Bill Blaikie

[Points Of Order, June 1st, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I will indeed come to a conclusion.

The weight of almost all the evidence in both law and convention therefore comes down in support of our claim to be recognized in this House as the party that we clearly are. The only precedent that breaks the pattern is the treatment of the Bloc in the last Parliament.

At this point I do not wish to open the question of whether a party that forms between elections as a result of defections from existing parties should enjoy the same status as a party of members who sought election under their party banner. I do not want to enter into that debate.

What I do want to argue is that your ruling on party status should be based on a clear reading of the law and on the overwhelming number of precedents in support of our claim to party status, not on a single problematic precedent that itself broke with all precedent.

I will say what we are asking for so that you are absolutely clear of what I am on my feet about.

We ask first that the seating arrangements be adjusted to seat us as a party with proper precedence given to our leader as a leader and as a Privy Councillor, and that the published seating plan identify us as New Democrats, as is already the case in Hansard .

We ask that we be treated as an opposition party during question period where at present we are recognized only very rarely, systematically denied supplementaries and always relegated to the last question.

I would point out that in the last Parliament the leader of the Bloc was regularly recognized at about two-thirds of the way through question period. I direct your attention to Hansard of 1993 for February 11 and 25, March 9 and 24 and May 4. Therefore, it is clear that the leader of the New Democratic Party has been treated in an unprecedented manner and that due consideration should be given to changing the way our leader has been treated since the opening of this Parliament.

My final point, for guidance on this matter let us return to Mr. Jerome's ruling of November 6, 1979. He said regarding the rights of small parties: "Participation in question period is their right, the same as any group of five members. It is not difficult to calculate mathematically what five members are entitled to as a proportion of the membership of the other parties". Hansard , page 1009.

If we apply Mr. Jerome's arithmetic to the situation in this Parliament, NDP members comprise 8 per cent of the opposition members and are therefore entitled to roughly 8 per cent of the opposition questions. By my calculations in a typical week there are some 125 questions and supplementaries posed by opposition members of which we should be entitled to 10. In practice you typically recognize us for only two questions per week. Occasionally you have not recognized us at all, as in the week beginning April 11 and only once have you recognized us for as many as four questions.

We therefore ask that we get the number of questions due to a party of nine members, that our leader be recognized after the leader of the Reform Party, that we be allowed supplementaries, and that we not always be relegated to the last question.

Finally, we ask that in general we be treated as a party under the Standing Orders and that you work with our caucus officers in the customary ways to facilitate the operations of the House. My party colleagues and I are asking only that we not be discriminated against simply because we did not meet an arbitrary threshold of dubious relevance that has not even customarily been applied by previous Speakers to procedures in the House, against which there is ample parliamentary precedent for alternative approaches.

We have every confidence that you will see the merit in our case and we look forward to the results of your review of this question. We are not asking you to rule on this in a hurry, Mr. Speaker. However we certainly hope that by the time Parliament resumes its business in the fall after the summer recess that some changes will have been made along the lines which I have suggested in this point of order.

[Points Of Order, June 1st, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I will wrap up. However, if I might be so bold as to say on my point of order, if I am being irrelevant or I am not speaking to the point, but I believe that I am-

[Points Of Order, June 1st, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I would hope you and the House would realize that this argument takes some time to make. I will move as quickly as I can to the conclusion of my argument. However it is not something that we do every day here and I would like my argument to be heard, if that is possible. I will try to move as quickly as I can.

There is no legal authority, either in the Parliament of Canada Act or in the Canada Elections Act, for withholding recognition from us.

Past Speakers have not, moreover, applied the 12-member threshold to questions of party recognition. I would now like to direct your attention, Mr. Speaker, to a number of the relevant precedents which is perfectly in order with what a good point of order should be like, arguing from precedent.

The first and most relevant precedent is the party status accorded to the CCF after the 1958 election. Electing eight members to the House the CCF was then in a very similar position to that of the NDP in this Parliament.

In 1958 the CCF continued to enjoy its full rights as an opposition party. CCF members were seated as a party in the House and were treated as a party in debate and during Question Period. The party leader was treated as a party leader in debate on the speech from the throne, being recognized immediately after Mr. Pearson and Mr. Diefenbaker. CCF members also sat as full members on committees.

After the 1963 introduction of the 12-member threshold, Speakers regularly interpreted the act as one that granted certain financial benefits to parties with more than 12 members. However that did not take away any other rights of parties that had fewer than 12 members.

On February 18, 1966 for instance, Speaker Lamoureux allowed representatives of the Social Credit Party and the Ralliement Créditiste to respond to ministerial statements under what is now Standing Order 33(1), even though they had only five and nine members respectively. He argued that he did not see how the standing order concerning the right of opposition parties to respond to ministers' statements could be "interpreted in light of the amendment to the Parliament of Canada Act", Hansard , February 18, 1966, page 1435.

The force of the tradition of protecting the rights and status of small parties can be seen again in the treatment of the Social Credit Party after the 1974 election. With only 11 members the Social Credit Party once again fell below the legal threshold of 12 members required in order to receive financial benefits. The Board of Internal Economy nonetheless granted the Social Credit Party $50,000 for research purposes at its meeting of October 22, 1974, a meeting attended by the present Prime Minister and by Mr. Mitchell Sharp.

I am raising this point not to ask for similar financial benefits, but to illustrate how previous Parliaments have protected the rights of small parties so assiduously that they sometimes have ignored the 12-member threshold on financial matters.

In 1979 in a Parliament in which I myself participated the Social Credit Party sent only five members to the House. A striking committee did not include a member from the Social Credit Party although they did sit in the front row of the House, right down in that corner.

There was a motion by the Social Credit member that his party should have a representative on the striking committee. In the ensuing debate on October 9, 1979, it was made clear by the Conservative government and Liberal opposition that what was at stake was not only the particular issue of the membership of the striking committee but also the party status of the Social Credit caucus.

When the Social Credit motion failed, Speaker Jerome at first decided that the motion obliged him not to grant the Social Credit members party status. On October 10 he did not recognize their leader in the debate on the speech from the throne. His ruling can be found on page 69 of Hansard for October 11, 1979.

The next month Mr. Speaker, your predecessor, Speaker Jerome, revised his position and took into account the important responsibility of the Chair to protect minorities in the House. In debate on an opposition no confidence motion on November 6, 1979, Speaker Jerome recognized the leader of the Social Credit in debate immediately after the other opposition party leaders. He gave an eloquent justification for his decision from which I would like to quote. It is an important piece of evidence because it qualifies the original ruling of October 11 published in the edition of Speaker Jerome's rulings.

I quote: "We ought to be clear at the outset that it is not a transgression of propriety to mention the name of the political party of the members who are involved; it is the Social Credit Party of Canada. Its members are members of this House of Commons and their leader is the hon. member for Beauce. Those are the realities. The vote"-on the striking committee motion-"under no circumstances, may I say, can be taken to pass out of existence a political party, nor can it be taken to render as independent members the group which has been recognized as a party and which has in fact been seated together as a political party. The Social Credit Party exists as a political party and the five members exist as members of that party under their leader".

He went on to say that even though the House had expressed itself on the question of the membership of the striking committee, he had certain responsibilities as Speaker.

Again, I quote Speaker Jerome: "It seems to me that the responsibility of the Chair and the responsibility of the House of Commons is to protect whatever rights minorities do enjoy and therefore it seems to me that I must conclude what it is that the members of the Social Credit Party are entitled to-.I think that what those members are entitled to respects the fact that they are members of a political party so long as it does not give them an advantage that they would not otherwise enjoy as five members and secondly so long as it does not deprive other members of their right to participate in some way". Hansard , November 6, 1979, pages 1008-9.

This is the approach to the question of party status I am asking you to take toward myself and my colleagues in the New Democratic Party in the House. We are asking you to recognize us as a party in the House just as previous Speakers have recognized small parties in the past.

One result of previous Speakers' recognition of small parties can be seen in the seating plans of past Parliaments. I would like to table some of these past seating plans for your consideration. I submit these for your consideration because they show that parties with fewer than 12 members have indeed been designated as parties and seated as parties with representation on the front benches.

I draw your attention in particular to the seating plan dated April 1989 where even only one member, the member for Beaver River, was designated as a member of the Reform Party. As I mentioned earlier however, this designation of the member for Beaver River disappeared with the advent of the Bloc and the decision not to treat it as a party. Currently the nine NDP

members in the House are afforded no such appropriate nomenclature in the seating plan of this Parliament.

[Points Of Order, June 1st, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order of which I have given notice to you and to the parties in the House.

It has to do with the fact that we in the New Democratic Party have not been recognized as a party in the House since the beginning of this Parliament. In doing so I am fully aware that certain decisions relating to our current lack of party status were taken before you were elected as Speaker.

I am therefore making these arguments with no intention whatsoever of pointing a finger at the Chair or at anyone else for that matter. The fact that we have been seated in the House as if we were independent members is a good example of what I mean. The seating plan took shape before you were elected as our Speaker, but it is only the most concrete symbol of the whole situation that I want to call into question today.

I have not raised this earlier because I thought it was appropriate for the House to become acquainted with itself after the unprecedented upheaval of the last election. This place operates not only on the basis of written rules but also on the authority of a large body of conventions which come from parliamentary practice. I thought it best to wait until the many new members had an opportunity to become familiar with the importance of conventions in the makeup of our day to day parliamentary constitution.

However, with respect to the issue I wish to raise today, the real conventions of this place and the conventional wisdom are not always the same. The recent conventional wisdom has been that the 12-member threshold for party status is a hard and fast rule understood in an unambiguous way by all concerned.

My point today is that the question of party status has in fact been governed by unwritten convention and practice and that the only thing that is hard and fast is the question of which parties qualify for certain moneys. I begin by making it absolutely clear that what I am seeking is not a change in those sections of the Parliament of Canada Act which pertain to money, but a recognition that that statute applies only to money and that all else is a matter of convention, practice and the discretion of the Speaker as the Chair seeks to fulfil its historic role as the protector of the House itself and the minorities therein.

There are no unambiguous definitions of parties in legislation, in the standing orders or in the procedural authorities, and yet parties are essential to the efficient operation of the House. Their officers, leaders, House leaders and whips try to facilitate what all of us do here as we discharge our public responsibilities.

Parties present themselves to the House as parties and are not created or disposed of by the House itself. Our membership in our respective parties is a matter between ourselves, our fellow caucus colleagues, our extraparliamentary organizations and ultimately our electors. We can leave our parties or be asked to leave our parties. We can create new parties, merge two parties into one, as did the Progressives and the Conservatives, or change the name of our parties as we in the New Democratic Party did.

The tradition of this place has been for the Speaker to accept the party affiliation that the parties and the members report to him or her. Yet since the beginning of this Parliament the Chair has not accepted the party affiliation that we in the New Democratic Party clearly possess.

The only possible precedent for this is the way in which the Bloc Quebecois was treated in the last Parliament. All other precedents, including the way the one Reform member was treated prior to the formation of the Bloc, points to the injustice and inappropriateness of the way the NDP is now being treated.

I would ask members to listen to my argument before they judge it. The authority for not treating us as a party has apparently been the Parliament of Canada Act which since 1963 has set out a threshold of 12 members for parties whose officers are granted special allowances and subsequently for parties whose members may sit on the Board of Internal Economy.

My point today is first to show that the wording of the Parliament of Canada Act does not empower or require the Chair to withhold recognition from parties with fewer than 12 members in spite of the conventional wisdom. Second, I am asking the Chair to follow the established practice of recognizing such parties in the House.

Let us then look at the wording in the Parliament of Canada Act. The words in section 62 read that the officers of "a party that has a recognized membership of 12 or more persons in the House" shall receive a variety of allowances. It does not say that a party must have 12 members to be a recognized party and clearly assumes that parties with fewer than 12 members are indeed parties.

In section 50 caucuses that do "not have a recognized membership of 12" are not entitled to have representatives on the Board of Internal Economy but are clearly to be construed as still being caucuses.

These clauses are worded in such a way that the question of other forms of recognition is at worst left open. At best the wording of the statute seems to imply that party as a concept is something independent of numbers and that 12 is the number of seats an already recognized party must have in order to qualify for money but not for recognition as such. Recognition of parties with fewer than 12 members is already implicit in the wording of the statute itself. If the Parliament of Canada Act says anything about official party status then it confirms rather than denies

that party status itself is distinct from the financial provisions of the act.

There being no clear and precise legal definition of party status, we may ask how the financial provisions of the Parliament of Canada Act came to be confused with the acceptance of party status in the House.

Shortly after the passage of the 12-member threshold amendments in 1963, the Ralliement Créditiste divided themselves from the Social Credit Party which was left with only 11 members. In the ensuing debates about the new seating arrangements, the new 12-member threshold was loosely applied to questions of parliamentary practice as the House sought to deal with the fact that two parties had been created out of one, a situation quite unlike the one in which the NDP now finds itself.

Indeed, in the last Parliament the 12-member threshold was also used to deal with the formation of the Bloc out of defectors from the Liberal and Conservative parties, another situation totally different from that of the NDP in this Parliament.

John C. Courtney, a political scientist who published a paper on party recognition in March 1978 in a volume of the Canadian Journal of Political Science , explained the development of the misreading of the 12-member threshold very effectively:

Technically the 12-member threshold in the 1963 act and parliamentary procedure had nothing to do with one another, yet the timing of the events was virtually certain to produce a combination that would lead to the injection of the phrase "recognized membership of 12 or more persons in the House of Commons" into future debates over regulations and statutes dealing with political parties. The term, indeed more specifically the number, would gradually assume an authenticity of its own.

The view that the 12-member threshold constitutes a hard and fast rule in law about party status in this House is in fact an illusion. However, in an illustration of the old maximum that hard cases make bad law, misapplications designed to deal with divided and/or new parties are now side swiping the NDP in the absence of an appropriate will to discern the difference between some previous situations and the situation we find ourselves in at the moment.

A more reliable legislative authority for determining party status can be found in the Canada Elections Act. In sections 24 through 42 of that act, it is clear that parties lose party status not when they fall below the 12-member threshold but only when they fail to file certain documents or when they fail to officially nominate candidates in at least 50 constituencies 30 days before polling day.

Even though there is no question that the New Democratic Party is now a registered party under that act, in the House we are treated as if we were independents, no differently than some other members who do not belong to a party registered under the Canada Elections Act.

To this point, informal arguments against the way we are being treated are often met with the argument that real independents could make a similar claim, that it is a primarily a question of degree and that a line has to be drawn somewhere. If the Canada Elections Act were taken into account this argument would hold even less water than it does now if that were possible.

There is therefore no legal authority, either in the Parliament of Canada Act-

[Transport, June 1st, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Transport and has to do with the request that the Minister of Transport has received from the United Transportation Union concerning the alarming number of derailments that have taken place lately. The minister will have received a letter from the UTU on that matter.

In light of its concern and the concern expressed by a railway carman about changing practices with respect to maintenance and inspection of rolling stock, I wonder if he could tell us what his response will be to this request.

[Budget Implementation Act, May 31st, 1994]

I rise on a point of order, Mr. Speaker. I hate to sound like an old timer but I was around when we wrote the rules for the question and comment period.

The idea written into the recommendation and accepted by the government was that the question and comment period was first and foremost for members of parties other than the party of the person who had just spoken. It was only in the absence of members of other parties that members of the same party were to be recognized on questions.

[Budget Implementation Act, May 31st, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member who just spoke mentioned the whole question of the family trust, something which also came up in question period today. It is the absence of anything dealing with that particular issue in the bill that is relevant to the debate before us.

The member also spoke about advising people to stick by their initial positions. The member should be aware that the leader of his party, in spite of what he said earlier today, was a member of a government that was responsible for greatly increasing the unfairness of the tax system between the rich and the poor.

I remember Michael Wilson in his first budget saying that the problem with the country was that we did not have enough rich people. He set out to create more rich people and he succeeded. One of the ways he succeeded was by being harder on the poor and by reducing the number of middle class Canadians that existed. He did so through the tax system after 1988, with the compliance of the now Leader of the Opposition.

Also on the same issue-and I invite the member to respond to this after I am finished-we saw the Liberal government of today claiming a certain innocence with respect to it. I was here. I remember that when I was attacking the extension of the exemption for the family trust at second reading the Liberal critic at that time, now the Minister of Health, got up and agreed with the Minister of Finance that I was on the wrong track. It was only after testimony in committee that the Liberals changed their minds. On second reading they were very much with the government on the particular issue.

I want to ask the member a question. Perhaps he would want to reflect. It seems to me we have something that speaks volumes about the priorities of this government and previous governments. We have the lack of any action on the extended exemption, thanks to the Conservatives, for the family trust and at the same time an attack on the unemployed.

The unemployed, people without any income, are being told that they will have to go longer and that they will have reduced benefits: a massive bill in order to do that to them. At the same time we have no action on the part of the government for people who have income, in fact billions of dollars of income from those assets, the deemed disposition on those assets and the capital gains. They have been able to plead with the previous government, and now it appears with this government, that it would be hard on them, that it would be oh so hard on them.

We see from the release of letters that at one point there was correspondence between the Minister of Finance and the committee for family enterprise saying how difficult it would be if they would finally have to pay the tax on all the millions of dollars they have tied up in real estate and other assets that they were expecting to pay for 21 years.

Here we have, it seems to me, a perfect example of what is wrong with our value system. We can say to the unemployed: "You are unemployed. You do not have any income. Tough. We are going to make it tougher on you".

Yet at the same time and by the same governments, whether they be Conservative or now Liberal, we say to the very rich in the country that we understand it will be tough for them to have to pay that deemed disposition and those taxes that they have known since 1972 they were going to have to pay in 1993. Perhaps the member would like to comment on that.

[Regulatory Requirements, May 30th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to express a concern of the NDP caucus, the Canadian Labour Congress and others about discussions that are apparently taking place within government about a project or initiative called "Waiving Compliance with Regulatory Requirements".

Many people are very concerned about extending more and more discretion to ministers to waive compliance with certain labour and environmental regulations with respect to certain projects or applications by companies.

I call on the Minister of Human Resources Development and others to scrap this project now. There is enough leeway in the regulatory regimes now. We do not need any more deregulation than we have had already.

[The Late John Smith, May 12th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, it is with great sadness that I rise today on behalf of the NDP caucus to pay tribute to the late Mr. John Smith, leader of the British Labour Party.

It is often said that in Britain the left owes more to Methodism than to Marxism. John Smith, a Christian socialist, exemplified this tradition, a pragmatic Scot whose political beliefs were shaped by both Christian faith and ideological analysis, who was cut down at the zenith of his popularity with the British people.

To his family we extend our condolences and recall the words of the biblical tradition: "Well done thou good and faithful servant".

To his comrades in the British Labour Party we say the struggle continues. To the United Kingdom we say a fine alternative Prime Minister has been tragically lost. To his fellow Scots we invoke the words of the famous Scottish song: "O flower of Scotland when will we see thy like again".

[Tobacco Packaging, May 11th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I have so many questions stored up, I do not know which one to ask.

My question is for the Prime Minister. It has to do with evidence given in committee yesterday. A hired gun of the tobacco industry said that NAFTA might stand in the way of the intention of the Minister of Health and the government to introduce plain packaging to discourage the use of cigarettes.

What does the government intend to do about this? If it is found to be the case and NAFTA does stand in the way of this obvious good measure in terms of public health, will the government reconsider its support of the North American free trade agreement?