jour. We need more accountability in this place.
Responsible government presumes that the members of the House want their government to be held accountable. It seems that over the last many years, slowly but surely, that power has eroded. The executive sits in the House, unlike in the United States where the executive sits apart from their house of assembly. The executive sits right here in front of us and we have the opportunity to ask questions directly to it, but for historical reasons that have crept up very slowly but very insidiously over time, we have allowed the government to get away with things.
We have allowed government members not to answer questions. We have allow them not to be held accountable in the manner that they must. We have allowed them to pass omnibus bills that are almost impossible to get through in the time allocated for us to study them. We cannot possibly ask all of the questions that are pertinent to a brick that is several hundred pages long.
We need the tools. The House has created specific offices to help us with that control. The Auditor General's office, the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer and various tools have been created. The problem is, for instance, the Parliamentary Budget Officer's budget is simply insufficient to do the work that he needs to do, especially when the government introduces omnibus bills that are very difficult to get through. The executive seems to be making a point of making it as hard as possible for government members to be held to account.
As legislators, as members of the House, we need to start taking our role of control over the executive seriously. The motion is one step toward that. It is a small step, but a step in the right direction. We cannot forgo our responsibilities. We have to be held to account as members, and as members we have to hold our government to account.
I am very happy to see that the other opposition party seems to be supporting the motion. I certainly hope that the governing party is going to as well.