Precisely, so I have hit headlong into this.
I am a conservative person and conservatives by nature are cynical people. I subscribe to what George Will calls the “Ohio in 1895 Theory of History”, so named because in Ohio in 1895 there were precisely two cars in the entire state and one day they collided. That is a true fact. Therefore, as a conservative, I am temperamentally inclined to worry and believe the worst. However I must say that I have not been disappointed with private members' business. I was quite excited when my first private member's motion was drawn.
When we are campaigning during an election we think people will want to talk about the big issues and the ideological divide between parties. However, when we get to the doorstep and actually talk to people face to face, we realize that the issues they are most concerned with are the bread and butter issues, such as how much money they have in their pockets and whether they will be protected when they go to the park with their kids in the evening. These are the core issues.
In my constituency one of those issues was leaky condos. I drafted a private member's bill, put it in the pool and it was drawn and brought to the House. I was very disappointed when I discovered it was deemed non-votable, as were the vast majority of my constituents.
However, there is a broader issue here. At the beginning of all political philosophy there is a stark question that is asked: Who shall rule? There are three basic answers, the first being, a few or many. In a liberal representative democracy, the answer to that question is that the many shall rule but they shall do so through the few.
In the greatest single essay on representative politics, Federalist No. 10 , James Madison said that representation, the delegation of decision making to a small number of citizens elected by the rest, is supposed to define and enlarge the public views.
As Harvey Mansfield, a professor of government at Harvard University says, “the function of representation is to add reason to popular will”.
As members of parliament, our delicate task is to listen to the wants and needs of our constituents. Then it is to deliberate over the longings and desires of our constituents and decide how to advance those views as effectively as possible while acting in concert with our campaign commitments, party principles and priorities, and our private consciences.
Once we have arrived at the point where we are prepared to act, members of parliament, other than party leaders and cabinet ministers, have very few legislative tools at their disposal. One legislative mechanism that we do have is the ability to draft private members' bills and motions which may be drawn by lottery to be brought to the House.
In our current parliamentary mode, because our institutions are so out of date, because of our warped view of what is supposed to be competitive federalism and because it is so disorganized, private members' business for members of parliament is a key element for citizens to feel that their representatives can represent their interests, or, if they represent their own personal interests they can be held accountable at the next campaign.
I speak from the prerogative of advancing the two different forms of federalism that can be represented by members of parliament in the House. One paradigm is the Edmund Burke model, which is to say that members of parliament come to Ottawa to pass judgment.
The second view is that members of parliament come to Ottawa to be bugles for their constituents back home. It is a very different paradigm and I want to refresh the House on that difference.
On November 3, 1774, Edmund Burke delivered a thank-you speech to some people who, upon hearing it, may have wished they had not done what he was thanking them for. They had just elected him to Parliament. His speech was to the voters of the bustling commercial city of Bristol. After felicitously expressing his gratitude, he proceeded to, as it were, step back and put some distance between himself and those who had embraced him. He said, “I am sorry I cannot conclude without saying a word on a topic” then on many minds.
He told them that he rejected the popular theory that a representative should feel bound by “instructions” issued by his constituents concerning how he should vote in Parliament. This doctrine, he said, is incompatible with the duty of a representative...a representative should “live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents”. But all he was saying was that a representative should hear, understand and empathize with his constituents. “Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinions high respect; their business unremitted attention.” But, he said, a representative does not owe obedience. He owes something more than his “industry”. He owes his “judgment”.
And not just his judgment about how best to achieve what his constituents say they want. No, a representative is duty-bound to exercise his judgment about ends as well as means. His job is not just to help constituents get what they want; he also is supposed to help them want what they ought to want.
Burke was taking issue with something that had been said to Bristol voters by another man they had just elected, a man more pliable to them. Burke noted, “My worthy colleague says his will ought to be subservient to yours.” Burke tried to soften the blow of his disagreement by saying that if government were a mere matter of willfulness, an endless clash of wills, then “yours, without question, ought to be superior.” “But government and legislation are matters of reason and judgment, and not of inclination; and what sort of reason is that in which the determination precedes the discussion, in which one set of men deliberate and another decide, and where those who form the conclusion are perhaps three hundred miles distant from those who hear the arguments?”
They were, he said, sending him to a capital, but not a foreign capital. He was going to Parliament, not to “a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests, which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates.” He should not be guided by merely “local purposes” or “local prejudices.” “Parliament,” he said, “is a deliberative assembly.”
Many members of parliament come to the House with the view that they are here to deliberate, act and pass judgment on what they think is in the best interest of the whole country and of their constituents.
There is an alternative view, a more popular representative view. Mr. Trudeau had this view and many members of the official opposition have had this view for many years, that their primary responsibility is to come to Ottawa to represent primarily the views of the constituents back home as they best determine what that view is.
The problem with our current system of governance in Canada is that because the Senate is so detached from its responsibility of representing regional interests, and because the Governor General is not a national unifying figure because she is not given a mandate through the electoral process, the House of Commons is bound by the responsibility to represent the private interests of individual constituents, the personal views of members of parliament, the national aspirations of a grand vision for the whole country and the regional needs, desires and differences among the federation.
It is very difficult for individual members of parliament to fulfil all those tasks within what is supposed to be a competitive federalist model. We have been handcuffed into that because of the outdated institutions of the Senate and, in my view, of the Governor General, and the fact that this House of Commons is more often than not a rubber stamp.
I was faced with this on May 9 when my private member's motion was debated in the House. When I was standing and speaking to my non-votable motion, there were so few members in the House that I half expected tumbleweeds to blow through because it was so poorly attended. That is a reality. If there is not going to be a vote, then private members' business debates on motions and bills mean nothing. We are wasting, whatever it costs, about $100,000 an hour, to keep this institution running, and there is no point at the end of the line for having done that.
Canadians should know that once a member puts his or her private member's bill or motion into a pool it is drawn. The member then has to appear before a committee. The committee is known as the subcommittee on private members' business of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, whose chair must have the largest business card in the history of western civilization.
In order to make a private member's bill votable, the bill must meet five criteria, as the member for Brandon—Souris mentioned, and these criteria are entirely subjective. The third criteria states that bills and motions should concern matters of significant public interest.
In order to get a private member's bill or motion made votable, it must meet all five criteria. The committee, which is dominated by the government, must give unanimous consent in order to make a bill votable. One of those criteria, that bills and motions should concern matters of significant public interest, is defined by whom?
As I said, in the last campaign people told me that they wanted me to go to Ottawa and address the issue of leaky condos because it was a significant local issue affecting over 10,000 people, so I did that. I drafted a private member's bill and was lucky to have it drawn. I then went to a committee where it had to be unanimous that my motion be made votable, and one of the criteria was that bills and motions should concern matters of significant public interest. My issue was of relevance only to the lower mainland of British Columbia. There was not one single British Columbian on that committee. How would members of that committee know if they do not live with the constituents who are impacted by this issue?
I therefore emphatically support the motion and I am encouraged that it will pass tonight. It is a step in the right direction. It should have happened a long time ago, and passing it will send the right message that we are undertaking the first steps of modernizing this institution.
