Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak today. It is always an honour to rise in the House. I am speaking today as part of the debate on a key issue, specifically government Motion No. 9. The purpose of this motion is to introduce changes that could be described as innovative. These are unprecedented changes aimed at altering the composition of committees.
We know what the topic is before us. It is certainly unprecedented because the situation is unprecedented. We have never had in this place a change after an election where the composition of committees is to be changed because, according to the government, there are now more Liberal MPs than there were after the election. There is no question regarding the numbers: the result is that we have moved from a minority Parliament to a majority Parliament.
It gives me an opportunity to get to some of the basics that we very rarely get to talk about in this place, which is assumptions that are made about the nature of committees and the rights of individual members. Unquestioned, in the way this motion is put forward, is the notion I wrote to the Prime Minister about, after the election. I said, “Please do not forget to include, when they are considering committee makeup, the very respected and experienced parliamentarians who happen at the moment to be in an unrecognized party.” I was speaking not of myself and the Green Party, but of, at that point, seven New Democratic Party MPs who were experienced, thoughtful parliamentarians who all had good experience on committees.
We knew we had a lot of new MPs. We have seen problems where committees can become overtaken by an effort to filibuster, but it is not always the case. Certainly, experienced MPs with committee experience are worth consideration to put on committees. That certainly is not immediately the issue at hand with the numbers and rejigging the numbers to ensure that there is a Liberal majority of members on those committees. I am unfortunately in a position where I cannot say what the Prime Minister thought about my proposal because, although I put a lot of thought and effort into that letter, I did not get so much as a courtesy reply, “We have received your letter and we will get back to you at some point when we have absolutely nothing better to do and can consider it.”
I went through the research to confirm what I understood to be the case, which is the status of every member of Parliament. I put it the other day to the hon. government House leader, who agreed with me. “Oh yes indeed, all members are equal in this place. Oh yes indeed, we all have equal rights,” said the hon. leader of the government in the House. Obviously, yes, that is our fiction, but our reality is somewhat different. I had more rights in this place when I was first elected in May 2011 than I have today.
As is always the case, larger and more powerful parties spend a great deal of effort to reduce the rights of smaller parties. Smaller parties and opposition parties spend a lot of effort trying to scupper what a larger party wants to do when it is in government. It is kind of an endless cycle and it is not really in the interest of democracy. It is also not what happens in other Westminster parliamentary systems around the world.
I am going to spend a bit of time now going back through the recognized party rules. What does it mean to be a member of a recognized party? What are their rights in that situation? I double-checked with our Clerk before I wrote the letter to the Prime Minister, to say, “Am I right? Is it the case?” I just wanted to double-check that nothing has changed in our rules. In 1963, Parliament passed a law that created the concept of a recognized party. Without any self-interest, the members of the larger parties decided larger parties should by right have money in order to support their work in Parliament. Because larger parties have so much more work than smaller parties, goes the fiction, they need public funds to do the work of MPs in Parliament. That is the recognized party law from 1963. It has been unchanged. It says that if they have 12 members, they get money. That is all it says. It does not say anywhere that if the party has fewer than 12 members, they do not get as many questions in question period. It does not say anywhere that if they have fewer than 12 members, they have no right to be a full member of any standing committee.
I double-checked with the clerk. I suggested to the clerk, and I hope the clerk does not mind me recounting the conversation, as I do not think it was terribly private, that this constitutes a really bad habit, this practice of saying that the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands cannot sit on any committee and would get one question once a week at the end of question period, etc. That is not part of the recognized party law. That is a bad habit. The clerk put it into more parliamentary language: It is a practice of long standing. In other words, I did not have it wrong. There is no law or rule that says members of Parliament from whatever size party cannot be full members of a standing committee. It offends no rule. It offends no law. It just ignores a practice of long standing. However, it adheres far more closely to our beautiful fiction that all members of Parliament are equal to every other member of Parliament and that the Prime Minister is merely primus inter pares, first among equals.
We know that when the recognized party rule was created, it created two tiers of MPs. One is those from larger, recognized parties. For citizens who may be watching this discussion, the minute we get 12 members of Parliament, we get about $1 million in extra resources from the parliamentary budget to support our parliamentary work. We have had cases, and I will not mention them, where parties have used the money they get for parliamentary work quite inappropriately, and I would say illegally, for partisan purposes. However, that is a separate question. The money is the only thing the 1963 recognized party law is about. Rights to participate in committees are not a part of that, nor are rights in question period, etc.
Then we go to this: How far and wide is this practice in Westminster parliamentary democracy? How much did this Canadian idea of recognized parties catch on? The answer is, not at all, not anywhere. We are the only Westminster parliamentary democracy that ever created the idea that there are two tiers, that larger party MPs or their parties get money—