Mr. Speaker, I intend to share my time, if I can speak quickly enough, with my colleague and House leader, the member of parliament for Pictou—Antigonish—Guysborough.
Let me be clear. I think this institution is in very significant trouble. It is appropriate that we should look at the procedural changes that are proposed here. We will try that. I think the government should know, and I believe I am speaking on behalf of private members of many parties, that if this process does not work there is a growing will in the House to find some other way that will work, because the status quo in the House of Commons is no longer adequate. It does not attract the respect and the sense of legitimacy that the House of Commons needs. It is not accepted by the people of the country. Increasingly, it is not accepted here.
I want to start with what may be seen by some as a revolutionary principle. I believe that if parliament works better, government can work better. Of course there is going to be an adversarial relationship between the House of Commons and the government, and the member for Winnipeg—Transcona was absolutely right. What people vote for is a parliament. They do not necessarily vote for a government. What we are here to do is to hold a government accountable and also to ensure that the government best reflects the interests and the sensitivities of the country. That can be done through a strong parliament.
I hope that there will be some inspiration taken from the work of the McGrath committee by the members of the committee here. I want to speak for just a moment about legitimacy.
I think the success or failure of democratic systems depends on the public's willingness to support or accept decisions made in the name of democracy. Canadians are prepared to make difficult decisions, but they want to shape them. To do so, they must have confidence in their leaders.
Just as we need wealth in order to prosper, we need confidence to govern. These days, both are lacking. Our objective in these discussions must be to find the means to rebuild confidence in public institutions, to revive a feeling of legitimacy that will mobilize Canadians.
That is for three reasons. First, at the end of the day, the House of Commons is our most important institution. It has power over the courts, over cabinets and over constitutions. Let me in passing dismiss the notion that there is something unconstitutional about dealing with questions of confidence on the floor of the House. Second, this is the only Canadian institution to which each citizen in each corner of Canada feels connected. Third, the House of Commons may be the last existing pan-Canadian institution. More than ever, this diverse, blessed and difficult community needs institutions it can respect and hold in common and we in this House are losing that capacity now.
I believe the House is seriously broken and I want to make the case that this is no government's fault. Perhaps the best way I could do that is to identify three mistakes that were made, of which I was part, at least three, and there were no doubt many more. The most important, I think, had to do with the change with regard to the control of estimates. Last night we sat through a system where, in the twinkling of an eye, we approved the spending of billions of dollars. That should not happen that easily. That should not happen that automatically.
I was part of a parliament, an adviser to a leader of a party who, in the name of efficiency, changed the rules of control by Committee of the Whole. That was a mistake. We should recognize that it was a mistake. We should not consider that because that is the status quo now, we are somehow bound to accept it. We have to go back to some control of spending or parliament will never have any purpose. At the end of the day, if we do not have the power to control spending, we have power over nothing at all.
Second, to come to a point raised by my colleague from Winnipeg—Transcona, I was a member of a government—and we in that government were wrong—that changed a decision we had earlier taken and reinstated parliamentary secretaries to committees. They should not be there. They threaten the independence of the committee. The McGrath committee report, which we briefly accepted at the time, was right.
I make this point not because I like to admit mistakes, but because I think that if we are going to get anywhere in the debate we have to recognize that the present state of the House is not the fault of any one party. It is a collective fault and the repair will come only if there is a collective will to try to change the House.
When I was first sitting in the galleries and watching the House, sitting right down about here were a couple a members of a party that I think was then called the CCF. They used their power with respect to divorce bills to deny unanimous consent to the House of Commons to force a change in the law of divorce. It was too sensitive for governments to deal with as a matter of initiative, but those two members of parliament at the time, Mr. William Peters and Mr. Frank Howard, used that power, which no member of parliament now has, to deny unanimous consent on individual members and to force a change in the law of Canada. Did that incapacitate the Government of Canada? No. Did it force it to respond to public current attitudes of the country? Yes. What is parliament to do? It should be to force governments to pay attention to where the people are.
We have made mistakes in the past. We have to recognize that if we are going to make this institution relevant. We have to be prepared to admit those mistakes and make very fundamental changes.
During my participation in the debate to the throne speech, I outlined a way that I would deal with what I believed was one of the most major of the recent failures of this parliament. It had to do with committee of the whole House and control of government spending.
My own view as to how we could do that may not work but I would like it looked at. I would empower the Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition to choose two departments a year. Their estimates would be considered without any time limit and without let or hindrance. There would not be any government spending approved until every member of parliament had approved the estimates of those two departments. It would be done in committee of the whole House. It would be understood that the choice by the Leader of the Opposition would not be made until the day before the examination began so that every department would have to prepare, assuming that it would be examined.
I believe that would work. If it would not work in committee of the whole House, I believe some variant that would allow a committee of supply to sit in an alternate Chamber would work. We have to admit that four decades ago we made a mistake and restore to the House some capacity for control of spending.
I want to speak very quickly on a matter which my colleagues would make clear I speak only for myself. It involves a quite significant change in the relationship between government and the House of Commons.
It is time to challenge a central assumption about the House of Commons, namely the assumption that the power to initiate legislation should rest almost exclusively with cabinet and that the principal role of the rest of parliament is simply to hold cabinet accountable. In practical terms that means that cabinet governs and the rest of parliament simply approves or disapproves.
Cabinet is at the centre of the decisions and the rest of parliament is at the margins, whether as members of a government caucus who can often change the details of a proposal but rarely change its substance, or as members of an opposition party whose amendments or criticisms can sometimes, but not very often, bring a change. We do not have parliamentary government. We have cabinet government in a parliamentary system. We have to make some very significant moves away from that. One way would be through more free votes.
On the question of cabinet government, let me quote from a recent article by Eric Kierans, a distinguished former member of the House and a former member of the Trudeau government. He was commenting on events 30 years ago, but current today. He said:
Canada today is run by the Prime Minister's Office and Privy Council Office, whose mandarins instruct the elected members as to what they should do and say, and what opinions they must support.
The notion that the prime minister is primus inter pares—first among equals—which appears in every textbook on political science, has become a lame joke. The prime minister has no equals, nor any who can remotely aspire to be equal except by taking over the job.
The position is more like a president than a prime minister, but within a system not designed for such overwhelming centralized control, and in a regionalized nation where such control is not merely awkward, but dangerous to the public weal.
So spoke Eric Kierans. He is absolutely right. We have to take account of the extraordinary dangerous power that any prime minister, whether a prime minister from Shawinigan or a prime minister from Calgary Centre, holds. That simply has to be changed if this system is going to be valid again.
I would ask the House to consider a concept. Let us distinguish between two broad categories of the policy questions the House of Commons considers. One set involves issues which are without question life and death issues to a modern nation in a competitive world and where a government must be able to act quickly and decisively. Those would include economic and fiscal policy, trade policy, federal-provincial-territorial relations, basic foreign policy, some legal matters and some others. The list would have to be drawn very carefully. An accountable government responsible to parliament should be the principal source and author of policy on those questions.
However there is a second category of issues which, while unquestionably important, are not at the core of a government's ability to lead and protect the nation. Moreover, in some of these fields more imaginative and more appropriate policy may come from sources outside government. That could be the case, for example, with issues relating to Indian affairs, the environment, the fishery, agriculture and to other policy fields. In those cases a principal source and author of policy should be an all-party committee of the House of Commons empowered to work directly with public servants and to call upon the best advice of the community. Indeed a process like that may yield better and more pertinent legislation than would a government which regards those issues as simply secondary to its mandate.
In effect we already distinguish between issues which are more important to a government and issues which are less. In lower priority ministries, if good ideas come forward from the public servants of parliament they are more likely to be shunted aside in the privacy of the Prime Minister's office. Moreover, as I know from experience, governments fall on large issues like budgets, not on more ordinary questions. So we already distinguish between categories of issues.
This proposal would make much better use of the talent and experience of the men and women chosen by their neighbours to serve in the House of Commons. We are wasting that talent and experience today, and we have been for some time. In my consistent experience in the House of Commons in government and in opposition, any senior official in Ottawa has more influence over public policy than any elected member of parliament who is not in cabinet. That is wrong in our system. There has to be some very basic reforms undertaken if we are going to change that system.
I do not think that breaks the traditions of the application of modern parliamentary democracy to a modern society. Those are the sorts of things we have to look at.
Let me go to more specific matters. I am conscious of my time and do not want to intrude too much on my colleague.
I take the distinction made by my colleague from Winnipeg—Transcona. We are talking about reform here if we are talking about anything sensible, but modernization is also allowable. We should start by giving consideration for example to petitions that come by e-mail. The standing order requiring 25 signatures on a petition should be abandoned. There is no reason to be that exclusive. There is no reason why all motions on private members' and supply days should not be votable. What is the House about if we are not going to have the opportunity to vote?
There is no question that we need a stronger cadre of law with respect to the auditor general, the privacy commissioner, the information commissioner and the language commissioner. They should all have the status of being permanent witnesses to all committees and should be entitled to automatically comment on items of business before committees.
To go back to a matter raised a moment ago, the Speaker should have the power to refuse a closure motion and time allocation motions when the Speaker is of the opinion that the rights of a minority are being infringed upon. That is done in the United Kingdom. There is no reason why it cannot be done here. If we are interested in following the British example, let us follow the good examples that would empower parliament more than is the case now.
I would like to see more elections in the House. You, sir, as Deputy Speaker, should be elected. Other presiding officers should be elected in the same way that Mr. Speaker is elected.
There are a range of other specific changes that have to be undertaken. As someone who has been in government and who has been in opposition, as the only member on the opposition's side of the House who has been a Prime Minister and who has sat in the cabinet of Canada, I believe the Government of Canada has nothing to fear from the Parliament of Canada. Members who sit in cabinet have nothing to fear from the members of parliament who do not sit in cabinet.
If we respect the fundamental rights of individual members of parliament and if we shake our rules to reflect that respect, we will not only have a government what could command more legitimacy, that would be more in tune with the concerns of the people in the country, we will have a parliament that will draw out the better natures, not the darker natures, of the members of parliament here.
