Madam Speaker, four and a half years ago, on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared a worldwide pandemic, the COVID-19 pandemic. Two days after that, the House of Commons suspended.
About ten days after that, on March 24, it came back in an emergency session with the government's goal of passing a piece of legislation, which at that point had not been shared with the House of Commons, that would give the government, among other things, the power to suspend the House for a year and a half. Supply would be guaranteed to the government for over a year, until December 2021. The government would have the ability to pass new laws by regulations, which is known as a Henry VIII clause because Henry VIII did something similar in his reign 500-odd years ago. We would have seen the suspension of the system we call responsible government, in which the government of the day is responsible to the House of Commons, for a year and a half.
Those of us who were members of Parliament at that time were told to stay home, that it was too dangerous to come to Ottawa and we would be risking our own safety and the safety of others. A series of preposterous arguments was presented as to why we could not meet and how it would be dangerous. We could, of course, have met at the convention centre and been widely spaced; no trade shows were on at the time.
We needed unanimous consent to pass this bill in one shot, so I came here with the intention of denying unanimous consent if no one else would do it. As it turned out, that was not necessary because a number of my Conservative colleagues came here with the same intention, and that attempt to suspend responsible government was stopped. The House of Commons' ability to bring down the government, which would have been pushed through, was stopped.
At the time, I said I would come here one day and talk about the importance of the confidence convention, the history of it and the importance of responsible government. Today is that day.
Let me just read what I said on March 24, 2020. It is on my website:
Indeed, if we are to take our signs from the first draft of Bill C-13, which is to be introduced today..., it would appear that the Government's primary interest is in using the COVID-19 crisis to strip away any Parliamentary oversight whatever, between now and December 2021—twenty-one months in the future [as it then was]....
That contempt for democracy, for civil rights and for the traditions that make Canada the great place it is and give Canada its honoured place in the continuum of the world's great democracies has been the one consistent theme of the government throughout its entire life, starting with the 2015 election of the current Prime Minister and his fallacious, insincere, hypocritical promise that it would be the last election by first past the post. It turned out that it would be the last election by first past the post unless he was faced with the possibility of a system that was not his preferred system, which was preferential, a system that would systematically and predictably favour the Liberal Party. At any rate, here we are, and I want to talk today about the concept of non-confidence.
The Westminster style of government, the model our ancestors would have called responsible government, was developed in near-synchronicity in the United Kingdom and in Britain's North American provinces in the fourth and fifth decades of the 19th century. This system started with a non-confidence vote that took place on November 15, 1830, in the Parliament of Westminster. That vote brought down the administration of the Duke of Wellington, the same Duke of Wellington who defeated Napoleon. The non-confidence vote of April 7, 1835, reinforced that principle, bringing down the government of Sir Robert Peel. This model was emulated in the province of Canada by Baldwin and LaFontaine in the 1840s and also in Nova Scotia, which became the very first jurisdiction in the world, other than the United Kingdom itself, to achieve responsible government.
I want to be clear about this. Through the ability to bring forward motions of confidence, or non-confidence, in the government of the day, responsible government was all about establishing whether the government of the day could or could not command a majority of votes in the elected lower House of Parliament or the legislature.
Here is how the bronze plaque outside Nova Scotia's house of assembly commemorates the event that took place in that jurisdiction:
The First Responsible Government in the British Empire
The first Executive Council—
That is the formal name in British colonies for what we call the cabinet.
—chosen exclusively from the party having a majority in the representative branch of a colonial legislature...on the 2nd February, 1848. Following a vote of want of confidence in the preceding Council, James Boyle Uniacke, who had moved the resolution, became Attorney General and leader of the Government [in other words, the premier]. Joseph Howe, who had long striven for this “Peaceable Revolution,” became Provincial Secretary.
The principle that administrations could be replaced by means of non-confidence votes was adopted only a month later in the province of Canada, when the Baldwin-LaFontaine ministry was sworn in by the governor general, Lord Elgin. In New Brunswick, it was adopted in May of the same year.
As we can see from these examples, there was a time when it was normal practice for confidence motions to result in changes of government without an intervening election. However, that time has passed, and it has been the normal practice for well over a century for successful non-confidence motions to be followed by an election, with the voters being given the option to give their support in that election to the party that moved the non-confidence motion.
This, of course, is what happened in 2006, when a motion of non-confidence in the Liberal government of Paul Martin was followed by the election of Stephen Harper's Conservatives. The voters can also choose to reject the movers of the motion and reaffirm their support for the existing administration, which happened in 2011, when Stephen Harper was elected with an expanded mandate after losing a vote on a confidence motion in the House of Commons.
A motion of non-confidence may be preceded by a long preamble, listing the reasons why the government no longer has the support of a majority in the House. It may, like the motion adopted in 2011, hint darkly at the government's real or purported wrongdoings. Here is what the 2011 confidence motion said:
That the House agree with the finding of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs that the government is in contempt of Parliament, which is unprecedented in Canadian parliamentary history, and consequently, the House has lost confidence in the government.
That is, by the way, a fiction. The procedure and House affairs committee had not submitted its report. I know this because I was in the midst of addressing that draft report when our proceedings were suspended by the vote of non-confidence. The bells started ringing and our meeting suspended. Nonetheless, the vote took place and there was an election.
In 2005, Paul Martin's government was brought down by a motion that simply stated, “That this House has lost confidence in the government.” Today's motion, in that tradition, says simply, “That the House has no confidence in the Prime Minister and the government.”
There is a sense in which the current government has not had the confidence of the Canadian people for some time. In preparation for my remarks today, I wrote down the percentage of the vote that every victorious party has had in a Canadian election going back to 1958.
The current government was elected in 2019 with 33.12% of the vote and in 2021 with only 32.62% of the vote. More than two-thirds of Canadians voted against the current government at that time. This is really bad. In 1958, the year of John Diefenbaker's colossal victory over the Liberals, do members know that the Liberals, who were defeated in their worst defeat ever up to that point in time, had 33.75% of the vote? They got more votes as a percentage than the current government received in either of the last two elections.
What is even more amazing is that when we take into account the percentage of people who actually participated, which was 79% back in 1958 and only 62% in the last election, we learn that the Liberals in 1958, in that colossal defeat, had 26.6% of all eligible voters, whereas only 20.3% of eligible voters voted for the current government. There is a real sense in which the government has not had the support of the Canadian people for some time, and we can see why, based on its phenomenal record of incompetence.
I just want to assert that the time has come to accept the judgment of the Canadian people, to let them have the chance to make the same judgment again and to elect a new government that can bring them the competent and honourable governance they deserve.
