Mr. Speaker, I am very happy to deliver my first speech in the House today, to join in this discussion on the standing orders that guide all of us in the performance of our parliamentary duties.
Before becoming an MP myself, I was the happy assistant to the Hon. Jacques Saada, who was deputy whip and government House leader. The rules and procedures of our legislative assembly have often been a topic of discussion at the constituency office, and I retain a real fascination with them.
There are a lot of little bits of “history” behind many of the standing orders we know today. It is sometimes comical to find out their origin. However that is not what concerns us now, since the idea of this day of debate is to cast a so-called contemporary eye upon precepts that in some cases date from 1867.
My colleagues have already raised many points that deserve another look. Personally, I would like to consider the standing orders that affect the House committees.
In the McGrath committee report of the mid-1980s, there was a recommendation for the more active use of legislative committees. In fact, the idea was to allocate to the said legislative committees the detailed scrutiny of legislation, which would allow standing committees to focus on policy matters and departmental estimates.
This recommendation seems to me quite logical, but despite my reading and rereading of the Compendium of House of Commons Procedure, there are many things that seem contradictory to me. Without making an exhaustive list of them, I would still like us to consider the purpose of legislative committees. They exist in order to study bills. The procedural framework is explicit in the Compendium.
Now, in my second term of office as member, I have still not sat on a single legislative committee that was created to do the work for which it was planned. To my knowledge, all bills are sent to the relevant standing committee, which must then drop all other studies to examine that particular bill.
The House of Commons has given itself the capacity to create committees exclusively dedicated to the review of bills. Would it not be more effective to make full use of that capacity?
Continuing on the theme of the structure and operation of House committees, I would also like to suggest that we consider the possibility of giving each standing committee its own operating budget.
At the moment, the funds we are provided by the Board of Internal Economy and the Liaison Committee are allocated in a rather arbitrary fashion, along the lines of first come, first served. That results in somewhat reactive planning, which is sometimes frankly unfair.
Of course, this may sound self-serving, in the sense that the committee I sit on was just denied the opportunity to take part in an international conference that would be extremely relevant to the functioning of that very committee.
I therefore propose that annual allocations to the committee be made more equitably. Pursuant to Standing Order 107(1)(a):
The Chair of each standing committee...shall form a Liaison Committee, which is charged with making apportionments of funds from the block of funds authorized by the Board of Internal Economy to meet the expenses of committee activities, subject to ratification by the Board.
Pursuant to Standing Order 107(6):
The Liaison Committee shall be empowered to create subcommittees of which the membership may be drawn from among both the list of members of the Committee and the list of associate members....
Depending on your point of view, that is either perfect or utterly non-transparent, because a subcommittee on committee budgets, made up of members of the liaison committee, will end up having members that vote and speak for their own committees. This gives them an advantage over the budgets allocated to other committees. There are not really any rules to protect against this potential conflict of interest.
The last point I want to address is perhaps the most sensitive. Some of my colleagues have talked to me about whether a dress code for parliamentarians should be included in the Standing Orders. At this time, the Standing Orders do not set out a formal dress code for male or female members.
Speakers have established some expectations for our male colleagues, but women MPs have no such guidelines. I suggest it would be fair to look at the possibility of establishing a formal dress code recommendation. It could be a simple statement that members dress in contemporary business attire or anything else that the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs may eventually judge appropriate.
Those are some of my thoughts on the matter, and I would be happy to discuss them further with my colleagues.