Madam Speaker, never has the Kingston part of my riding name been more important than today, as my colleague from Kingston and the Islands and I wrestle over whose riding is home to the illustrious former Speaker of the House Peter Milliken. He is a man who served with great distinction for many years and who will make, if this goes to the procedure and House affairs committee, an excellent witness providing some information as to how we have done things in the past and how Speakers have behaved in the past.
There are many, many parallels to draw upon here. There have been many Speakers in this House and in all of our 10 provincial assemblies over a period of well over a century. There are parallels not only in the Parliament in the United Kingdom but also at the House of Representatives in Australia, in the one in New Zealand, in the various Australian states, in the world's largest democracy in India and in a number of African and Caribbean countries. The parallels here are enormous.
The precedents are significant. If the behaviour of the Speaker is such that it would warrant our judgment that he has been acting inappropriately, or acting outside of what is the normal expectation of the Office of the Speaker, there is no better place to determine that than the procedure and House affairs committee. If the reverse turns out to be true, then there is no better place to establish that than the procedure and House affairs committee as well.
I want to deal with a few of the things that the procedure and House affairs committee ought to consider in its deliberations on this subject. The committee will have limited time, so it will have to structure its sittings with some care. I say all of this as someone who served on the procedure and House affairs committee for 15 years. Although I am no longer on that committee, I believe that still stands as not merely a record for serving on that committee, but for the length of service on any House of Commons committee for any member of Parliament in the course of the 21st century. There is no question that the procedure and House affairs committee is the right place to go. It looks at technical issues.
We think of the procedure and House affairs committee as dealing with, for example, proposed changes to the Standing Orders. That is the right place to consider those changes. It is also the right place to consider and discuss conventions. We sometimes think that conventions or unwritten rules are literally unwritten, that they exist only in the ether, and we have a common understanding that is inchoate and for which there is no language. That is not actually what conventions in the Westminster tradition look like, whether they are the constitutional conventions of the British constitution, which have a reflection in some unwritten parts of our own Constitution. There is the convention, for example, that there is a prime minister, who serves as the voice of the House of Commons to the sovereign, and that cabinet speaks with a single voice. These are conventions, and they are embodied in a few very important words in the preamble of the Constitution Act, 1867, which says “the Provinces of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick” being desirous of “a Constitution similar in Principle to that of the United Kingdom”. All that is contained in that wording. If we dig into that word, we find that that “convention” has built out considerably from there and there is a considerable amount of written material that was around at that time that explained exactly what the fathers of Confederation had in mind when they wrote that wording.
I say all of this by way of saying that conventions are the product of usage, but they are also the product of discussion and deliberation and are to be found in places such as committee reports. Therefore, we have an opportunity to deal with some of the issues that are being discussed here. Is it the case, on a go-forward basis for example, that we ought to be looking at some aspects of the U.K.'s practice, in which the Speaker is expected to take a certain course of action upon retiring from the role of Speaker? Where is that not appropriate? In the past, we have not had such a limitation, and the result has been that Speakers have become Governor General and they have become ambassadors. The potential exists, in theory if not in practice, that it can influence how Speakers behave.
It was with exactly this kind of consideration in mind that the Fathers of Confederation, when dealing with the issue of senators, who, they felt, might be subject to similar pressures, had to —