Mr. Speaker, I am particularly happy to speak today on this question.
First, I find it especially interesting that we can have a debate in this House in which all members may freely express their views on the standing orders requiring change or improvement in order to make our work in parliament more effective.
In this regard, it is a debate without party lines as such. Members may be creative, identify the irritants they see in the standing orders and propose solutions. It is no doubt with interest that the House leaders will consider what will happen here, what the members will present, and this will no doubt be very useful in improving our debates.
Second, I want to thank the government House leader, who was kind enough to guarantee that no change to the standing orders would be made without unanimity among the House leaders. If everyone, does not agrees on the benefit of a change, there will be no change.
I have already seen changes to the standing orders not made unanimously. It is extremely irritating to the members of a party when the rules change unbeknownst to them, without their having either the desire or the possibility of agreeing to the change. I therefore thank the government House leader.
I am, however, of the opinion that we, the House leaders of other parties, need to be responsible. There is always a certain give and take involved.
Although the government House leader is offering us this possibility of blocking changes that do not suit us, we must still be reasonable and must sometimes make an effort to compromise in order to obtain positive results, instead of seeking the slightest pretext to never agree with anything and end up with a reform that is really no reform at all.
We are all aware that the standing orders of the House of Commons need to be improved. We are all aware that certain avenues exist on which, I believe, we can reach agreement fairly readily.
In this connection, I offer my co-operation in advance to the hon. leader of the government in the House and I want him to know that I will be pleased to try to contribute a great deal of positivity and open-mindedness and in a spirit of respect and promotion of the rights of all members of parliament, not on any partisan basis but on the basis of what I would call respect for the elected representatives that we are.
Certain principles, however, must underlie the reforms to the standing orders with which we will be involved and the work of the committee on which we will sit.
It must be understood that the standing orders of the House of Commons do not exist in order to make people's lives difficult and to stop them from expressing themselves. The rules that govern a Chamber like this one, a parliament, are there to allow a fair power relationship between the opposition and the government. A parliament where the government already enjoys an absolute majority, as is the case here, is fully capable of making decisions without having rules allowing it to do so without any interference whatsoever.
Of course there are rules so that the government can govern—and it is ultimately the objective pursued—but there are also rules allowing the opposition to slow down the government in its decision making process. When we feel that a decision is bad, we can slow down the government, we can make things more complicated for it, we can even question some bills on which there is no consensus, particularly when opposition parties work together and pool their resources.
If I say this, it is because it is significant. Our colleagues must realize that when a parliament no longer gives opposition parties an opportunity to prevent, through extraordinary means, the government from quietly proceeding with its bills and reforms, there is no parliament anymore. From the moment that a government enjoys an absolute majority, there would be nothing left to stop it, regardless of the initiatives that it may take. Such a situation would not be good.
When the public realizes that parliament no longer allows its elected representatives to slow down or block certain government initiatives, the opposition organizes itself at another level. Democracy moves to another sphere, because people realize that it is game over in parliament. People organize themselves in the streets, they hold rallies and use other means.
Whether we are government or opposition members, as is the case on our side of the House, it is in everyone's interest to ensure that the rules of the House give us some power to influence things.
I also want to discuss the spirit of the debates that take place in a parliament such as this one. We have been in a democratic system for a long time and this is probably why we tend not to realize the richness of democracy, because we have been using it and sometimes abusing it.
There is one vital problem, when the government enters a debate in the House and the idea from the start is to carry the bill to term. I cannot stress enough how important it is for the government to listen to opposition members and to consider what is proposed. I know no members in the House who do not want to improve bills, in many respects, according to what their constituents ask them to do.
All too often, unfortunately, the debate, the period between the time the government introduces a bill and its passage and the reading stages, second reading, report stage, third reading, are viewed all too often by the government as a necessary evil. The time between introduction and passage is a period of time that varies in length. It should be considered an extremely rich and fertile period to allow the government to improve its bill.
We know that bills are not prepared by the members of the House. They are prepared by impressive teams of officials. I am aware of all the responsibility borne by the ministers and all the teams and armies of officials, who come to them with initiatives, bills of 100 or 150 pages, who explain their initiatives and, finally, who try to promote their way of seeing things.
Ministers are sometimes obliged, not only in this parliament, but in all parliaments, to fight their own machine in order to say “The government does not want to go so far with this particular bill”. There are epic battles between ministers and their own machines.
What needs to be understood is that government and opposition members alike form a kind of team, which sometimes has to do battle with armies of public servants. Our role is to make sure that the concerns of our constituents are expressed in the House. It is to take what the administrative machine proposes and say “That does not make sense. That should be in a particular order, or that should be done this way”. Our role is to amend.
The rules of debate which we are going to amend, the standing orders, the practices and procedures will have to be amended such that the period of exchanges between government members, ministers and opposition members allows productive review, improvement and adaptation of what an extremely powerful administrative machine has pushed all the way through to parliament. This is the spirit in which I intend to work.
Naturally, I would like to talk about time allocation motions. If there is one thing which worries me, it is the extremely frequent recourse to such motions. Whenever time allocation is moved, I know that this is a convenient way for the government to move things forward.
But should the government have the right to use a time allocation motion if a bill has not been debated more than 12, 15 or even 20 hours at most? It is not normal for the government to bring forward, after two or three hours of debate, a time allocation motion. Really now. That makes no sense. Is anyone ready to admit that there is nothing excessive about debating an important bill for three hours? As I have said, they are churned out by officials and we have to absorb their content, take them apart, analyze them and express our views on them.
The time we take here to debate bills gives the general public the opportunity to find out about the ones that concern them, to organize a lobby, to tell their MP “Hold on there, Mr. Member, we want to meet with you because there is a bill before parliament, before the House of Commons, and we want to see this or that change to it, because it causes us this or that problem”.
The time allowed for discussing a bill must, therefore, be substantial if we are to do our jobs properly, if the public is to have time to react if there is something about it that does not suit it, and also if we are to demonstrate that the real objective of government is to improve a bill.
If this is not borne in mind, obviously things never move fast enough; they will never move fast enough. Perhaps in a few years the government will find an hour's debate on a bill too long and will invoke time allocation. That makes no sense.
The government has to return to fairer proportions on this. It must agree to the effort and sacrifice needed to allow members to debate. I am going to try to convince my colleagues, the leaders, that the government should not be able to bring forward time allocation too quickly in order to ensure quicker passage. This is perhaps one thing that needs to be looked at.
However it should not be used after three hours of debate, because the government House leader is in a bad mood and knows debate will probably be extended, so he brings forward a time allocation motion. This is not what parliament is about, this is not the point of a time allocation motion. However this is the way they now use it, unfortunately. I do not want to offend anyone and start a quarrel when we are having a positive debate on the rules, but everyone knows that the number of time allocation motions more than doubled from one government to the next.
So, at some point, it is time to be reasonable too, and I think that this is the time to have a look at this. I think the government House leader, a generally reasonable man, should want to look at this business honestly and give his opinion. I intend to raise issues in any case.
Perhaps it should not be usable until a certain amount of debating time has passed, and perhaps in exchange it could be made easier to pass, not take so long, or some such thing. There are some points that need looking into.
As for electronic voting, I do not want to come across as someone who is opposed to change, since I am in favour of modernizing the way we vote, but I do have certain reservations. That will most certainly be discussed in that committee.
There is a certain nobility and an infinite democracy in the fact that a member has to rise here in this House before the cameras and say in essence “I, Michel Gauthier, the member for Roberval, vote for or against this bill”. There is a responsibility that goes with that.
So much so, that when a motion is presented that is an important one, not that there are any that are unimportant, but one that holds particular importance from a policy point of view, then we, and all parties have all done so, require a member by member vote, not applying one vote to another, as you specialized in at the time you were whip of your party, Mr. Speaker. Things go faster if that is done, and in many cases it is convenient for everyone. In certain cases, however, members were required to stand up.
I think we should find a system which would ensure that, to a certain degree, the act of voting would be one of courage. Otherwise, a member will become completely anonymous. We do not yet know what the system will be but he will come and press a button, or he will be in his office and vote with a card—we do not yet know what the system will be—and it will show “Michel Gauthier, Roberval”, “Yes or No”, or “For the motion” or “Against the motion”, or whatever, and it will be much less onerous for the member. It is this that worries me.
I know that we must move forward, but we must continue to require that a member have the courage of his convictions and be able to say publicly, “I voted for that, and I was not ashamed to do so”. In certain cases, as we know only too well, members are sometimes absent for certain votes. They prefer not to be recorded as having voted for or against certain motions, particularly when they must toe the party line. This is because voting is an important act. If, when modernizing voting, we decide on electronic voting, we must come up with the best process possible, but it must be the one that makes members of this House as accountable as possible.
In addition, there are certain standing orders I wish to touch on briefly, because I see that my time is running out.
I do not think that the standing orders should be changed if, for instance, we do not have the support of two thirds of the members. It seems to me that the rules which govern us are too important to be passed by the government alone. That is the problem. The problem is that sometimes the government majority represents a large number of the members and there could be changes to the standing orders which only the government, not all opposition parties, wanted.
Perhaps it could be proportionate to the number of parties, or whatever, so that a change to the standing orders would have to reflect a certain consensus or unanimity in the House. Finally, there is no point dreaming in technicolour. They should talk about a consensus or a vote in each of the parties, I do not know, but some mechanism must be found. This question requires attention.
Opposition days are important to me. I am going to try to convince my colleagues in this regard. There are not many opposition days. When a party presents a motion, by regulatory subterfuge, we have to prevent our motion from being diluted or substantially changed. We are obliged to divide our time, to present the motion, to speak ten minutes, to say “My colleague will speak during the ten minutes I have left”. The other colleague rises and presents an insignificant motion to prevent the motion from being amended, diluted or transformed significantly.
It seems to me that opposition days are held to enable each party, and we all have our own days, to speak to an issue that interests us.
I think, therefore, that the government should agree to allow an opposition motion to be amended only by the party presenting it so that there is no need to resort to subterfuge to protect a motion. We do it indirectly, and that complicates things. Why not be honest and let an opposition day belong to the opposition, be it the Bloc Quebecois, the Canadian Alliance, the NDP or the Progressive Conservative Party, and let each party be master of its motion, which may no longer be amended at any point during the debate. This is something to look at.
We are also going to talk about the coverage of debates and about emergency debates that should, in my opinion, all be voted on. The reason a matter is discussed in this House during an emergency debate is that it is something important. What could be more natural than to ask parliament to decide? I think this ought to be addressed as well.
In closing, as fair as the chairs and vice chairs of committees are concerned, we should take a page from the book of the Quebec national assembly. Half of all committees are headed by a member of the government party, and the other half by someone from the opposition. The vice chairs are the opposite. If a government member chairs the committee, then the vice chair is from the opposition and vice versa. This would provide more of a balance for a healthy democracy.
I have already experienced this in the Quebec national assembly. I can tell hon. members that it works very well, gets a large number of MNAs involved, and gives rise to some extremely interesting situations as far as the dynamism of the debate and the operation of parliament are concerned. Instead of having all but two committees chaired by someone from the party in power, I would like to see a better balance.
These are some of the matters we will be looking at, but my point was mainly to stress that we must approach all this within a perspective of openness and intelligence, hoping to see parliament operate better and better, and that all MPs, not just those in government, will be able to do a more effective job in this House.
That is the spirit which will govern my contribution.
