Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to participate in the debate in the very last days of this Parliament before we adjourn for the summer.
I am supportive of the concurrence motion for the 21st report of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs. It would be a good thing to adopt these rules for several reasons. I do not think the rule changes are revolutionary. They are quite minor rule changes. Moving from an exhaustive balloting system to a preferential balloting system for the position of Speaker is a very small change. Nevertheless, even though it is a small change, I am supporting it for a number of reasons.
First, I do not think we should be afraid of changing the Standing Orders in this place in order to continually renew and reform ourselves. Too often there is an inertia in the chamber about making changes to the Standing Orders, because many of them have been long standing. Certainly, many of the Standing Orders of the House have been long standing precisely because they have worked so well. However, in many other cases they are not working as well as they ought to, and changing the Standing Orders is something that should not be an infrequent and difficult thing to do in our Parliament.
The second reason I am supporting this is that this is present practice in the chambers of other Westminster parliaments. Therefore, we have practical, real-life, empirical evidence to see how these changes would work in practice. In the British House of Lords, the Speaker of the Lords is elected through a system of first preference votes. Therefore, we know that system works over there, so we can be assured it would work here.
However, here is the other reason I am supporting it, and it may be different from those of the other speakers who have risen to speak to this concurrence motion. The reason I think it is important to support this is that the average time it has taken to elect the Speaker in the previous number of Parliaments has been about seven hours. That is a lot of time. That could be significantly shortened through the use of a single preferential ballot, which would then allow us to reform the way in which committee members are selected in the House. I believe we have to move away from a system of standing committees, where members are selected through whips and deputy House leaders on PROC, to a system where members should be elected by the House as a whole, by their peers in the House, to committees at the beginning of each Parliament.
If we were to do that, that first day of the sitting of Parliament would be the ideal time not only to elect the Speaker of the Chamber but also to elect members to the 24 standing committees of this Chamber. Then in turn, when those standing committees meet for the first time, they could elect the chair of their committee. In doing that, we would create more independent committees of this place that would function in a better manner than they do today. However, in order to arrive at that system where members of Parliament vote for committee members, we need to vote for the Speaker in a more efficient manner.
That is the other reason I am supporting this. I think having a super day of voting on the first day of a Parliament after a general election, a super day of voting in the House of Commons, would allow us to reform other rules in the Standing Orders and allow us to do it in an efficient manner.
I want to commend my colleague on PROC for championing this idea. It would be a good change, which the House should support. It would lead to improvements in the way we elect Speakers and particularly to a much shorter time dedicated to the election of Speaker. At the same time, it would allow us to consider other amendments to the Standing Orders that would allow us to move away from the way committee members are selected now, which is essentially through the power of party leaders, to a system where members of Parliament, all 338 of us, would come together and also determine which of our peers would sit on the respective 24 standing committees.
I encourage members on both sides of the aisle to support this change. As I said, it is not a revolutionary change, but I think it would lead to more efficient voting and an opportunity for us to consider other votes for other matters on that first day that we sit as a House of Commons.