Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order to ask you to rule new clause 344.1 in Bill C-76, reported back from the Procedure and House Affairs Committee yesterday afternoon, out of order for offending the so-called parent act rule.
Before getting into the substance of my argument, I want to acknowledge that this is essentially an appeal of a committee chair's ruling. However, this issue falls within the allowable categories of such points of order. On April 28, 1992, at page 9801 of the Debates, Speaker Fraser said:
As the House knows, the Speaker does not intervene on matters upon which committees are competent to take decisions. However, in cases where a committee has exceeded its authority, particularly in relation to bills, the Speaker has been called upon to deal with such matters after a report has been presented to the House.
Your immediate predecessor cited this passage as an authority in a ruling he delivered in relation to the parent act rule on May 1, 2014, at page 4787 of the Debates.
Turning to the substance of my point of order, the parent act rule, page 771 of House of Commons Procedure and Practice, third edition, states:
In the case of a bill referred to a committee after second reading, an amendment is inadmissible if it proposes to amend a statute that is not before the committee or a section of the parent Act, unless the latter is specifically amended by a clause of the bill.
That latter point traces back to citation 698(8)(b) of Beauschene's Parliamentary Rules and Forms, sixth edition, edited by Fraser, Dawson, and Holtby.
In the present case, an amendment, known in the Procedure and House Affairs Committee proceedings as “Liberal amendment 55”, purported to add a new clause to Bill C-76 for the purpose of making an amendment to section 498 of the Canada Elections Act. Bill C-76, as introduced, would amend both sections 497.5 and 499 of the Canada Elections Act, the two sections that bookend section 498, but not section 498 itself.
In ruling on my point of order at committee, the chair stated that there is an exception to the parent act rule for consequential amendments, but cited no authority in that regard. An exception such as that could have wide-sweeping consequences, which merits a passing reference somewhere in our various procedural authorities so that members may be guided appropriately.
No such reference, aside, or footnote articulating this exception to such a clear-cut rule appears in a canvassing of Bosc and Gagnon, O'Brien and Bosc, Marleau and Montpetit, Beauschene's or Erskine May. However, I have found the words of Mr. Speaker Fraser, from the ruling I cited earlier:
When a bill is referred to a standing or legislative committee of the House, that committee is only empowered to adopt, amend or negative the clauses found in that piece of legislation and to report the bill to the House with or without amendments. The committee is restricted in its examination in a number of ways. It cannot infringe on the financial initiative of the Crown, it cannot go beyond the scope of the bill as passed at second reading, and it cannot reach back to the parent act to make further amendments not contemplated in the bill no matter how tempting this may be.
This sentiment was reiterated much more recently by no less an authority than this House's esteemed former law clerk, Rob Walsh. Mr. Walsh, at page 115 of his book On the House: An Inside Look at the House of Commons, published just last autumn, offered this perspective from a drafter's point of view:
An amendment to a bill amending an existing Act of Parliament, if passed, cannot amend a section in the “parent act” that may be implicated in the change but is not being amended in the bill. As a lawyer, I found this rule problematic at times. Occasionally it seemed clear that a section in the parent act, untouched in the amending bill, would need to be amended if the bill's amendments were passed. This is a “consequential” amendment, an amendment that is a consequence of another amendment. The lawyer drafting an amendment for a private member...might see that another section in the parent act would also need to be amended if the member's amendment is to work effectively, but the procedural rules won't allow the consequential amendment to be proposed.
These citations, I submit, are quite clear that consequential amendments, no matter how tempting, cannot be made to a bill if such amendments run afoul of our clear rules and procedures.
Accordingly, Mr. Speaker, I would ask that you find new clause 344.1 to be out of order and that it be struck from Bill C-76. Nonetheless, should you find favour with the analysis of the member for Yukon, the chair of the committee, I would ask that the Chair's ruling in consideration of Standing Order 10 “state the...authority applicable to the case” so that all members will understand the applicable limits when contemplating amendments they might like to propose to legislation in the future.