Debates of May 2nd, 2017

Reference to Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs

[Wayne Stetski, NDP, Kootenay—Columbia, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to follow up on a theme that was raised by the hon. member across the floor, and that is acting responsibly and respectfully. What is the responsibility of the Liberal government to act responsibly and respectably in the House, and what needs to change to get us there?

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Edmonton, AB]

Mr. Speaker, the government could start by respecting the ability and right of hon. members to debate this question of privilege by backing down on trying to shut down debate.

A second thing the government could do is respect the fact that before it changes the rules of the House, in order to do so, there must be consensus. That has been the tradition. I know the government House leader has backed down somewhat on the government's intent to change the Standing Orders, but she has not committed to doing so on the basis of consensus. That would be a second major thing the government could do to show it finally does have respect for this place and for members of Parliament. However, I do not have a lot of confidence in the government when it comes to doing that. We see no indication that it is prepared to do that.

For the government, it really comes down to how far it can go and get away with it. We saw that last spring when the government introduced Motion No. 6 to literally try to take away every tool that was available to opposition members to do their jobs to hold the government to account. It only backed down after that unfortunate incident involving the Prime Minister. Then we saw the government try to prevent a vote in the House on the ability of members to defend the privileges of members. The government was stopped as a result of my hon. colleague, the member for Perth—Wellington, raising a new question of privilege and the Speaker ruling on it.

Now we see that the government has sort of backed down on changes to the Standing Orders, but only partly. It would not surprise me, given the arrogance and attitude of the government, that before much longer we will see another effort to try to do what it has not been able to get away with yet. Canadians should be very concerned.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am very glad indeed to participate in this debate.

I want to address the problem that faces us as we decide on this matter of privilege to face the fact that we are going to be sending this question of privilege to a committee which has itself largely broken down. It is a committee in which the spirit has been adopted by the current government of running roughshod over the traditional rights and privileges of the opposition. These are privileges that are the practical basis on which the opposition can carry out its job of ensuring proper scrutiny of what the government does, ensuring that government business can be slowed down and examined at sufficient length so that if there is a problem with it, it can then be brought to the attention of the Canadian public. This would allow the Canadian public to then say they expect changes, thereby pressuring the government, which after all wants to win the next election, into respecting the wishes of the people and changing its policy.

That is what the opposition does under our system. It is what the opposition has always done under our system. It is a good way of organizing things. That is why these rules have evolved over time, over centuries. It is why they have been maintained over the decades of the past century. It is why we have, among other things, concluded as a parliamentary community that we ought not to change the Standing Orders without the consent of all parties. That, of course, is the approach that all the opposition parties want to take right now. It is the approach that was taken under the Harper government and under the Chrétien government. T

here have been very few occasions on which changes to the Standing Orders have been pushed through without the consent of the opposition, and that is a very good thing. Those changes that have been pushed through without consent are almost invariably, but they are invariably, changes that have had the effect of stripping the opposition of its ability to do its job on behalf of Canadians, and therefore of destroying, in part, the constitutional apparatus. When I say constitutional I mean that in the traditional British sense of how we conduct legislation in a Westminster system in Canada.

The practices on the committee that have veered so far from what is acceptable need to be enumerated here, and I propose to do that today.

At the committee on March 21, a motion was introduced at an in camera session, and in all fairness, it was a session that started off in camera and then went public. A Liberal member of Parliament proposed that all changes to the Standing Orders would be implemented and a report submitted to the House of Commons by June 2. This was effectively a way of ensuring that a single report containing all the necessary provisions, everything the Liberals wanted, would be produced. There could be a dissenting report, I guess, but there would be no option of trying to place limits on what gets agreed to by saying that no, the opposition does not support this or that particular change to the Standing Orders, including ones that had never been contemplated in the Liberal election platform or discussed with the Canadian public. All of these could be pushed through at the government's discretion.

Lest anyone suffer from the illusion that we had any idea of which policy option would be preferred, we have a government discussion paper which includes a whole range of topics, some of which contradict each other. We would either sit on Fridays and make them full days or not sit on any Fridays. Numerous other options were put out there which could not be compatible with each other. New items could be added in and the government would not indicate it. At no point between that day and this day would the Liberals ever indicate which of these items were the ones that were their bottom line, so we never knew. We had no security at all. We were told to have a discussion and the Liberals would not provide us with any details; we would get to find out once we had consented to allow them to move forward with the motion. Of course, we opposed that.

I proposed an amendment to this motion in that committee which said that we would still maintain the June 2 deadline, but we would only have such changes to the Standing Orders as had the unanimous consent of all members of that committee. This followed the practice established in the past and actually spelled out in the House orders during the last Parliament in which Jean Chrétien was our prime minister. That is what we proposed. For the intervening period between March 21 and today, that is all we discussed, endlessly.

The first big surprise and the first deviation from appropriate practices came immediately after I proposed that amendment. This would have been on March 21 at the end of the normally scheduled meeting. We started the meeting at 11 a.m., as the procedure and House affairs committee always does. We were getting close to one o'clock, which is our normal time for adjournment. I proposed my amendment, expecting that we would come back if we stayed on this topic and deal with it at our next meeting, which would have taken place two days later, on March 23, but the chair at the appointed time for adjournment said, effectively—I do not have his exact words in front of me, but they are in the committee Hansard—that we were not going to adjourn because the chair may not adjourn without the consent of the majority of committee members; it is not in the power of the chair to adjourn, and the Liberal members indicated they did not want to adjourn. The purpose of this quite clearly was to keep the debate going until the opposition ran out of steam and then the government would simply push through its motion in that committee and that would result in the Standing Orders being unilaterally changed in a way that could not be controlled or modified in any way by the opposition in that committee.

At that time, I argued that the chair was misinterpreting the practices of the House. There is no standing order that says the chair cannot adjourn the committee without the expressed consent of the majority of the committee at the time when the committee normally adjourns. However, the chair argued back that no, he cannot adjourn. He went on at some length that he could not do this, and so in the end we had no choice. We could hardly stand up and walk out of the committee. That would result in the Liberals getting what they wanted, and subverting all of our rules, all of our protections, so we had no choice but to talk and talk. We started a filibuster, which has become the longest filibuster, to the best of my knowledge, in the history of this country. Until it was adjourned this morning, in that committee it was still March 21. Instead of being adjourned, the meetings would be suspended, and we would come back sometimes after a break of a day or two days and on one occasion most recently after a break of two weeks, but always to the fiction that it was still March 21.

It is one thing for us all to see the clock as a certain time in order to wrap up the proceedings of a committee or of the House early, or to do the opposite and see the clock as being a little earlier than it actually is to allow the committee to go on a bit longer. I used to do this all the time when I chaired the Subcommittee on International Human Rights. I would say to the committee members, and members can examine the committee Hansard to see this, “I see the clock as not yet being 2 p.m.” When we looked at the clock it was clearly 2 p.m., which was when we adjourned, but as long as no other member disagreed, that allowed us to maintain the official fiction that it was prior to 2 p.m., so that we could continue hearing witness testimony. We would hear heartbreaking stories about people who had been tortured and murdered in other countries. It was our job to listen to this testimony and then make use of it in preparing our reports. I always sought the consent of the committee in that matter, but I understood that a meeting ends at the time it is scheduled to end. The chair took a different position.

Then today he came to our meeting. We met at 9:02 a.m. The chair said, “It being 9:02 on May 5”, not maintaining this fiction that it is March 21, “good morning. Welcome back to the 55th meeting of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs. This meeting is being televised. Prior to our suspension on April 13, the committee was debating” the member for Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston's “amendment to [the] motion. Also, I'll bring to your attention the two excellent papers we asked for, done by our researcher, one on the standing orders in Quebec's National Assembly dealing with omnibus bills, and the other one on the historical contents of budget implementation bills.”

Referring to the debate that is happening right now, he said, “It is my understanding that all parties have signalled their intention to support the subamendment and amendment on the question of privilege currently being debated in the House. As members know, when this question comes to a vote it means that ultimately this committee will be seized with the matter of access of members to the parliamentary precinct. Given this information, I'm happy to say that this 55th meeting finally stands adjourned.”

He then gavelled us out.

There are two problems with this procedurally. This is the same chair who said that a meeting cannot be adjourned without the consent of the members of the committee. Now he said that he was adjourning it. He made no effort to even look up from his papers. He adjourned the meeting of the committee without the consent of the members. Unlike the previous occasion, when we actually had arrived at the pre-scheduled end time of the meeting, this was in the middle of the meeting.

This was clearly in violation of the traditional practice in this House that the chair cannot adjourn a meeting. It is not a standing order. It is a practice to ensure that chairs cannot adjourn meetings in the middle of a meeting, in the middle of a proceeding, to prevent some item of business from being dealt with or to prevent discussion.

Our name is Parliament. Parlement. Medieval French is where this came from. It is a place to speak. Our default setting is to be able to continue debate, and he shut that down in a way that violated the practice of this place, as stated on page 1087 of O'Brien and Bosc:

The committee Chair cannot adjourn the meeting without the consent of a majority of the members, unless the Chair decides that a case of disorder or misconduct is so serious as to prevent the committee from continuing its work.

That is something that would only occur in the middle of a meeting, not when we have arrived at the end and are past our time. The chair has violated this rule twice. Once was by misusing it to justify keeping a meeting going indefinitely. That particular meeting started at 11 a.m. and concluded at 3 a.m. and then was picked up after a suspension the next day and the next.

The second was by actually overtly and egregiously adjourning the meeting a minute into a meeting that was expected to be several hours long, and, I might add, in the midst of me attempting to raise a point of order on this very point. I stated, “point of order.” He heard me and chose to ignore me. That was an egregious, deliberate, and overt abuse not of the practices but of the Standing Orders. This is the committee to which we propose to send items of privilege, a committee chaired by someone willing to violate the practices and the Standing Orders of this place.

That is one problem. Let me talk about something else that was wrong in the way this was done. It was with respect to the suspension of the committee. What the chair did at the end of the first meeting, the first sitting of this committee, which started on March 21 at 11 a.m. and carried on until 3 a.m. the next morning, was suspend, suddenly and without warning, and we came back the next day, I believe at noon. After that, the tendency was to suspend at midnight and come back later on.

Let me give members an idea of just what I am talking about. They will see the importance of this in a second. We started on March 21 at 11:05 a.m. There were a number of brief suspensions for votes during the day. We then suspended at 3 a.m. There is an oddity here. It says we suspended on March 21 officially, but it was really March 22, until noon the next day. On March 22, we then suspended until March 23 at 10:30 a.m. We then suspended and recommenced on March 24 and then again on March 25. On March 25, there was a suspension during a break week. We suspended on March 25 at 11 a.m., and we returned on April 3 at noon. We suspended on April 3, coming back on April 5. We suspended on April 5 and came back on April 6. On April 6, we suspended and came back on April 7. On April 7, we suspended and came back on April 11. On April 11, we suspended and came back on April 12. On April 12, we suspended until April 13. On April 13, we suspended and came back on May 2, today, and we had this adjournment.

I want to talk about what O'Brien and Bosc say about suspensions. They say:

Committees frequently suspend their meetings for various reasons, with the intention to resume later in the day. Suspensions may last a few seconds, or several hours, depending on the circumstances, and a meeting may be suspended more than once.

So far, so good:

The committee Chair must clearly announce the suspension, so that transcription ceases until the meeting resumes. Meetings are suspended, for example, to change from public to in camera mode, or the reverse, to enable witnesses to be seated or to hear witnesses by video conference, to put an end to disorder, to resolve a problem with the simultaneous interpretation system, or to move from one item on the agenda to the next.

It also notes:

Speaker Milliken expressed reservations about the power of a committee to suspend proceedings to the next day....

This is not something that is an approved practice. I then looked up Speaker Milliken's ruling, delivered on June 3, 2003. He stated that it was inappropriate. It was not a breach of the rules or the Standing Orders but a breach of precedence for the chair of the Standing Committee on Transportation to suspend a meeting on May 28 and resume it on May 29.

He said:

Your Speaker is...somewhat troubled by the notion of an overnight suspension of proceedings. As hon. members know, if the Speaker's attention is drawn to a lack of quorum and no quorum is found, the House must adjourn forthwith. While it may be argued that no such obligation exists for committees, I would not consider the unorthodox actions of the transport committee in this particular instance to be a precedent in committee practice.

This is a quorum issue that caused them to suspend.

In other words, their suspension to be back the next day was not a precedent that says that this is acceptable. This is not an acceptable practice, and that was a situation in which a committee suspended once for 24 hours.

Here is a situation where the committee suspended 10 times for breaks ranging from 24 hours to two weeks. This was not a suspension. This was adjournment and reconvening of the committee. To this chair's credit, when I asked him, he started to let us know what the next time we would be coming back would be, and he started to let us know when our next suspension would be so we could at least plan.

However, initially, in this particular situation, the government members apparently knew when the suspension would be, but the rest of us, who had to keep the debate going, were hamstrung. These are all examples of an absolutely egregious abuse of the way in which this place works.

I intend, now that I have seen how these particular practices have been abused, to come back with proposals to change the Standing Orders to make sure that suspensions are used as suspensions, not as adjournments, and to make sure that the rule, the practice on adjournment, is actually put down as a Standing Order. We cannot adjourn a meeting as the chair in the middle of a meeting, but at the end of a meeting, we cannot keep the meeting going unless we have the consent of the majority of the committee. Hopefully that will remove some of the abuses that have gone on in this committee.

Let me just say this. There is a pattern here, not just in this committee but in the government, of absolutely having no regard for the traditional way we have done things. This is a majority government. It has enormous power. The powers of a Canadian prime minister far exceed those of an American president, far exceed them, domestically speaking, but they are not the powers of a dictator. The rules that keep them from being the powers of a dictator are the ones that are incorporated in our Standing Orders and in the respect we all have, until recently all had, for the practices of this place.

These are slender threads that preserve our liberties, but they are vital. We should not sweep them aside, and I encourage all members to take great caution not to allow this practice on this committee to become the practice of the House or of the committees in the future.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, when the member himself changed the Standing Orders for the election of the Speaker, for which we used to have a runoff ballot, he brought in a ranked ballot system. Forty per cent of the members of the House actually opposed that.

Why the double standard? Why did the member not seek unanimous consent when he wanted to change the rules?

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I hope you will not object if I take a moment to give context to the comments of my hon. colleague from Winnipeg North.

In the last Parliament, I proposed a motion to amend the Standing Orders and when that motion came before the House, it was voted on in a free vote. All members of the Liberal Party, with one exception, voted in favour of it. About two-thirds of Conservatives voted in favour of it, and about 20 NDP members voted in favour of it. The member's point is that we do not have unanimous consent and, therefore, it would be hypocritical for me to be advocating unanimous consent for changes to the Standing Orders, which was not the matter I was addressing. I was addressing abuses on the procedure and House affairs committee. However, let me deal with this.

What happened was that proposal to change the Standing Orders went to the House, it was then sent to the procedure and House affairs committee. The procedure and House affairs committee made a unanimous recommendation that the matter be referred back to the House of Commons without a recommendation in favour of or against, and that all parties consider the possibility of engaging in a free vote on the matter, which was done. If we follow, there was all-party consent on this matter at committee, which is what I have been arguing all along. If the member goes back and examines the record, he will see that I have always said that we need all-party consent.

In the context of the procedure and House affairs committee, that means unanimous consent. It does not mean I am trying to suggest that if we change things here, we should give any one member of Parliament the ability to stop the change from going forward. I am saying all-party consent, and that practice existed in the past. That was the practice, for example, in the committee I mentioned under the Chrétien government, where all party House leaders were members of a committee. It was the committee that had to approve changes, not a member of the House of Commons but every member of that committee, every party, in other words. That practice was followed with the changes that I proposed and that were eventually adopted with regard to the election of the Speaker. They are the practices that should be maintained for all future standing order changes.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I have a great deal of respect for my friend, as I do for a number of folks on all sides of the House, who deeply enrich themselves with the knowledge and history of this place. It is important that all sides have members who dedicate themselves to that conversation, because we all are actors passing across the stage. We are here for a time, we never how long, and yet we must maintain and, I would argue, improve the quality of what Parliament does on behalf of Canadians. The issue we are debating now is the ability of members just to get into the House to vote on behalf of their constituents, a motion which, by the way, the Liberals tried to kill at one point in these proceedings, which is ironic to a detrimental level.

We have been talking about the rules that govern us as members of Parliament representing our constituents and that the long-standing tradition by prime ministers throughout history was to never change those rules unless all parties agreed, simply because it is a good test. Otherwise, one could imagine a government with a majority, a false majority, in this case, changing the rules to its own advantage over the opposition. We all recognize that a majority government has enormous strength and power to pass through its agenda, yet the role of the opposition to hold it to account is central to everything we do.

The Liberals are using the line that they would not give a veto to the Conservatives over one of the Liberal election pledges. Ironically, that did not stop them from breaking their pledge on electoral reform. They themselves broke that with no help from anybody else. However, this notion that it went from an election pledge to somehow override the long-standing and important tradition that we as parliamentarians try to make the place better seems to me a distortion of the power of a promise ill-defined and badly made at some point by some political leader in the middle of a campaign versus the strength and integrity of the House of Commons.

I have a frank question for my friend, which I might ask in private but am asking in public. He mentioned the pattern we were seeing from the government, which came in with great promise to make Parliament better, to be more open and transparent about the way to conduct ourselves, yet has demonstrated its tendency to want to override the will of Parliament, to distort the power that already exists in its favour. Can that pattern be broken or has this ship simply sailed too far away to get it back to some level of sanity and decency?

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Mr. Speaker, first of all, I am shocked and appalled to discover that member introducing electoral reform into one of his comments.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

It just came to me.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

It is the obvious analogy, Mr. Speaker. There is one distinction between the electoral reform promise that the government gave and the promise it gave here, which is that the electoral reform promise was dramatic in terms of timing.

The promise was that this would be the last first-past-the-post election. It was not clear what the government was going to replace it with. When we proposed on the electoral reform committee to give the government free rein to choose any system that it saw fit as long as it then introduced that system to the Canadian public in a referendum vote and as long as that system was five or less on the Gallagher index, which means highly proportional, it was at that point that the Prime Minister fessed up and said he was only ever willing to consider preferential voting.

That was good to learn. It would have been nice to have known that in 2015. I suspect that a number of ridings might have gone NDP but for the fact that some of their swing voters went Liberal. We might now have NDP members there had this promise been clarified at that time, as opposed to after the fact.

The member asked if the ship can be turned around. I would suggest that the House is doing the work of turning it around.

On the electoral reform issue, it is unfortunate that the whole shebang ground to a halt. Should it arise in the future, the nature of that debate will be very different as a result of the clarification that we collectively brought to that discussion.

Here too we see that a number of the items that were on the Liberal agenda, such as programming motions, which was the most devastatingly bad of all the ideas the Liberals had, are off the agenda. Here the idea was essentially to do what they were going to do on procedure and House affairs, which is shut down debate and make it impossible to move forward, but we have now come to a resolution. I think those are off the agenda. The governmentt House leader said in her letter that they are off the agenda, and on this one I take her at her word. That is progress, but it is unfortunate that we have to achieve progress in this way.

However, that is the idea of the Westminster system. The government's feet are actually held to the fire. It is not a very pleasant process for the government and it may not be a pretty process from the point of view of the Canadian public, but I am not sure we are after a system that is pretty. We are after a system that in the long run delivers incrementally better and better government, and on this matter, despite other philosophical differences between me and my colleague, we are 100% in accord.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I had in mind a longer question, but given your injunction, I am wondering if the hon. member for Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston has had any opportunity to look at the proposals I have made for changing our standing rules and if he sees merit in any of them.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I cannot do justice to the hon. member's quite detailed and lengthy paper on changes to the Standing Orders. She came forward in good faith with a substantial number of proposals.

Rather than dealing with any of the specifics, I will make this observation. What she has done—and this is the best practice for any of us here—is she has looked at best practices of other Westminster jurisdictions, of which there is a treasure trove, a cornucopia, and drawn upon some of those best practices. She has pointed in particular to themes of working consensually together. This is a theme that has animated the hon. member's work on electoral reform. It defines the kind of system she is working toward with electoral reform. She wants a system that makes us more consensual.

The same general thesis animates her proposals for working in the House. That is not easy in a Westminster system. We all know the famous story of our being two swords' lengths apart. I assume the purpose was to prevent us from actually stabbing each other, but that is not to say that we have to keep on doing that into the future. We can work more consensually, and the theme that she is proposing is a profound one that I hope will be picked up by members in all parties in the remainder of this Parliament.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with my good friend from Kootenay—Columbia.

It is indeed a privilege to rise today and speak in my best efforts on behalf of the people of Skeena—Bulkley Valley, the beautiful northwest of this great country. I use the word “privilege” very specifically.

I wonder if some of my Liberal colleagues might take their conversations elsewhere. It is a little distracting.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Liberal, Anthony Rota]

Order. Actually, that is a good point to make. I can hear the discussion happening from here. I want to remind everyone in the House that it is nice to see everyone talk and kibitz. However, if it is going to be at an elevated level, maybe members could just take it into the lobby.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Mr. Speaker, we do reference this place as Parliament, a place in which we speak, but it is tricky when we all do it at the same time. It is more akin to question period.

I use the word “privilege” in terms of speaking on behalf of the good people of northwestern British Columbia, because it is in fact exactly that. To be able to rise in this place and speak in our best efforts on behalf of those we represent is an honour that only a few of us get to hold over the many years that this country has existed.

It believe it is also right at the heart of the issue we are talking about today. This is called a question of privilege. For a lot of Canadians, it is very old language, a question of privilege. Privilege sounds like something very shiny and potentially valuable in wealth, which one is afforded. We all know “I am entitled to my entitlements” and all that sort of thing that has gone on in the past.

However, the privilege we speak about today is simply the privilege to speak. In this motion it is about access of members of Parliament to come and vote on behalf of their constituents, which is of course at the very most sacred core of our democracy. We elect people, and we put them forward to represent us. They speak on our behalf, but they also cast votes on our behalf.

The incident that happened most recently with my friend the member for Milton and others was that they were physically prevented from getting into the House of Commons, which unfortunately seems to happen once every four or five years. MPs are trying to get up on the Hill and, because of some security measure or some other thing, they cannot get in.

Some in the public may say, “Big deal; the vote passed by 20 or 15 that night.” However, I have witnessed votes in this House that have been tied. I have witnessed votes of confidence over whether a government would stand or fall being supported by one extra member, keeping us from an election at one point. To say that it does not matter in the small example is missing the entire point of the larger example, which is that we all need free and fair access to this place to simply do our jobs.

Part of our job is voting. A second part of our job is the ability to hold government to account. The only members in this whole place who sit in government are the Prime Minister and the cabinet that the Prime Minister chooses.

The role of all the other MPs in this place, including government members who sit in the so-called backbench, is to hold government to account on two fundamental things: spending and laws; to look at the proposals that come forward from government, see if its spending is accurate and true to the nature of the promises made, and to see that legislation that passes before this place, whether it comes from an individual member or from the government itself, is of the best quality, using the best information.

The context in which we are debating this is important, not only the context of the Liberal government's recent pattern of becoming more and more forceful, more and more pushing its agenda onto an increasingly unwilling opposition, but also the context in which the government was elected into office. I would argue that the slogan of hope and hard work that the Prime Minister used to talk about was one that had a certain resonance and meaning for Canadians.

Clearly, the Liberals won the last election. Canadians were looking for something that was more hopeful, I would argue, more respectful of the conversation—not only the one that happens out in the larger public, true consultation, meaningful consultation around what it is that government wants to do, but also more respect for this place that is Parliament.

We saw the Harper government use the very powerful tool of prorogation, and a lot of Canadians did not even know what that word meant until the Prime Minister shut down Parliament entirely to avoid a vote of confidence at one point. The previous prime minister got into the routine and habit of just not liking a debate going on too long, and he would just shut down debate. There would be a quick vote, and 30 minutes later the debate was over and the bill was moving on.

The former government got so addicted to these tools that it would actually invoke shutting down debate as it introduced legislation. The debate would be 20 minutes old, and the government would bring in a motion to say that in another 30 minutes it would be over. Some of these bills were of enormous consequence to the lives of Canadians. That is a problem.

We can see how in government there is a certain intolerance that seems to grow, a resistance to scrutiny, particularly when a government gets into a bit of trouble or just starts to get tired of this whole procedure of Parliament that we have concocted over many centuries. That is too bad.

We also can recognize a majority government, and in this case, as in most majority governments in Canada, it is a false majority. A little less than 40% of Canadians who voted, voted to support the government. Liberals used to talk about that as a false majority and one of the reasons that we ought to change our voting system, as much of the world has.

It is also known that a majority government in Canada has inordinate power to see its agenda through. It is not as if debate takes an extra hour or two, or a day or two and the government is going to lose that vote if it is whipping the vote on its side, which governments often do. It is all a question of timing and sequence, and can we simply hold the government to account. Sometimes that means holding the government to some pause. As it wants to ram its agenda through, as it wants to get a bill through or a budget through, it feels that sense of urgency, but it maybe has not done all the scrutiny, has not looked at it from all sides, which is kind of the point. Some of these laws do not get changed for 40 or 50 years and if they are badly done, it takes things like Supreme Court challenges to fix them, which are incredibly expensive. Rather than get them right and take the time to do it, governments sometimes want to rush things.

We see this pattern creeping out, not just into the House of Commons but into the committee. We saw this at the procedure and House affairs committee earlier today where, suddenly, the chair woke up, decided he wanted the meeting to be over, smashed the gavel, and then suddenly it was over.

This is clearly the opposite of the promise the Prime Minister brought in. If we ask Canadians the question, aside from being a prime minister, what did Prime Ministers Chrétien, Mulroney, Harper, Martin, and Pierre Elliott Trudeau all have in common? A lot of Canadians would say not much. What did Harper have in common with Chrétien and Chrétien with Mulroney? They had one thing common. They believed in the tradition of this place. If we were going to change the rules, if we were going to change the way we interacted with one another, if we were going to change the balance of power between the government, which we recognized is subsequent, and the power of the opposition, then we clearly needed to have all the parties in the conversation, not at the end of a barrel of a gun, saying that if we did not agree the government would do it anyway. That is not a conversation. That is not a consultation. That is a farce.

The long-standing and important tradition is that we do not change the rules without the support of others. That seems to me beyond just tradition. It is just basic common sense because, lo and behold, governments change from time to time. The powers that a current Liberal government wishes for itself, because they are Liberals, they are benevolent, they are nice guys and would never abuse these powers, and that is not true, transfer to the next government, whichever one Canadians choose that to be. Then Liberals will be saying that the government is abusing its power now. They then will have to ask themselves, as Liberals, who gave it those extraordinary powers, and maybe the Liberals should have thought twice about that.

Looking at changing fundamental ways in which we dialogue on behalf of Canadians, in which we fight on behalf of Canadians, does not belong to the Liberal government. The money does not belong to the Liberal government; it belongs to all Canadians when they pass budgets. The laws do not belong to the Liberals government; they belong to all Canadians when we pass new laws.

The role and representation we have in this place, as my friend from the Conservatives says, sometimes hangs by a thread. The ability for people to have faith and trust in what we do and to continue to participate in our civic conversation relies on the quality of the effort we bring to this place, the respect we have for each other, and the respect we have for Parliament. This does not break down to right versus left. This comes to down to what is right and what is wrong. The Liberals I have spoken to quietly, as we have gone around this place, are sometimes scratching their heads, wondering what they are doing as a Liberal government. They are wondering why a massively long filibuster is taking place at procedure and House affairs. They are wondering why we doing this and why we are we doing that.

This is pattern language. However, patterns can change. It seems to be difficult to put this pattern change onto the current government. We need to talk to Canadians about this. We need to talk to Liberal colleagues about this, and to the people who support them. This is not what they voted for. They hoped for something a lot better. They expect and deserve a lot better. We need to reverse this pattern of trying to impose will on Canada's Parliament. It only belongs to the Canadian people.

[Filomena Tassi, Liberal, Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the member mentioned right and wrong. This is day seven. We have been discussing this for seven days in the House and essentially we have agreement. I know on the Liberal side all Liberal caucus members agree and I think all members in the House agree that unfettered access for MPs is extremely important.

Second, we all agree that this matter is to go to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs. That is the normal procedure. Everybody is in agreement with that, because we know this is an important matter. As has been mentioned, this is not the first time this has happened. We need to hear witnesses and look at this in more depth so we can come up with solutions to make our best effort to correct this situation so that MPs have access to this place.

In light of that, we have spent seven days on something that we all agree on. We are all in agreement. Some members have even said every MP should have the opportunity to speak, which, in effect, would be five and a half weeks of speaking about something that we all agree on, but right now the reality is seven days. We are talking about something that we all agree on. Is that right? Is that a respectful use of the House's time? Is that a respectful use of taxpayers' dollars? They are paying our salaries to be here. We are all in agreement on something and all we are trying to do is send it to PROC. We have spent seven days on this and opposition members are upset because they think we should spend more days on something we all agree with that has the same end result.

I would like to hear what my colleague has to say.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am only smiling a little, because that speech could have been given by Conservatives in the last Parliament when we in the opposition were trying to hold up some of their worst agenda.

The history of this is important. The member would do well to remember that her own government tried to kill this motion by punting it into non-existence. She can wave away, but it was only the intervention of the Speaker which overruled the Liberals' attempt to kill this motion in the first place that allowed us to talk about it at all. She can be as sanctimonious as she likes about respecting taxpayers.

Respect? My goodness, the Speaker of the House of Commons had to intervene with the Liberal government and say, “Whoa. Access to Parliament is incredibly important.” The Liberal Party tried to kill that motion in Parliament because it was interfering with the Liberals' machinations at the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs.

What is going on there? Let us talk about respect. The Liberals are trying to ram their changes to Parliament through without all-party agreement. If they want to stop the filibuster, if they want to stop the mess that is going on in the House, they should respect the traditions of Parliament, which prime ministers Pierre Trudeau, Chrétien, Mulroney, even Harper, respected. The Liberals came in saying that they were going to do better than even Stephen Harper. They should at least abide by that tradition.

If we are going to change the rules of the House, we have to do it together, because it is just too easy to break that tradition and then have majority governments force their will on Parliament. That is exactly what the Liberal Party is trying to do while it pretends that they are discussion papers and open conversations, and yet the Liberals will never at any point agree to one simple principle: that when we change this place, we should only do it together. That is a good principle that should be respected.

[Dianne Lynn Watts, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the parliamentary secretary to the government House leader stated numerous times today that the opposition is being irresponsible in wanting to continue debate on the question of privilege. I want to get the member's comments on that.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it is such a remarkable moment to hear the Liberals talk about taking too much time to respect Parliament. That is a bit of a contradiction of things as Liberals are going through the process of disrespecting Parliament, as Liberals are going through the process of saying they want to change the rules that guide all parliamentary debates, that they want to change the rules by forcing bills to only have a certain amount of time for debate at their discretion and nobody else's, to not even have a vote on it, and that it should be built into all legislation so that they can curtail Parliament and shut down discussions so there will be less scrutiny over what it is they are doing. They want to be able to stand and say that omnibus bills are bad in a campaign and the Prime Minister says that he will not use them, which, by the way, is a quote, and then the government introduces an omnibus bill that does exactly what the Prime Minister said he would not do.

Governments need to be held to account. Governments from time to time, as shocking as this might be for some of my Liberal colleagues to hear, need to be corrected and their power needs to be checked. The last I checked, in the last election, less than 40% of voting Canadians voted for that party. That means there is a majority of Canadians who did not. That means their voices need to be heard and their opinions need to be respected. That is the job of the opposition and that is what we will continue to do, despite these trickeries by the government.

[Wayne Stetski, NDP, Kootenay—Columbia, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to start by thanking the member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley on behalf of hundreds of thousands of Canadians who are keeping the democratic reform dream alive. He has done exceptional work.

We are here today to talk about unfettered access to the House for voting and also how the House operates.

I want to go back to the orientation session that we all had about 18 months ago, when 200 of us were new members of Parliament. I was so excited in that orientation by the conversations I had with new members of Parliament from every party. We all said the same thing: that we were all here to work together collaboratively to make a better Canada. That is why we were here.

During that orientation session, the Prime Minister made a cameo appearance and said that the role of the opposition is to make government better. I wrote that down, being a new member sitting in opposition. However, in order for that to happen, government has to listen to some of the things that the opposition has to offer.

Then I took my seat in the House, as did all members. There are probably very few things as special as the first time we take our seats in the House and look around this building and think about the history that was made here, the traditions that came from the House, the fact that this is the home of democracy for Canada, the House of democracy, and that we need to set a shining example for how democracy is supposed to work for the rest of Canada. Certainly that was the expectation of the 107,589 constituents from Kootenay—Columbia who sent me here. It was to build Canada and to build democracy.

Therefore, it is somewhat unfortunate that we end up having to talk about unfettered access to Parliament and the lack of democracy that appears to be becoming more and more evident in the House. Quite frankly, in terms of access to Parliament, the debate should continue until all members are heard and debate collapses, rather than ending through the imposition of closure, which we are facing today.

What happened? I will go back to the situation that came up on March 22, 2017. The MPs from Milton and Beauce were prevented from getting to Centre Block to vote on the budget—which is a very important vote—because the RCMP stopped parliamentary buses from picking them up in order to allow an empty Prime Minister's motorcade to leave the Hill.

After the vote, the MP for Milton got up on a question of privilege, and the Speaker later ruled that indeed her privileges had been breached. Debate began immediately on the question of privilege. Not too long after that the Liberals, in a move deemed unprecedented by the Speaker, used their majority to shut down debate. The Conservatives then got up on another question of privilege to argue that the Liberal move denied the MP for Milton the opportunity to have her question of privilege properly heard. The Speaker ruled in their favour, which of course leads to where we are today.

We are keeping this debate going because we oppose what happened to the member and also oppose what is becoming a very heavy-handed approach by the Liberal government to changing the Standing Orders. Now they have given notice of closure on this current question of privilege, which highlights yet again an undemocratic approach to dealing with accountability in Parliament.

I find this quite disappointing, but it is not my first disappointment in my 18 months here in the House. Motion No. 6 was introduced around May 17 of last year. It was almost a year ago today that we were dealing with Motion No. 6, which was brought forward by the Liberal government and attempted to set in place a temporary set of Standing Orders to control what the House was going to be doing for at least the next two months. It proposed that the House would not have an adjournment time on Monday to Thursday, when debates would continue; that there would be no automatic adjournment for summer; that only the government could move motions to adjourn the House or have debates; and that there would be no need to consult with the opposition about when to adjourn for summer. The government could do it at any time.

This ended up being withdrawn by the Liberal government after what was a really dark day, quite frankly, here in the life of this Parliament, and after the Prime Minister apologized and the Liberal government withdrew Motion No. 6.

Democratic reform was another disappointment. I really felt betrayed when it came to democratic reform. I went around my riding of Kootenay—Columbia, I visited 14 communities, and I started every discussion this way: we are not here to discuss if democratic reform is coming; we are here to talk about the preferred approach to democratic reform and proportional representation. Every discussion I started was that this was not a discussion of if we were moving to democratic reform or proportional representation; it was how we were going to get there. I and hundreds of thousands of Canadians were really disappointed to see democratic reform, which was one of the primary focuses of the Liberal campaign, all of a sudden disappear almost overnight.

With Bill C-7, the RCMP are looking to have a collective voice across Canada. Bill C-7 came through the House over a year ago. It went to the Senate and came back to the Liberal government in June 2016, and we have heard nothing since then. The RCMP still does not have a national voice, which they very much need, to deal with a number of issues they have.

The Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security recently decided it was not going to deal with Bill C-51. In my riding of Kootenay—Columbia that was one of the major election issues in 2015, and it contributed to my riding for the first time in 21 years no longer having a Conservative member of Parliament. That is how important this issue was. There were rallies held across my riding opposed to Bill C-51, and nothing has happened with that so far.

Yesterday we saw what many who have spent much longer in Parliament than I considered a real disrespect to the leader of the NDP, who asked questions that were not answered by the Prime Minister, even though the Prime Minister was here in the room. That is a lack of respect for our leader.

For the past few weeks, I have sat here and heard the Liberals claim that they just wanted to have a discussion on how Parliament works, and now they are unilaterally forcing through changes. These changes will not make Parliament better and do not have the unanimous consent of the House, which is tradition. It is really quite fair that Canadians are asking whether these are being imposed just to make life better for Liberals and the Prime Minister, and if not, then why not negotiate and get consensus from all parties in the House in terms of how we are going to work here in the House on behalf of our constituents? Any time a government becomes less accountable, it is the citizens who suffer.

We are here in Canada's house of democracy, and I go back to where I started in terms of the orientation session when everyone I talked to from every party said they were here to work together collaboratively to make a better Canada in what truly should be a shining example for democracy. It has been quite disappointing to sit through the last seven days and see what has happened here in the House.

I truly believe the Liberal government needs to do better going forward. We need to respect democracy. We need to work together collaboratively here in the House. I look forward hopefully to seeing that happen.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, as the member and all members of the House will know, this issue is all about unfettered access to the parliamentary precinct. It is not the first time this has happened. In fact, it has happened a few times.

I sat on PROC on a couple of occasions and had to deal with the issue. We all understand and appreciate PROC is where the issue is best dealt with. The last time it was dealt with in the House was on May 12, 2015. The total number of speakers was five, representing the parties. They stood in their place and explained why it was so important that PROC deal with the issue.

As of right now when the member sat down, we have had 49 members speak to this issue. A number of members said that they were speaking because it is a filibuster on a privilege issue. What are the options? If we were not debating this issue, we would actually be debating the national budget and the budget implementation bill.

Does the member believe his constituents would rather we were debating the budget, the priorities of government, and the priorities of opposition parties, or would they rather we continue what can easily be justified, from my perspective, as an opposition filibuster on an issue that should in fact be dealt with by PROC?

We in the Liberal caucus have made it very clear that we want the issue to go to PROC. We want to ensure that every member of this House has unfettered access to the parliamentary precinct.

[Wayne Stetski, NDP, Kootenay—Columbia, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the real question Canadians have is how we got to this point in the House, and how the Liberals put us in this situation where we are sitting today.

The Liberals put us in this situation by shutting down debate prior to sending the issue to PROC. You tried to shut down debate last time prior to sending it to PROC, and the Speaker overruled what you wanted to do. Now we are facing that same situation, where once again you are shutting down debate on a really important question of unfettered access to Parliament.

That is the real question Canadians want an answer to. Why has the Liberal government put this House in that position?

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Liberal, Anthony Rota]

I want to remind the hon. member that the tradition is we speak through the Chair. I am sure I had nothing to do with that, so I am sure he meant the hon. member for Winnipeg North.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I think it was the last comment from my friend from Kootenay—Columbia that talked about how we got here.

Canadians will wonder, and the government will hold itself up and ask why there is such discord, having this almost oblivious attitude toward its own actions in getting us here.

If the government wants to see the House functioning well and if it wants to see committees functioning well, it should ask itself how it is unable to do that with the majority that it has been given by Canadians. The simple request from the opposition is that in order to change the rules that conduct us here in Parliament, we should respect the long-held tradition that all parties agree to those rule changes, so that the power and balance of power that goes on between opposition and government is maintained with some dignity.

Ultimately, is that not at the heart of the problem, and why so many things have fallen off the rails, and why the government seems incapable of actually passing legislation? This is probably one of the lightest legislative agendas we have seen in 50 years. It is incredible how little the government has been able to get done, outside of selfies, of course, because it does a lot of those.

[Wayne Stetski, NDP, Kootenay—Columbia, BC]

Mr. Speaker, again I go back to the fact that I came here, as did all members, at least initially, to work together collaboratively to make a better Canada here in what should be a shining example for democracy.

We have strayed way off track from that over the last little while. We need to get back to working together collaboratively. We need to get back to making sure that this House is a shining example for democracy in Canada. That means that before the government changes the rules in the House, it is done collaboratively and through consensus. That is how we move democracy forward.

[Hélène Laverdière, NDP, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with my colleague from Nanaimo—Ladysmith. I am sure she will do an excellent job, as usual.

I am honoured, and perhaps a little saddened, to rise in the House to speak to the privilege motion currently before us. I say it saddens me a little because it is unfortunate that we have to move privilege motions and hold a debate on this matter, rather than doing our usual, ongoing work. Nevertheless, this is a very important matter, and I will come back to it in more detail later.

I think this question raises a much broader issue, that is, our ability to do our work in general. It is important because we are all here to represent our constituents and all Canadians. It is crucial that we be able to do so properly, because that is our most fundamental role.

One of the opposition's key roles is holding the government to account. Although we often hold it to account on budget issues, I feel we should hold it to account for all of its decisions. To do that, we need to be able to have in-depth debates and move about freely on the Hill so that we can take part in those debates.

During the election campaign, the Liberals said they wanted to work on creating a more collegial atmosphere and making it easier for us to do the job people elected us to do, but it really seems like things are going the other way and the Liberals are breaking their promises, just as they have done so many other times.

We were promised sunny ways. We were told everything would be great and everyone would get along and work together. However, for the last little while, the government has been trying to change the system so it can get its hands on all the power. Initially, I thought its goal was to prevent the opposition from having a say, but that is not quite right. What the government is really trying to do is make it so that anything said in the House, any argument the opposition might make, is simply ignored or carries no real weight.

For example, the government wants to change the rules of the House. I have no problem with discussing the rules of the House. However, what we are seeing now and what we saw last year during the debate around Motion No. 6 is the government's desire to foist its own vision of how the House should work on us, and that vision involves more power for the government.

People keep saying there is going to be a conversation about this. I bet I am not the only member of the House who is starting to wonder if “conversation” is really the right word here.

As we get to know this government better, we realize that having a conversation means that it will talk, it will listen, it will allow us to talk, but at the end of the day it is still going to do whatever it wants. The government wonders why the House is dysfunctional at times. The answer seems obvious when we look at what the government did with Motion No. 6 and what it is trying to do yet again to limit our powers.

The government is not really leaving us the choice to rise or not rise on motions like this on a question of privilege. On behalf of the people we represent, we have to express our right and our privilege to truly be heard on these major issues.

I was talking about the word “conversation”, but another way of saying it is “keep talking”. In other words, we can talk all we want, but at the end of the day, the government is going to do what it wants. Electoral reform is another fine example. The government promised to have a conversation and listen to what Canadians had to say about electoral reform. The government formed a committee that travelled across the country. It was all very nice.

Almost 90% of the experts and Canadians who appeared before the committee were of the same opinion, agreeing that we should have a mixed member proportional system. The Liberals did not like it because, as we know, it would not necessarily give them the advantage. Suddenly, the conversation came to an abrupt end. The Liberals said that they had let the people speak, but now they would do what they wanted and break a promise that they repeated many times.

This has happened in connection with several issues. There is the matter of House procedure. They are trying to limit the powers of the parliamentary budget officer. How will limiting these powers help transparency and accountability? They are also using closure. On this issue of privilege, it is quite interesting, given that our colleagues from Milton and Beauce were unable to vote because they did not have access to the House.

When members raised this question of privilege, the Liberals' reaction was to use their majority to prevent the matter from being debated. Even the Speaker said that it was unprecedented, that a government had never before used its majority to prevent a debate on a question of privilege.

In the end, they changed their minds, so we could discuss it here today, but now here we go again. The Liberals are imposing a gag order on this matter. In this context, we have to wonder what happened to all the lofty promises to be more collegial and work together. All this is coming from a government that promised transparency and openness.

Everyone here today saw question period, for instance. So much for transparency and openness, when the Minister of National Defence speaks out of both sides of his mouth and the Prime Minister does not really answer any questions. I think that is why more and more people are saying that, in the end, the Prime Minister and his government are just like the Harper government, but with a grin. We are happy to see a smile, but we would like to see a little more in terms of fundamental changes.

I would like to say a quick word about one of my memories of Jack Layton, from our first caucus meeting. We are not supposed to discuss caucus outside of caucus. He spoke to us at length about respect. That is what this is about, respect for members and for our institutions. I think that is what everyone here today is asking for.