Mr. Speaker, I will do my very best to take into account what has been said before. I would ask your indulgence with regard to this, for the reason that I was not present for the debate that took place here. The reason I was not present for the debate is highly germane to the subject matter of the debate. I am on the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, and the committee is meeting to discuss the item that the government says takes priority over the question of privilege here. That is my reason for not being here.
One ought to try to be here for debates when one is going to comment on it, but I was not. I have tried to gather information about what has been said, including getting some of the written remarks from speakers who have addressed this before. However, that is limited information, so I have had to put together my own remarks during question period in order to be able to make them here. That is my excuse or my pleading for why I may not be as organized as I would otherwise like to be. That said, I have tried to make a tabbed list of my comments in order to make them as concisely as possible.
The overarching theme that I am trying to address is simply this. It is important for the government to respect the ability of the opposition to carry on its business. We have rules in this place, Standing Orders, that govern how we behave. We have Standing Orders that are long standing, and ours are, through their lineage, the oldest in the world. The Standing Orders of the House of Commons came from the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada, and, before that, the provinces of Upper Canada and Lower Canada, which takes us back to the 1790s. Before that, they came from Westminster. They extend back to the very beginning of parliamentary history.
Even words as extensive as those cannot take into account every circumstance, and so we have developed folkways, practices, conventions as to how we should deal with matters. Those practices are then captured in books, like the one written by O'Brien and Bosc, House of Commons Procedure and Practice, and also in the Annotated Standing Orders of the House of Commons, which provide some explanation for the background to the existing Standing Orders. I will be using both of these books, but particularly the Annotated Standing Orders in my remarks today.
I was trying to get at this point. There is an overarching theme of respect, not merely for what the Standing Orders involve, which is taking care of the Speaker's rulings, but also for the practices that have allowed us not to develop a Standing Order on this or that abuse of process which ought to be the subject of a Standing Order. Simply by exercising self-restraint, we are able to get business done here. One area that this revolves around is the issue of how we deal with motions of privilege. There is a method that has always been used. I say “always”, though I do not know if it has always been used. However, certainly since the current Standing Order was put in place, it has always been followed. That has been abandoned by the government today, and that is the issue at hand.
Let me deal very briefly with the relevant history here. Number one, on March 10, the government House leader introduced a discussion paper on possible changes to the Standing Orders. Number two, later that same afternoon, the day before the break week began, the member for Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, a great member and a great friend, introduced a motion in the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs. It amounted to a guillotine or a closure motion on the consideration of Standing Order business, which has led members of the opposition to be afraid that the government could introduce any Standing Order change, limit debate on it, push it through at that time, and thereby cause draconian changes to the Standing Orders, including those Standing Orders that are of greatest concern to us. They are the ones that let us do our job of slowing down the business of the House long enough to draw specific issues to the public's attention.
Rather than having this or that issue vanish in the rear-view mirror before we have a chance to draw it to the attention of the public, this is the only tool available to an opposition in a majority government. It is the only thing that separates our system of checks and balances from what I would characterize as a Peronist or a Bonapartist government, in which one has the maximum leader over here, and over there are the people. There are no intermediate institutions, and every four years there is what amounts to a referendum on whether people liked the dictatorship that existed for the previous four years.
That is what we do. That is the point we are trying to preserve here. When the government says that it means this is only to be a discussion paper, not a draconian measure, it may actually be sincere. I do not know.
However, we are not in a position where we can risk taking the advice that Abraham Lincoln once gave. He said that if you want to find out the nature of a man, give him power. That is true. We would find out. However, we can see why we do not want to try doing this, because we may find out something we do not want to find out.
Here is the problem. We do not know what the agenda is. We do not know how we can let down our guard without potentially causing a catastrophe for Canadian procedural and parliamentary democracy. That is the issue.
The motion was moved. It went to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs on March 10. We took up the business on March 21, the first day that the committee was back in session. At that time, the motion was moved by the member for Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, and I proposed an amendment to it.
The member's motion calls for the committee to complete its study and report its findings and recommendations back to the House no later than June 2, 2017.
The amendment I proposed says that we would delete some of that wording and add in the following:
nothwithstanding paragraph (d),
That is the paragraph in which the date is referred to, the June 2 date.
but consistent with the Committee's past practices, as discussed as its December 8, 2016 meeting, the Committee shall not report any recommendation for an amended Standing Order, provisional Standing Order, new Standing Order, Sessional Order, Special Order, or to create or revise a usual practice of the House, which is not unanimously agreed to by the Committee....
That amendment is being debated at committee. There have been a series of ongoing suspensions of the committee business, and we have returned to this. In the formalized fiction of the proceedings of that committee, it is right now March 21. We have had something in the neighbourhood of 40 or 50 hours of debate.