Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to join this debate. I will declare from the outset that I am not a procedural scholar or a particular expert in the Standing Orders, but I have some strong feelings about a number of ways that this place works. Also, as most other members have pointed out, my views are my own as well.
I want talk a little about the Standing Orders in general and how they have served Canadians since long before Confederation. Some of our Standing Orders go right back to the Assembly House of Lower Canada, which is 230 years old. Dozens of our rules date back from those times. They are a part of how and why our democratic institutions are, in my opinion, extraordinarily successful.
Contained within our Constitution are promises of peace, order and good government. The success we have had in those areas is a function of how we govern ourselves in Parliament. Therefore, changes to the Standing Orders ought not to be taken lightly. I do not support a lot of the changes that have been discussed from time to time.
I certainly opposed the changes the government proposed in the spring of 2016. I do not support the idea of building in programming to bills either by PROC or giving the government the ability to do so. I am not going to talk about tinkering with the sitting calendar or the daily rubric, although I am intrigued by the member for Calgary Shepard's idea on moving question period to the start of the day.
Before I get to my main point about how we debate, I want to talk about the idea of any sort of permanence being added to remote voting or remote debating. I really oppose any type of permanence to these things for a variety of reasons.
I do not have time to really get into all of it, but there is something just inherently critical about being in close proximity to each other in the chamber, being able to gauge emotional response in debate, being together as we vote and bringing members into contact with each other. This is extremely important. Enormous factors will and can isolate colleagues from each other, without adding any type of permanence to remote voting. I do not believe remote voting can do a lot to promote a sense of family friendliness. Eliminating Fridays does not do it either. Yes, it makes travel a bit different, but condensing hours into the other days of the week would create different types of unfriendliness for the work environment and for families.
What I want to get into is how we debate and, if I have time at the end, a little on committees.
With respect to debates, this is a debating chamber and debate is perhaps the most important tool members have to represent their constituents. It is how opposition and governing party backbenchers can influence government. If Canadians watch, or if a member of the public were watching in the Gallery, they would see dull debate that is not particularly informative. The format we have of 10-minute speeches, which are usually read or at least done with significant notes just to put specific points on the record that are generally unsurprising and a regurgitation of known party positions and repeating that over and over again all day, is not the best way to have debate. It is really at the end of these 10-minute sessions, when we have five minutes of questions and comments, that the true debate begins. That is when members and their ideas are tested. It is really where members of the public, never mind other members of Parliament, are most likely to learn some insight into the member's position or to gain better knowledge of the bill.
The member for Calgary Shepard already talked today about the U.K. model. I certainly give tremendous support for the idea of moving in that direction. They have a long tradition of allowing other members to intervene during speeches. In the U.K. Parliament, it is perfectly normal for an MP, or several MPs, to rise while a member is speaking. It is the choice of members whether to yield to another member, and they can have time added back for when they yield for another intervention.
It even takes the Speaker out of it, where the member who has the time slot can manage who speaks. Members can make a speech in three or four minutes, making the main points they want to, and provoke response on the other side. They see other members rise to either rebut a point, to agree with a point or to bring in other information. That is when they really get the back and forth. In their Parliament, it is considered bad form not to yield one's time. Members would be heckled for failing to let other members jump into debate. They can have a seamless transition where there is much back and forth. I would like to see the Canadian Parliament look at how we do that.
Even if we did not go all out that way and adopt the U.K.'s system of interventions within a speech, if nothing else, we could perhaps change the proportion of speech versus questions and comments. Most members could imagine this more easily, to have a speech where they only have five minutes to make the canned points they want to get on the record and then have 10 minutes of questions and comments. This would be a simple change that would not fundamentally change how debate in our chamber is managed, as far as the Speaker and the House leaders go, but it would allow for much more participation and would have a much more edifying and engaged debate.
There are a lot of other ways we could improve debate. Question period itself could be changed to where questions are allotted or when the Speaker recognizes someone to ask a question the member is automatically given two questions, so the questions are always in two-question blocks. That way, the person who is asking the question can automatically then follow up with another question that is related to the response to the first question.
I want to say something about late shows. We could change late shows to go from a 10-minute slot to five minutes. Without even changing the rubric of the daily routine, we could go from three to five late shows, maybe putting that right after question period. That has been discussed today as maybe not a bad idea. At a minimum, we could open it up so maybe it is two, two, one and one rather than four, four, one and one and get more late shows in.
I do not know if I have time to talk much about committees, but I would ask PROC to look into or study the idea of having committee membership be determined by secret ballot. Rather than having whips supply lists of members for committees, have members actively campaign between their own caucus and other caucuses and be chosen for their subject matter expertise and their ability to work with others. The committee reports would carry more weight, they would be less partisan and they would be driven more toward strong reports that a government would be less able to easily ignore.
I wanted to touch on a lot of the things that have already come up today. We want the public to see that their MPs are able to engage in debate, are able to use their voices in Parliament, to be part of committees that are relevant and that produce reports that will have impact with the government. We can make all these changes, but I would not want to make large, whole-scale changes to the Standing Orders which have served Canadians well for centuries.