Madam Speaker, from a strictly procedural perspective, I am speaking in favour of an amendment proposed, two days ago, by the House leader for His Majesty's loyal opposition, to the government motion to adopt a series of amendments to the Standing Orders. I will not read out the amendment here, because it runs several pages, and I will certainly not attempt to read out the government's set of proposed amendments to the Standing Orders, which run to 25 pages in 12-point type. My speaking slot is only 10 minutes and I simply would not get through those things before I ran out of time.
The general thrust of the government's package of amendments is to make permanent the interim Standing Orders, which would otherwise expire at the end of the month, that allow MPs to participate in the House debates and at committee meetings remotely, using Zoom, and to vote remotely as well using the app on our telephones.
The government amendments would make this change permanent, extending not merely beyond June but also beyond the life of the present Parliament.
The thrust of the opposition motion is that the expiry date should be pushed back from June to a date that is described in the amendment as “one year after the opening of the 45th Parliament”. This would provide a full year subsequent to the next election, during which a consensus could be developed as to which aspects of the rules for virtual sittings and remote participation would be retained. If, at that time, no consensus were achieved, then, after the year expires, it would be necessary for all MPs to attend sittings of the House in person, as was the case prior to the pandemic.
Of course, if a consensus was achieved, then we could carry on with some form of virtual sittings. Very likely, the addition of a further year or two of experience with virtual sittings and online voting would allow us to make incremental improvements to the rules over the voluminous package being voted on today.
Of the two alternatives before us, I prefer the one presented by the opposition House leader, but that is not the subject that I wish to address today. Rather, I want to focus on the entirely inappropriate way in which the government is attempting to push through changes by means of a whipped party line vote.
I have been in this place for 23 years, nearly a quarter of a century, and until the present Prime Minister took office, that was never how changes were made to the Standing Orders. I could go back to the prior century and that was also not the way things were done. Some kind of non-partisan path has always been sought.
There are two distinct ways in which the House of Commons has been able to achieve non-partisan changes to the Standing Orders. The first way, which is used more frequently, is to have a committee develop the details of any proposed changes to the Standing Orders and to have that committee present a consensus report, which contains only proposed amendments that have won the support of all groups that have party status, which is to say of all parties, and which have at least one MP on that committee.
The centrepiece of the committee's report is always the exact wording of the proposed Standing Orders. The House then concurs in the report. A recorded vote may be taken or in some cases there may be approval by unanimous consent, but the key point is this: a consensus has been sought and the party or coalition of parties that have the majority in the House of Commons and on the committee judiciously refrains from attempting to impose measures that are not also supported by the minority.
The purpose of the Standing Orders is, of course, to protect the rights of whoever is in the minority in the House of Commons, whoever is, in one form of another, on the opposition benches. In a political system where the majority can act with complete freedom and with no restraints in its actions, Standing Orders of any kind are a mere impediment. This kind of unbridled majoritarian system is not the Westminster system and has no place in Canada.
It is with reason that this kind of unbridled majority rule is referred to as the “tyranny of the majority”, a term or a phrase developed in the 1840s by Alexis de Tocqueville, who was trying to distinguish between the unexpectedly moderate governing practices he had encountered in a trip to North America, as compared to the tempestuous situation in his native France, where one majority coalition would succeed another in an apparently unending series of revolutions, coups and counter-coups, with each majority coalition then proceeding to trample of the rights of the newly created political minority until it, too, would be overthrown, following the defection of one faction or another and the cycle of oppression would continue with new masters and new victims.
Returning to the committee for a moment, the work of creating and then sorting out the details of a series of changes to the Standing Orders, particularly in the case of technically complex changes, is often too much for a committee that is burdened with other matters as well, as is frequently the case for our procedure and House affairs committee, on which I served for 15 years.
We were in the habit, when I served on the committee, of delegating the task of drafting such changes to ad hoc subcommittees. One such subcommittee developed a code of conduct for MPs regarding sexual harassment, which now forms Appendix II of the Standing Orders. Another subcommittee, which I chaired, dealt with the definition of “gifts” under the MP conflict of interest code, which forms Appendix I to the Standing Orders. Whatever the case, the rule was always to seek out consensus and to go no further than was possible on a multipartisan basis.
The second way of achieving consensus is to have the procedure and House affairs committee review a set of proposed amendments to the Standing Orders and then to present the amendments to the House of Commons without making an actual recommendation. This is what was done in 2015 with regard to a motion that I had brought forward to change the manner in which the Speaker is elected, from a series of runoff ballots to a single preferential ballot. My motion was made in the Commons and then referred by the House of Commons to the procedure and House affairs committee, which examined it in detail, including hearing from expert witnesses.
The committee then made a report to the House, stating:
The Election of the Speaker is a matter for all Members to decide. The Committee does not oppose nor endorse motion M-489 brought forward by [the member for Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington]—
As I was at the time.
—and feels that the entire membership of the House of Commons should have the opportunity to vote on whether or not to change the Standing Orders in the manner suggested by M-489.
In order to accomplish this purpose of having a vote in the House, the Committee recommends that Standing Order 4 be amended as follows...
In the committee's report, this was followed by the text of the Standing Order amendments that I had proposed.
As part of this arrangement, which is not written down in the official record but which can be gleaned from the debates that took place in 2015 in the House and in committee, it is clear there was an all-party agreement to allow all members from all parties to vote freely on the proposed amendment. No party would apply a whip to its members, and this is exactly what happened. The vote took place in the very last division of the 41st Parliament in June 2015, in fact almost exactly eight years ago today.
Every single party in the House of Commons allowed a free vote, with the result that 27 Conservatives voted differently from their leader, 15 New Democrats voted differently from their leader, one Liberal dissented and even the Bloc Québécois, which only had four MPs elected in the prior election, recorded votes on both sides of that division. This is a reasonable model as an alternative to the consensus model, although I do worry that achieving a genuinely free vote is notoriously difficult in this place, which is why we elect our Speakers by secret ballot.
In the event that a consensus cannot be achieved at committee, it would be reasonable to follow the model laid out by the procedure and House affairs committee in that 2015 report with the addition of a secret ballot in the House of Commons on the motion that the committee has proposed. I note that this kind of secret ballot is not currently possible and would itself require a change to the Standing Orders, but I think that it is worthwhile to put the idea out there for future reference.
Nothing remotely like either of the two models I just outlined has been used in the present case, however. The procedure and House affairs committee signalled a majority preference for changing the Standing Orders in a report that features two dissenting reports from parties that, together, represent nearly half of all MPs in the House of Commons. This is as far from a consensus as it is possible to be.
Worse yet, the committee did not actually endorse any specific set of amendments to the Standing Orders, only the idea that such amendments should exist, and the government then produced a text drafted by bureaucrats confidentially to the text of the Standing Orders. This process makes detailed changes to those proposed Standing Orders, those 25 pages, virtually impossible as any micro changes of this sort that are done in committee can only be done if the House of Commons chooses to sit as a committee of the whole, which is clearly not going to happen.
Then, of course, there is the matter of closure. We are actually limiting debate and ramming through changes to the Standing Orders, something utterly unprecedented in this country, utterly without precedent and, I would say, utterly disgraceful.
From a process perspective, this is a retreat from the Westminster model to the majoritarian tyranny that de Tocqueville warned against. It is grand being a tyrant while the tenure lasts, but it is terrible to suffer the tyranny of those whom one had formerly oppressed, as many former leaders have learned, after the tools that they had forged are turned on their former masters. That is the real lesson to be learned today, and since the way in which we will be voting does not allow this lesson to be easily teased out, I thought it best to commit these sentiments to words and to express them today.
I have one last thought. This whole mess could be stopped if a standing order were adopted here that makes it impossible to amend the Standing Orders in the future using closure. If there was enough opposition, it would be possible for opposition parties to prevent a standing order change going through. That is not going to happen in this Parliament, but in the next Parliament, I will be proposing exactly such a change so that this kind of tyranny can never happen again.
