Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to talk about the Standing Orders. This is always a debate that I very much enjoy.
The rules of the House govern how we do our work in the House of Commons, and so, before we talk about the rules and how we might want to change them, I think it is important to talk about why we have these rules and what we are hoping to achieve with them. I would offer that the rules are there to help us create an environment where we have a professional, respectful discourse that promotes efficient work, such as on bills and on all of the statements and petitions and all of the other work the House does, and also so that we can represent our ridings from across the country. That is why we have come here.
Why should members listen to me about what I think we ought to do in the House? I am a valued member of the House, so that is one reason, but I would say I have a few credentials that they may want to consider. The first is that twice in the last six years I have been voted the most collegial parliamentarian, so I think I know something about being professional and respectful and working co-operatively.
The other thing members might want to consider is that I am the first female engineer in the House of Commons. Engineers are all about efficiency, and in my 32-year career I spent a lot of time talking about work processes, the efficiency or work processes and how to change work processes. In fact, when we had the last debate under S. O. 51s and I gave my speech with all of my ideas, the late Arnold Chan actually came across the aisle and said to me that I had a lot of really good ideas and asked if he could have a copy of my speech. I am pleased to say that a couple of the ideas I offered have actually started to happen in reality. One of them was that in order to be family-friendly, we should be holding most of our votes after question period. I see that in most cases, that is what we are doing. I also suggested that we should be doing electronic voting. I suggested that in 2015. Here we are, and it is happening, and so I would offer the rest of my suggestions to the House, not in any particular order of priority, but as different ideas that I think might help improve the work here.
The first has to do with our S. O. 31s. I really enjoy hearing from members when they honour their constituents, paying tribute to someone who has passed away, for example, or even when the member does do infomercials for their parties. I think these are all good, but I notice that not everybody really gets a chance to do them as often as they should, and so I think we should apply the same kind of lottery that we do for Private Members' Business. We should let it be a second lottery, so that if a member loses out and is late in the game on Private Members' Business, maybe they can be earlier in the game on S. O. 31s. Then we just continue to roll over the list in that order, so that everybody from ridings across the country has a chance to make their statements and make an impact.
Second, I notice that when we come to second reading and there is unanimous consent for a bill, we send the bill to committee and then it comes back here for report stage and third reading. If we unanimously agree at second reading, let us send it off to the Senate and call it a day. We all agree. Let us shorten the time to get some of this legislation in place. I think that would be beneficial. Then we could have more discussion of new bills.
Another point is on the dress code in the House. There was some discussion earlier about the dress code. One of the things, as a menopausal woman, that I have appreciated is that women are able to bare our arms in the House. We have the right to bare our arms, one might say. However, for my male colleagues, I have seen them when it is hot in the House and they are forced to wear their jackets. It is quite uncomfortable for them. Perhaps we should be setting a dress code in the summer that allows them to wear short sleeves, but a tie, so we are still maintaining decorum but are all comfortable, so that we can participate in and endure the discussion.
In terms of hours, private members' bills are very important. As somebody who passed a private member's bill on palliative care to get consistent access to such care for all Canadians, I can tell members that it was a real thrill. I think it was valuable to the country.
There are a lot of great ideas from all parties on Private Members' Business, but not everybody will get a chance to do that. However, we could alter the way we do hours in the House to try to double up the amount of time we have for Private Members' Business.
For example, we could decide to start from Monday to Friday at 9 a.m., which regular business does, and devote that extra time to Private Members' Business. We could have a few extra hours on Monday and an extra hour Tuesday. We could maybe start at 1 p.m. on Wednesday to have another hour and then another on Thursday and Friday. We could double the time for Private Members' Business, which would help everybody in a parliamentary session get through and contribute his or her private member's bill. That would be a great improvement for the House.
We talked about having votes after QP whenever possible. However, one thing to consider is the elimination of the all-night voting, especially for members who have medical issues, or who are seniors or for our families. Extending the hours to 10 p.m. or 11 p.m. gets the point across for the media to pick up that there is an issue that the opposition wants to bring forward, but we really do not need to torture ourselves all night.
There was some commentary on how maybe 10 or 20 minutes was not the right time frame for speeches in the House.
When I was first elected, I was asked if I could speak for some time on the withdrawal of the CF-18s from the ISIS fight. I said that I could do a couple of minutes on that, but I was told I had 10 or 20 minutes on the subject. I said I could say everything I had to say in two minutes, but that was not the way we did things. I ended up putting eight minutes of filler into the two minutes of what I really wanted to say. As I sit in the House and listen to other members, a lot of filler happens that does not need to happen. I would encourage breaking it up in some way so we would either have two five-minute speeches with the five minutes of questions to either one of them or allow the flexibility.
I really enjoyed the COVID sessions we had this summer. We had five minutes of questions in question period. I thought the quality of questions was better with respect to getting very specific and the answers were better, which was a good thing for our discourse.
Also, I would like to hear questions being answered. The standard talking points is a disservice to Canadians, especially when people do not answer the questions at all and move on to a different topic. That is not good.
When a lot of issues are going on and time is short, a lot of people do not even hear one speech on the issue before it shows up at the committee for consideration. I would rather see each party come with two or three speakers who have the diversity of thought from their caucus and have everybody sit in the House and listen to all of it so we all understand the issues before it shows up at committee. That would really help with the debate.
We also need to have better respect for one another. We have talked about heckling. I am not a fan of heckling, although I like the idea of intelligent heckling in the written comments. However, in general, we should not be talking when other people are talking. We should be treating our colleagues with respect. There should not be bullying, piling on and insulting going on. This is not helpful to the discourse of the House and it is not helpful to any of us.
On Questions on the Order Paper, every day, the government House leader gets up and asks that the remaining questions be allowed to stand. I have only been here for six years, but I have never heard anyone say no. We should strike that inefficiency. The question should always be allowed to stand.
I liked the idea of the late show questions answered by parliamentary secretaries. We should include all the rules of a pandemic sitting in the Standing Orders. I have more recommendations, but my time is up.