Mr. Speaker, I want to express my appreciation to the member for Pictou—Antigonish—Guysborough for sharing his time with me.
He talked about a made in Canada solution. This should also be a made in parliament solution and it is not. It is one that is made by the government and imposed upon the House of Commons. That is not the way we will achieve change in this institution that bears the stamp of legitimacy.
I am taking part in the debate because there is an extraordinary opportunity now for us in the House to make changes that will make this a much more effective parliament. It requires some leadership on the part of the government. Unfortunately, these early actions indicate that it is not prepared to undertake the kinds of changes that are necessary.
The government House leader characterizes this as a single, very confined issue. It is not. It is part of a pattern of driving democracy out of the House of Commons and of turning this parliament and, I regret to say, turning the Speaker into a simple servant of the government. It reverses the whole history and the whole idea of parliament. It reduces the accountability of the government. More seriously perhaps, it reduces the independence of the Speaker of the House of Commons.
There is no doubt that some means must be found to ensure that parliament can act. However, there is also no doubt that the opposition must be able to delay actions which it thinks is wrong. That is what parliament is about. There ought to be limits on the power of government. That is why we established the rules of parliament.
Obviously, the tactics of the Alliance Party on the Nisga'a bill and the tactics of the Bloc Quebecois on the clarity bill have caused legitimate concern on the part of the government. They do to all parliamentarians. It is not the first time these issues have arisen.
In the last parliament the Speaker was never asked for a ruling on the correctness of the tactics that were followed. I suspect that the government was fearful of an unfavourable ruling by the Speaker and therefore remained silent.
Now there is no risk of an unfavourable ruling by the Speaker because the government, by this motion, is telling the Speaker what it is that he is supposed to decide.
Instead of discussing the issue as a whole parliament, as we should be, the government is moving now to instruct the Speaker not to accept amendments that the government considers to be frivolous. It does that, just so it is clear, without the support of any other party in the House.
When parliaments change their rules, the problem is to ensure that the changes are perceived as legitimate.
The traditional way of reaching a consensus is through committees made up of representatives from all parties. This is definitely not what happened here.
This is a change imposed by closure. There was no consultation, no attempt to arrive at an agreement. The result is that the House now finds itself with a rule that will not be perceived as legitimate, for decades to come. This change to the Standing Orders of the House of Commons is all the more difficult to accept because it concerns directions given to the Speaker of the House, in spite of the objections raised by minority parties here, and because it imposes restrictions on these minority parties.
There is no longer anything to prevent the Prime Minister's office from asking the Liberals to muzzle the bothersome House of Commons.
The House has just elected its Speaker, a Speaker in whom we have put all our hopes that he would honour this House. But the first thing that the Prime Minister of Canada does is to tell the Speaker how to perform his duties. The Prime Minister's action grossly undermines the authority of the Speaker of the House of Commons.
There are better solutions than rule changes by closure. The Chair could be asked for a ruling or rulings on the basis of existing procedure. If necessary, a committee could be asked to devise new guidelines written for the House and known to the membership of the House. Members who are not part of the leadership struggle and not part of the everyday battles in the House could be asked, as parliament has asked them before, to address the situation.
None of these options have been examined, nor was there an attempt to find a solution by consensus. Instead, change is imposed by closure on the House.
As my colleague said, the government is cherry-picking U.K. procedures. I, by the way, find it very ironic that a government that made such a to-do about repatriating the constitution should now be down on its knees bowing and genuflecting to the house at Westminster.
Are we not an independent nation able to establish our own rules? The government in the U.K., in its rules, is much more balanced than this government is proposing to be here. What the government is doing is choosing U.K. rules that suppress members of parliament without having any of the counterbalances, such as the power of the speaker in the United Kingdom to refuse a motion for closure or time allocation.
It is fairly certain that a British speaker would have refused to put the present closure motion on a change to the rules after just two hours of debate.
The speaker in the U.K. also has the opportunity to insist that ministers attend the house and make statements there and not run off to the press gallery. The speaker can extend or restrict debates.
Those are the rules of the house of commons in Britain, if we want to look at the whole picture rather than simply cherry-pick the rules that limit the powers of the opposition.
What is most serious about this is the government's attack on the Speaker. By adopting this course of action, it is giving the impression that the Speaker is to be a tool of the government. It treats the Speaker as though he is still a backbench Liberal member of parliament. It tells the Speaker what to do.
Let us be realistic. It is not the whole House that is denying the Speaker's right to exercise his own judgment, it is the cabinet that is issuing the order and using its power of discipline and fear to bring its backbench members into line.
There was, Mr. Speaker, as you would know, to the great regret of all of us, an infamous speaker in the House 40 years ago, René Beaudoin, during the pipeline debate. He lost the confidence of the opposition and of the Canadian public because he seemed to be taking direction from the government.
This motion raises the risk that every subsequent Speaker of the House could become a René Beaudoin. It creates the possibility that every subsequent Speaker of the House could become a simple servant of the government of the day instead of a servant and defender of the whole House of Commons. It corrodes the impartiality which is at the heart of the authority and the legitimacy of the Speaker of the House of Commons. It makes the House of Commons of Canada a simple subcommittee of the Liberal Party of Canada. That is simply unacceptable.
The government asks us in this motion to accept its definition of what is frivolous. This request is from a government whose definition of propriety allows the Prime Minister to lobby a crown corporation to give money to one of his friends.
The St. Laurent government, let me make the point, could have dismissed as frivolous the objections that led to the historic pipeline debate in the House.
The Trudeau government could have dismissed as frivolous the amendments that ultimately forced its patriation package to the Supreme Court of Canada where the Supreme Court judged that the package broke the constitutional conventions of the country.
The Mulroney government could have dismissed as frivolous the amendments to the Patent Act.
The present government could dismiss as frivolous amendments that would make the ethics counsellor report to the whole House of Commons.
The government's definition of frivolous will naturally differ from that of the opposition. Who should decide in an unfettered way in a case like this? The Speaker of the House of Commons should decide, using the Speaker's discretion and the Speaker's judgment, but that will no longer be possible after this rule is changed by closure.
This weakens the whole House of Commons. It weakens the parliamentary system. It is a step backwards and it should be opposed.
