Madam Speaker, I hope no member will feel I am playing the role in a bad high school play, as somebody who is not in the habit of reading canned speeches anyway.
I am grateful for the opportunity to participate in some debate on the Standing Orders in the House. Often, these things are dismissed too quickly as being the wheelhouse of procedural wonks and we often fail to recognize the extent to which these rules really do affect outcomes in the House of Commons.
Sometimes those things flare up and we have moments where people are more appreciative of how the rules of the House affect the business of the nation. In between, we often do not pay them very much regard.
I know Madam Chair will appreciate some of that, having been a part of the studies of the estimates process we undertook at the government operations and estimates committee in the last Parliament.
I really want to zero in on something, and 10 minutes is not a very long time and there is a lot to discuss. However, partly because it is very germane to this Parliament, and any minority Parliament, I want to take time to talk about the confidence convention and some opportunities for us to make a difference when it comes to that.
It is a long-standing prerogative of the Crown to dissolve Parliament whenever he or she sees fit. In Canada, that has really come to mean that the Prime Minister gets to dissolve Parliament when he sees fit, and with one short exception, it is pretty much always been a he. When we talk about the different roles and aspects that our government plays, this is really a place where the legislature, the House of Commons particularly, ought to have more say. I am not talking about the unelected other place in this instance. Canadians' elected representatives ought to have more say about when a Parliament ceases to work. I do not think that is a decision of the Prime Minister.
If we were to ask a lot of Canadians whether it should be up to the Prime Minister to decide whether he enjoys the confidence of the House of Commons as opposed to having the House of Commons decide whether the Prime Minister enjoys the confidence of the House of Commons, I think we would find that a lot of Canadians agree it makes more sense that the House decide that question. However, that is not the way our system works.
I have done a bit of work on this. As some members may know, the NDP tabled a supply motion in my name in November in order to try to come up with a solution to this problem, at least for now, short of amending legislation. There is the opportunity to try to do some of that work in the Standing Orders. As it stands, a no-confidence motion, or confidence motion, depending how one wants to frame it, could come either from the government as a motion or it could come any day from opposition parties.
The other thing that does not quite make sense is that an opposition party can put a no-confidence motion on the Notice Paper along with any number of motions and we would not know until the day of whether we were debating a motion of confidence or not. As we saw in the fall, we could have what appears to be a pretty simple matter of establishing a committee and the Prime Minister could decide the same day that it would be a confidence motion.
It really makes sense for democratically elected members of Parliament to have more say on whether the House of Commons has confidence in the government. Also, instead of the kind of gamesmanship that the current rules allow, if there were to be a confidence vote, members from more than one political party ought to be movers of that motion. There should be some agreement across party lines. Members should know days out whether there will be a question of confidence voted on by the House of Commons so everybody has time to prepare and to show up. I do not think these things should be done flying by the seat of our pants.
I encourage members to take a look at the proposal that was tabled then and I hope that by virtue of this interjection along with that from the member Saanich—Gulf Islands this will be sufficient for the procedure and House affairs committee to take up this issue as part of its study. Along with it, I would hope that it would look at the similar prerogative of the Crown whereby the Prime Minister is able to prorogue Parliament. There has been some discussion on that point.
I thank the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands for having raised that point, because it is something that we really ought to be looking at. She is quite right to say that there are uses for prorogation, although we have not seen any in a long time. I just wrote “prorogation” where the government is updating the agenda for a parliamentary session, but what we are all concerned about are the instances of political abuse of that power. One of the ways to prevent that abuse is not by discussing the reasons after it is already done, but by implicating legislators up front so that they have some say about the appropriateness of a prorogation before it transpires, and there are ways to do that.
Hugo Cyr has already been mentioned in this debate. He talks about having a rule that deems the Prime Minister to have lost the confidence of the House if he seeks a prorogation without its permission. What that means is that because the Governor General is only obligated to follow the advice of a prime minister who enjoys the confidence of the House, if he is deemed to have lost that confidence, it does not tie the Governor General's hands in the same way. That is something that certainly bears consideration.
I mentioned the estimates. I think the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, either itself or in consultation with another committee, particularly the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates, should be examining how to take up the project of estimates reform. Some things were tried in the last Parliament. Some of those went well and some of them really did not, I have to say. It is no secret to members who were here in the last Parliament that I hold that view, but it was a good project and we should be endeavouring to learn whatever lessons we can from that experiment. Despite the fact that there are very concrete timelines governing when the estimates have to be brought to the House, the estimates were deferred when we saw the country in crisis, and Parliament agreed with that deferral.
One of the reasons the government presented consistently in the last Parliament for not having a fixed budget day, which would allow a proper alignment between the budget and the estimates, was that sometimes crises happen, and then the government's hands cannot be tied to present a budget at a specific time. We saw that in a crisis, Parliament is quite prepared to work collaboratively with government to bend some of those rules when it is in the country's interest, and we can reasonably expect that this Parliament would have been willing to do that for a budget, at least to a point. There are some legitimate arguments to be made about whether the government ought to have presented an economic statement or budget sooner than it did, but Parliament has demonstrated that it is reasonable on this point and that if the government does not meet the deadline because there is a genuine crisis, parliamentarians are willing to work with the government in that case.
We should be asking that question about a fixed budget date again, because we need to do something to get the budget cycle and the estimates cycle into alignment so that parliamentarians have a better idea of what they are studying and what the financial implications of it really are. In the current mode, even in the last Parliament, we were not there, and now that we have gone back to the rules that obtained before the last Parliament, we are very far away from having a well-functioning estimates process that Canadians and their elected representatives can understand.
On the question of a second chamber, I would say I quite like the new chamber. I would be happy to spend more time in it if folks in Elmwood—Transcona are gracious enough to give me the opportunity to continue serving them, but I would much rather see, when we go back to Centre Block, a second chamber established in the red chamber after the abolition of the Senate, which I think would be a wonderful thing to see. It would go a long way toward making Canada a true democracy in the 21st century.
Of course, we cannot speak to the rules of the Senate here, but what we can speak to is what I think has been a real travesty, something we saw in the last Parliament with a bill that would recognize and implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. We saw procedural shenanigans tie that bill up in a way that, as far as I am concerned, was completely inappropriate, given that it had the blessing of Canada's elected representatives. Reforming the other place is required, and as the House that actually represents Canadians by virtue of their choices and not prime ministerial patronage, it is important that we undertake to do whatever we can as a House to assert our will over theirs.