Mr. Speaker, it has been almost a year since I had the privilege to start participating in debate in this place. I recall fondly the day of my swearing in last fall. I received a pin after I was sworn in, and I received a very large green book of over 1,000 pages of procedural rules. I have to say, like my friend for Laurentides—Labelle, I can be a bit of a geek too. I took that book home, I read and tabbed it, and I was very excited about participating in the debate.
We have had some very good moments here, but I see some spots where there can be some improvement, and I would like to discuss some of those.
Primarily I would like to talk about how we approach private member's bills, the order for private member's bills, and how we can improve debate in this place, and particularly on that point, how we can avoid some of the repetition that we have sometimes. When we look at private member's bills, we all come to this place because we are passionate about something. We want to make a difference in our community, or whatever issue we may have that motivates us and makes us want to be here to make a difference.
I was motivated by wanting to address income inequality, which I saw was growing in my community. I wanted to deal with public transit, which was crumbling in my community, and active transportation. I also wanted to deal with food policy issues that encourage that Canadians have access to healthy food.
I see that type of passion in the private member's bills that come forward here. We recently saw tabled a national cycling strategy. We voted last night on a community benefits bill. We made a change to the national anthem to make it gender neutral. These are the diverse issues that are presented by the many people here from different parts of this country.
Despite all this passion and excitement about these many issues, whether we actually have an opportunity to table and have debate on a private member's bill is governed by chance; it is by a lottery. Many of us in this place will not have an opportunity to see a private member's bill move forward to debate and to a vote. I think that we need to see some changes made to this lottery system.
The way it works right now is that we have first-time members of Parliament arriving here, and they could be tabling a private member's bill within only a few months of having been elected. This does not really give them the opportunity to reach out to their colleagues across the way to hear their ideas and perspectives. It does not give them an opportunity to adjust and learn how things work in this place, because it is a learning experience. Therefore, we are not setting people up for success. On the other hand, there is no guarantee for the people who have been here for multiple parliaments that they can ever have a private member's bill to reflect what they would like to present. There is no weighting given to that.
My suggestion is twofold. I think we should create more time for private member's bills in this place, and I also believe that we should change the way we weight the lottery.
I have heard considerable debate today about Fridays. What do we do with Friday? I have to say that I do not necessarily take issue with continuing sittings on Fridays, but I would like to see them be more efficient. I say this as a person who has a young family that I would like to get back to. However, truthfully, I do not know if family matters on this. We all have reasons to go home and be in our ridings, but for me, the hardest part is saying goodbye to my family every week. Therefore, I would not want to add more weeks of sittings.
I think there is value in taking those Fridays and finding a way that we can make more use of that time. I would suggest that we set aside Fridays for private member's bills. It would be a chance to have more opportunities for people to present their bills and to be heard. That would be my suggestion for Friday as a way to make them more efficient. However, if we are not able to create more opportunity and more time for the hearing of private member's bills, then I would suggest we change the weighting of the system for the lottery.
However, I had not thought of the suggestion of my friend for Laurentides—Labelle, but I think he has a good idea in that perhaps we make sure, after a Parliament rises and we go into the next Parliament, that the bills on the Order Paper do not die for the returning parliamentarians. That is definitely one good idea that might help with the waiting.
My own suggestion, and I have been thinking about it, is that there be a system for returning parliamentarians who did not have a private member's bill in the past Parliament, so that they would go to the front of the line. There would be a lottery for those, and then for the new members. I think that would help both the returning members and the new members. It would give new members more time to get adjusted to the system, and it would give returning members an opportunity to make sure they could be heard. Those would be my suggestions in respect of private members' bills. I would also like to see us perhaps looking at using Fridays, and changing the lottery system so that we could have a better system of waiting on the dates.
On improving debate, one of the most moving and genuine debates I have witnessed in this place was the one we had on the crisis in Attawapiskat. On that evening, I heard very genuine stories from members of all parties in House. There was an authenticity to that debate. When I was listening to people, most of it was devoid of partisanship. It was a real opportunity for us to learn from one another during that debate. I thought the questions we asked and the chance for us to learn from one another was very valuable. I would like to see more of that in our debates in this place. From time to time, we can sort of lose the thread. I would really like to see a return to that.
I worry that we are often subject to a fair bit of repetition in this place. Sometimes the same ideas are repeated, which does not necessarily give us much of a chance to learn about each other's ridings and where we are coming from.
I would use question period as one example of where there is quite a bit of repetition. There has been a lot of discussion today about how we can make question period more effective. I was keeping note during question period today, just to get an idea, and I noticed that members of the same party asked 10 questions on pretty much the same issue. Actually, there was another issue as well. The four questions that followed were on pretty much the same issue. It was not a case of different variations of the same question, but pretty much the same question was asked, all by the same party.
Obviously different parties may have the same question to ask, and that cannot be changed, but I wonder if there is not a way that we could restrict members of the same party from asking the same question, or largely the same question, more than, let us say, twice. We will be generous and say that twice is good, but that 10 times seems like a lot of times to hear the same question.
It is one thing for us to be here and to be part of that debate, but another when we think of public who are watching it. I am not sure that it increases their respect, as there are multiple other issues that could be raised. I would like to see us move away from the repetition that we sometimes see.
I would also say that with respect to the course of regular debate. It would be really nice. I truly enjoy hearing and learning from all the members who are here about what is important to their communities. It gives me an opportunity to reflect and go home to my own constituency and say, “We have this perspective, but while I was in Ottawa, I heard all these other perspectives that can open our eyes to how we have different impacts.”
I would like to move away from repetition and to see if there are ways we can move the debate to be closer to the kind of debate we had the evening that we debated the crisis in Attawapiskat.
I also like the suggestion of having a clock that we could watch, that would give us a rundown on the amount of time we have left. I think that would be helpful for a lot of us.
For today, my primary suggestions are about private members' bills, affording them more time, changing the wait times in the lottery, and seeing if we can avoid repetition in the course of our debate.