Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise again in the House to debate an important issue.
Canadians tuning in today can perhaps be forgiven if they are wondering what Motion No. 18 means. Most probably do not give a lot of consideration to what the Standing Orders mean and how they affect their lives, but this motion is really about accountability and transparency of government and of the House of Commons. That is what we are debating today.
After several months, the government has finally put forward some proposals to change the Standing Orders, and it is important for people to understand how we arrived at this point and how we arrived at the proposals that are on the table today.
The road that we are on began over a year ago, when the government proposed Motion No. 6. The government was frustrated with the opposition for opposing its legislation and its attempts to change our laws. We were doing our job, but the government became frustrated with that, so it brought in Motion No. 6, which was by all accounts a draconian motion to take away the rights of the opposition, thereby disenfranchising the people that we represent, the millions of Canadians who voted for parties other than the governing party. We were sent here to do an important job; certain members of the government understand that, while others clearly need a reminder.
We saw what happened when the Prime Minister's anger boiled over. He came down to this end of the chamber, made contact with one member, grabbed another one, and we spent days debating his violation of the parliamentary privileges of members of the House. Only because of the Prime Minister's unparliamentary outburst did the government withdraw Motion No. 6 at the time, and we went back to operating under the normal Standing Orders that give opposition members their rights in this place.
We then came to March of this year and a supposed discussion paper. I listened with some amusement to the previous Liberal speaker and questioner talking about how this was just a discussion paper and how the government had no agenda. In fact, we heard from the previous speaker that freedom now reigns in committees and the Liberals are just operating as a bunch of free agents. They do not have any direction from the Prime Minister's Office or from ministers' offices. They just act on their own goodwill and good ideas.
Of course, the discussion paper was tabled on a Friday afternoon before a break week. Then, two hours later, a motion was presented calling for discussion of the paper that had just been discovered, just been translated, just been tabled before Canadians.
I guess an idea popped into the head of the member for Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame to bring this discussion paper before the procedure and House affairs committee with a firm deadline for the committee to report back to the House on these changes by June 2. It was essentially holding a hammer over the heads of opposition members. We could talk about it all we wanted, except here was the deadline, here were the terms, and here was what was going to happen.
We in the opposition exercised our rights as opposition members to hold the government accountable and to use the tools at our disposal to draw Canadians' attention to these changes.
What did the Liberals propose to do in these changes? They proposed to cancel Friday sittings, thereby reducing accountability by 20%. The House would sit for fewer days.
They proposed that the Prime Minister would only be in the House for 45 minutes a week, for question period on Wednesdays. They also proposed to cut speaking times in half and have five-minute speeches instead of 10-minute speeches, because we all know how easy it is to get complex matters discussed in five minutes. Perhaps members of the government are wishing they had implemented that already, as I have reached that point in my speech right now.
The Liberals also proposed electronic voting, meaning that we would no longer have to stand and be counted. I can tell the House that from this vantage point, I have several times seen Liberal backbenchers making up their minds as the roll call was coming to them. As they had to stand and be counted, they realized either through their own conscience or through the pressure of their peers what they should do. It is important that we stand and be counted and be recorded here in the House of Commons.
The government proposes eliminating the ability of MPs to bring up and sustain debate at committees. We have seen the member for Lakeland do an admirable job of using the immigration committee to talk about the government's false reasons for closing down the Vegreville case processing centre. Through her efforts at committee, we have exposed the fact that the government rationale for that decision was false, that the cost savings were manufactured, that in fact it would be costing taxpayers much more money to shut down that system. We never would have had that debate if the government had had its way and eliminated the ability of MPs to do that.
The government also wanted to eliminate the ability of MPs to be able to bring up concurrence motions, to be able to debate committee reports here. We have had important debates many times in this session. Just yesterday, we talked about the Official Languages Act and got to talk about the fiasco that was the Liberals' appointment process for the Commissioner of Official Languages. These were their proposals. We are now left, after weeks of debate and weeks of the opposition using the strategic and procedural tactics available to us to draw attention to this and slow it down. The government has finally put forward this thin gruel of Standing Order changes.
It is not just members of the opposition who have taken offence to how this has been conducted. The member for Malpeque, a long-standing, respected member of this Parliament, who has sat at the cabinet table, who has sat in the official opposition, who has sat in the third party and is now on the government benches, but as a backbench member of Parliament, quite clearly said:
This is the House of Commons. It’s not the House of cabinet. It’s not the House of the PMO. It’s the House of Commons. It’s the people’s House, and the majority of the people in that House are not members of Cabinet.
Those are wise words, and I wish that government members, members of the Liberal caucus, would heed them.
The member also said the following:
I know there is some upset in my own party over the way things are at, at the moment, that the environment seems to be somewhat toxic. But opposition are using the only levers of power they have at the moment, and I understand that; I’ve been there.
The member for Malpeque understands that we do not unilaterally change the rules of the game to benefit the majority, that the rules are there to protect the minority.
Again, the government has time after time shown that it is actually more interested in having an audience than an opposition. The member for Malpeque served in the government of Jean Chrétien. It is unfortunate that the government does not follow that example. Jean Chrétien was a tough guy. There was no love lost between him and the opposition. He realized that this place served a purpose, that members of the opposition served a purpose. Before there were any changes to the Standing Orders, he struck an all-party committee, in which the government did not have the majority, to look at things that could be agreed upon to change.
This happened again in the previous Parliament. Everyone talks about Harper ramming through this and ramming through that. When it came to the Standing Orders, he respected the rules and he respected the opposition, and there was no change made if there was no agreement; the issue was not brought forward. That was the record of Stephen Harper. We know that the government will not follow Stephen Harper's example on that, but they should follow Jean Chrétien's example.
I want to address just one of the issues: the Prime Minister's question period. The government says this has to be done to enact their campaign commitments. However, Prime Minister's question period is nowhere to be seen in Motion No.18. I do not know why. Perhaps it is because the Prime Minister has the ability to answer as many questions as he wants without changing the Standing Orders. Maybe he has finally come to that realization. Perhaps it is not going too well when he has to answer time after time, for instance, how many times he met with the Ethics Commissioner. He refuses to answer time after time.
We have come to this place. This is thin gruel. There is not much there. What is there, again, is done without the consent and co-operation of the opposition.
We think that there are possibilities to make changes here, but we believe that the government should have come to the table with a more willing attitude to work with the opposition and only make those changes that could be agreed to by all the major parties in this place.