Joe Comartin

[Canada Elections Act, September 18th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I have looked at it to some degree. I certainly do not claim to be a constitutional law expert, which is what we are into here. I would not challenge Mr. Forsey's opinion but it is only one opinion. There are strong opinions on the other side within the constitutional law, both academics and practitioners, that this proposed amendment by the government to the elections act would withstand a constitutional challenge.

I would make one additional point and that is that our Constitution is not just a written one. The Supreme Court has made it clear that we can create constitutional conventions and that may very well occur here. It is certainly what I believe would occur if we moved along the lines I am arguing for which is a restriction on what a vote of confidence is. If over a period of years the Governor General were advised by the government of the day to have an election on a certain date and abided by that, over a period of several elections that would then become a convention within this country. The same would be true in a minority government situation along the lines that I previously mentioned.

[Canada Elections Act, September 18th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, perhaps the member should study some of the other governments. I am going to use England as the example. England's legislature has been going through an extensive reduction in the votes that are considered to be confidence motions. It does not in any way demean the democracy in that country. I believe it is just the opposite.

Governments there, both conservative and labour, have suffered defeats on issues they ran on and saw as part of their mandates in their elections. Their governments did not collapse. Democracy continued in that country. It can in fact work.

The other point that one would have to make, if one goes back and studies the history of successive governments in this country, is that all too often matters that were not part of the mandate are brought forward as confidence motions. They tend not to be the major issues of the day on which the political parties ran for government or ran for office, but more mundane ones that are oftentimes manufactured as causes for confidence motions knowing that the opposition parties collectively will vote against it and bring the government down.

[Canada Elections Act, September 18th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak to Bill C-16 and to signal, as I did earlier this afternoon, that the NDP would be supporting this legislation. We are looking forward to getting it into committee for further discussion and perhaps amendments. In essence, the proposition being put before this House right now is one that we have supported for a good number of years. In the 2004-06 Parliament our former member, Ed Broadbent, was a strong proponent of this and encouraged the government of the day to press forward with it, to no avail. We are pleased to see that the government has in fact moved on the issue.

To a great extent this bill is about combating the cynicism that is in the electorate. We can say it makes sense for our electorate to know that there would be a fixed date for an election every four years and prepare for it knowing in advance when voting would take place. However, what is more important, and I do not want to downplay the significance of that certainty of a fixed date, is that if this bill passes it would be an opportunity for this House, for Parliament, to say to the citizens of Canada right across the country that we are no longer going to have their decision making process manipulated by the government in power. That has been very much the history of parliaments of all stripes in this House.

A parliament, a government of the day, will say this is to its advantage to go now even though it is nowhere near the generally accepted four, four and a half year mandate that we should stay and work and do what is our responsibility to the country. The government says, no, this is to our advantage right now, because of this issue, it is popular in the country, it is our issue and so we are going to go to the electorate.

We saw that, as we heard from some of the other speakers today, in the last number of years happening repeatedly, where we had elections at three and three and a half year intervals, and that suffers. If nothing else, if we want to look at it from a non-democratic standpoint and simply from a financial standpoint, it means we have more elections, and those cost money, in the range of $200 million, each time we go to the electorate. More importantly, the essential issue is that we say to the people of Canada that we are no longer going to manipulate the electoral date in order for it to be of advantage to the government in power of the day.

One of the side effects of that, because of the certainty of the date which would allow people to know in advance when the vote would be and to prepare for it, is that it would increase, I believe, the number of people who would vote because they would not feel this negative cynicism toward all parties and all politicians from this perspective. They would say that they knew this election was coming at this point, it is part of our law, they are ready for it, they are going to participate in it, they are prepared for it, and they have not been forced to go to the polls only because of an opportune time for the government in power. For that reason the bill is important. It is one that we should all be supporting. I think we have heard today from the various parties that they all intend to in fact support this approach.

I suppose the comment one has to make is that it is too late. We should have done this a long time ago, but in fact we are now finally now getting to it.

One of the concerns that we do have of this legislation is with regard to the situation in a minority government because of course this law would have no effect if the past practice continues. The past practice is, as often as not in a minority government situation, that the government comes down not so much because of a lack of confidence generally in the government but on a specific issue.

We are proposing for consideration in this minority government situation, and we will be raising it at committee when it gets there, to constrain the ability of the government to intentionally bring itself down by creating a false issue, by setting up an issue that all three of the opposition parties with the majority of seats in the House would vote against. That has happened and there certainly has been speculation that the government may be planning on doing that some time in the spring of this session.

In order to avoid that kind of cynicism, there are alternatives. I put this to the government House leader today. He, of course, was dismissive of it in the sense that it would usurp the power of Parliament and cross over into conflict with our courts. What I suggested to him was that we limit the number of issues that can be confidence motions, so that a government cannot unilaterally, as it can now, say an item is a confidence motion and if we do not vote with it the government, it goes down and we have an election.

That again is a manipulative tool that governments in the past have used. From a democracy standpoint there is no reason to have that in our system. We could, I believe, with some discussions, debate and negotiations come to a conclusion and incorporate that into legislation as to what is a permissible motion of confidence and exclude all others.

One of the answers I received from the government House leader was that we cannot do it because we would end up being challenged in the courts. That is not necessarily the consequence. The decision as to whether a motion is one of confidence or not, once we have set the criteria, could be determined, first by your Chair, Mr. Speaker. That is one alternative, or it could be by a vote in the House. There are other alternatives.

Albeit, and I am not going to advocate it, another alternative is to allow the Governor General to make that decision. Being an unelected position and being a strong democrat, I am not prepared to turn the power over to that office, but I do believe it would fall within the perspective, control and authority, and jurisdiction of either the House or of the Speaker of the House at the time, and so there are alternatives.

Going back again to why we are supporting the bill, both from a democratic standpoint but more to deal with cynicism within the electorate, it would be another way of saying to the electorate, even in the minority government situation, that they would not be forced to go to the polls, that we would be able to continue the government and continue on the issues that are confronting the country without going to the electorate. We would not allow the government of the day to simply say something is a confidence motion, that if we do not vote with it we would have an election.

There are alternatives. It is an alternative that I believe would deal very much with the other part of the cynicism when elections are called in this country.

I want to say that there are clear reasons why this will be effective and I want to address one of the negatives at the same time as seeing it as a positive. I believe that by allowing for fixed election dates we actually would reduce the amount of partisan electioneering that goes on between elections. We would reduce it to that latter period of time, to the last six months.

What happens now, and I think we are being less than honest with the electorate when we stand in the House and say that we are going to be in a constant election mode with the implication being that we are not right now and we are not even in a majority government situation. I have been in both. Anybody who has been here knows whether one is in a majority government situation or a minority government situation, as it stands right now, electioneering goes on because we do not know, and I was very glad to hear my colleague from the Bloc making this point, when the plug will be pulled. Right now we are into that situation and in fact we do partisan electioneering on a constant basis.

Having fixed dates, I believe and would argue strongly, would reduce the amount of partisanship that goes on between elections and restrict it to the latter period of time of, as I say, six months to a year before the campaign starts. The argument is that it is somehow going to increase the amount of politicking that goes on, being meant in a negative tone, the result of which will in fact be just the opposite.

With regard to the other positives here, again it is a situation where because one knows what one is confronted with in terms of a date, the recruitment of candidates by all parties and the recruitment of volunteers by all parties will be enhanced when we know the dates that we are working toward as far as the election date itself.

The bottom line is, and I will conclude with this, if we proceed with the legislation as proposed, it is definitely a step forward but it is not enough. I believe we should strongly look extensively at the issue of how we trigger elections in a minority government situation around confidence votes and amend this legislation to include criteria as to how the situation would be dealt with then. That would go to finalizing that cynicism that the electorate feels toward all politicians about the way we manipulate election dates in this country.

[Canada Elections Act, September 18th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I have always wanted to acknowledge the fact that my friend is a graduate of the law school that I went to. However, I am not sure it really helped him a lot in his political career in terms of where he has ended up.

The NDP are in support of this bill and I think he is aware of that. We do have reservations around the minority government situation and the ongoing reservation of the royal prerogative in those circumstances. In particular, our concern is that a prime minister or a cabinet of the day could manipulate, if I can put it that way, the political agenda by way of designating any number of votes as being confidence votes, knowing that at some point they will provoke the combined opposition to vote against a bill.

I wonder if my colleague's government has given any thought to limiting that government power to specified areas, that is, only certain types of bills. I would suggest, because of historical precedence, that these should be money bills and that only money bills should be designated as confidence motions. All others would simply be regular votes and therefore would not provoke or justify the calling of an election if the vote failed against the government.

[Federal Accountability Act, June 21st, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Vancouver Quadra must have missed part of my speech because I spent a good deal of time on floor crossing and being highly critical of the member for Vancouver Kingsway and his conduct and this government allowing it to go ahead.

I am aware of the amendments that were brought forward. It gives me an opportunity to attack the Liberal Party members for attacking our member for Winnipeg Centre. They actually put out a press release saying that he had not dealt with it and in fact had voted against the floor crossing amendment. He complained about it. They did it a second time.

The member for Winnipeg Centre, who was representing our party on that committee, made it clear that we were strongly in favour of legislation that would prohibit, once and for all, floor crossings, not the representation that was made by the Liberal Party members in their personal attack on him.

[Federal Accountability Act, June 21st, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, this will be really easy. It is such hypocrisy to hear that from the member for Calgary—Nose Hill. In the last Parliament her party led the charge against Glen Murray and did exactly the same thing to him. Now she stands in the House and accuses us of witch hunts and American style politics, which is really interesting coming from the Conservative Party.

It is not me talking when I say that Mr. Morgan did not meet the criteria as the person to head up that commission. I am quoting from a really radical magazine, the Canadian Business magazine of May 22 to June 4. This is a two page article and a commentary on Mr. Morgan. We hear from the Conservatives repeatedly about how this person is such a great person.

I know I do not have enough time to read the whole article but it goes through incident after incident that Mr. Morgan was involved with in the corporate world; how he destroyed ecosystems; his attack on Kyoto; his attack in Ecuador on a whole ecosystem. He destroyed a whole ecosystem.

The company he headed up in Colorado was fined more money in one year than all the other company fines for 15 years before that. That is the kind of person the Conservatives feel is a paragon of virtue who should be heading up our public appointments process. It is a joke and it is the height of hypocrisy for the government and the member for Calgary—Nose Hill to suggest otherwise.

[Federal Accountability Act, June 21st, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I must agree with the member's characterization of the Prime Minister's conduct as being arrogant. There is just no question about that.

The role of the commission is set out very clearly. It is a major step forward in dealing with blatant political patronage at its very worst. The commission is required to do a number of things. When we hear the Prime Minister making statements that the commission will in effect not be allowed to perform its duties because he will not appoint anybody to it, breeds the cynicism that I made reference to as did the member in her question.

My understanding is that Canadians and members of this House were taken aback and insulted by the Prime Minister's attitude in saying that if he did not get his way he would go home with his ball. He appears to have shifted his position and we expect that he will make the appointments. If he does not play the proper role of the Prime Minister in this regard, including the consultation process that is required, which again was an idea that came from Mr. Broadbent, I can assure the Prime Minister that he and his party will pay in the next federal election.

[Federal Accountability Act, June 21st, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I wanted to hear the intervention from the member for Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca in response to the last totally illogical comment from the member for St. Catharines.

Bill C-2 has been trumpeted by the government as historical legislation and to some degree there is some validity to that, mostly stolen ideas from our former leader and past member, Ed Broadbent. A number of the provisions within Bill C-2 were proposals that he entered into the public record by way of a report issued about 18 months ago, one that was heavily adopted by the Conservative Party at the time and now the Conservative government. As the member for Halifax just mentioned, unfortunately not all of it.

However, there are some key components in it and it is the reason our party has been willing to support the legislation, recognizing it is far from perfect and has some fairly glaring gaps in it, which I will address in a few minutes.

It is important to say that we support it. It has some fairly major advances to deal with what has been a growing level of corruption in some cases, but certainly a growing level of cynicism in the Canadian body politic toward the House and members of this House and toward political parties in our country. It is well past the appropriate time for this legislature and all political parties to address that cynicism, to respond to it and to in effect clean up our act, which the bill, and hopefully soon law, will go some distance in doing.

It begs the question that if we do this will we see a reduction in cynicism? Will we hopefully see an increase in engagement by the average Canadian citizen in politics. Will they pay more attention to it and involve themselves both at election time and in between elections in the determination of policies that are in their best interests and in the best interest of the country as a whole.

We are hoping, and I would say to some degree expecting, some positive outcome in the body politic as a result of this legislation. To that again, I want to acknowledge the phenomenally good work that Ed Broadbent did. He contributed to pushing the Conservative Party and government along these lines and, in effect, showing them the way. It is a debt of gratitude that our country owes to him as a result of all his hard work and vision in that regard.

There are a number of things that it does. It brings into play a new public appointments commission.

In terms of the level of commitment we see from the Conservative Party, we always had suspicions. Because Mr. Gwyn Morgan was in effect shuffled out of the intended role of heading up this commission, in a snit the Prime Minister said “I'm taking my ball, I'm going home”. He said that he would not include the public appointments commission in the bill. It was to heck with all the rest of us, to heck with the country and to heck with the importance of having this appointments commission to in effect clean up the patronage, which has been so pervasive. It was in the previous Liberal government and it obviously was going to be in the current government. However, when he did not get his chosen appointment, he took his ball and went home.

Quite frankly, because we have a minority government, we told the Prime Minister he could not do that and we were going to change the bill, which we did at committee stage. We got the commission back in place. All parties and all members of the House will be faced with the need to ensure that the appointments are only made based on clear criteria.

In the last Parliament Mr. Broadbent prepared a model which a number of committees adopted when they were reviewing appointments. Not as many appointments were reviewed as we would have liked, and I will not say the criteria were always followed, but it was a beginning. We have now come to a much broader scope and positive changes, we hope, in the way appointments are made to our innumerable commissions and boards.

Whether they be crown corporations or small committees, they all play an intricate part in the democracy of the country. For far too long those appointments have been based on who one knew and to which political party one belonged, which was always the party in power. Far too many of these appointments were not based on quality and merit but simply on who one knew and to which political party one belonged. Shortly that will be a thing of the past.

It is amazing that we are at the early part of the 21st century and we are only finally getting to this. We look back and think about the days when a government changed and the entire civil service changed from the most senior official to the least significant part time employee. It was wholesale. To the victor went the spoils was the motto. We did away with that quite some time ago in the public service. We created a public service of a standard based on merit and substance, but we did not do that for the appointments and it continued right up until the present time. We observed in the last government just how terrible that could be. That sense of entitlement was so pervasive and was so negatively viewed by Canadians right across the country.

As the appointments come forward at all levels to be reviewed by committees, the NDP will be vigilant that criteria are based on merit and not on political affiliation. To a great degree we have substantial hope that the quality of the boards and committees and the appointments to sit on those boards and committees will substantially improve to the benefit of all Canadians.

I want to spend a few minutes on a couple of key points that are missing from the proposed legislation. One point has already been referred to by my colleague from Windsor West in one of his comments. It is an issue that the bill did not address. We tried to get it addressed in committee and it was ruled out of order. It is the issue of floor crossing.

Mr. Broadbent, in his writings on this subject, made it very clear to all of us in the House and to the country as a whole that there was a fundamental need to address this issue if we were going to clean up the democratic process in this country and the way the House and the government functioned overall. We should not have individual members of Parliament who stood for election in one party, who canvassed door to door, adopted the policies and principles of that party, and then sometime after gaining the confidence of the electorate and being elected, on a whim, or as a result of incentives offered by the government of the day or on some occasions the opposition party, responding to those incentives most times out of self-interest and not the interests of their constituents. We should not have individuals who certainly were not responsive to the vote that had brought them to their seats determining on a whim or through self-interest to leave the party to which their constituents had elected them to join another party.

We saw several very blatant incidents of that in the last Parliament, but I do not think we saw anything so crass as what we saw after the election. I happened to be driving in the car with one of my sons when I heard the news on the radio. I said, “They have to be wrong. That did not happen”. This was two or three days after the election.

The member for Vancouver Kingsway, now the Minister of International Trade, had been elected to the Liberal Party. He had sat in the previous Liberal government as a minister, and had been very vigorous, aggressive and confrontational in his attacks on the Conservative Party during the election. He led his constituents to believe that he would represent their interests, that he would stick with the Liberal policies and principles, and I sometimes think those two do not go very well together, but leaving that aside, he had convinced his electorate in Vancouver Kingsway that they should vote for him and they gave him the seat. Sixty per cent of the people voted for other parties. In any event, he took that seat under those conditions and within days switched parties.

Did he do it, as he claims, in the interests of his riding? Did he do it because he was offered the incentive of becoming a cabinet minister again as opposed to sitting as a backbench opposition member? We may never know. I suppose history will judge that, but in either event, it is wrong. It is morally wrong. It is ethically wrong. It should not happen.

Mr. Broadbent had made it very clear that his policies would have prevented that. That legislation, if he were the author of it on our behalf and on behalf of the Canadian people, would have prevented that.

That provision should have been in Bill C-2. As I said earlier, at the committee stage we moved amendments to include that provision. They were ruled out of order. We did not even get a chance to have them come to a vote at committee.

I have to say I have some doubts as to whether they would have gone through, as the sense I have of the other three political parties in this House is they are prepared to continue to permit that kind of conduct. They are not prepared to deal with the absolute anger that constituents feel when their elected member, who ran on one basis, makes that kind of abrupt change and they have no control, they have no say until the next election. They are stuck with a member like that for an extended number of years until the term is up and they can get at him again in an election. That is not good enough and it has to stop.

One of the failings of Bill C-2 is it did not address that. The government refused to address it. Obviously given the greetings that the Conservatives gave the member for Vancouver Kingsway, I suppose we should not have expected anything else from them, but it certainly belies their claims of accountability. What is accountable about that? Nothing at all.

We are stuck with that for the time being. At some point the Canadian people will get another shot at this and I believe we will respond at some point with the proper legislation that will prohibit that kind of conduct in the future.

There is another major point that is missing here. In the election and in the run-up to the election, the Prime Minister and the Conservatives made various overtures to the Canadian people about electoral reform. They even included it in the throne speech earlier this year.

The one little thing that we have seen and which is being claimed as being some form of electoral reform is the bill we saw earlier on, and I will put it in quotes, “Senate reform”. Quite frankly, it is a joke. All it does is fix the maximum number of years that unelected, unaccountable senators get to sit in the other place. This is claimed as being some kind of major step forward, which of course it is not at all.

What should have been put in place with Bill C-2 is a meaningful process to have full electoral reform. It may be worth a few shots to actually get the government to accept the reality of what the Canadian people want. Electoral reform is needed. We are out of sync with the rest of the major democracies in the world in terms of exclusively using the first past the post system. The United States is now the last democracy that uses it. England has begun to move significantly, both in Wales and in Scotland, and all the other democracies have moved in one form or another to do away with the first past the post system. They have recognized, going back 100 years in western Europe, that it does not respond properly to full democratic representation, so that every vote counts as the same, so that there is not a wide divergence in results in the reflection of the actual popular vote where a party forms the government, with a significant majority in some cases, with less than 40% of the vote.

We have seen very many examples of that in Canada, at the federal level and at the provincial level. We have seen the anomalies in New Brunswick where the government gets a little more than 50% of the vote and takes every single seat in the province. In British Columbia there were two elections where the provincial government took all but two seats. The party got less than 60% of the vote but took 97% and 98% of the seats. We have not had a government in Canada at the federal level that got a majority of the vote since around the second world war, for more than 60 years now. We simply cannot continue with that system.

I mentioned earlier in my address about the cynicism in the public generally regarding politics in Canada. It is part of that sense that people do not have control over their politicians, over their elected officials. It is not the be all and end all to that, but it is one of the significant pieces that has to be put into play.

When we hear the Conservative government extol the virtues of Bill C-2, we have to keep in mind that there are some gaping holes in it. We are going to support it because it does address some of the accountability issues. It does build in, in a number of ways, protection from some of the worst forms of corruption that we saw in the last government, and which we saw quite frankly in the Conservative government under former prime minister Mulroney. To some degree that will stop, but it is not the end, and we will not get that until we replace the first past the post system.

We are quite prepared to support this bill, but we are saying to the Canadian people and to this House that we are going to continue to work for the further reform that is needed in our democracy.

[Judges Act, June 20th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, the use of the notwithstanding clause has been an issue of great debate in the country. However, when we come down to the fundamentals, it is there to protect human rights, civil liberties and the rights of all Canadians, especially those of our minority groups.

The government seems to have had an equivocal attitude toward it, the Prime Minister in particular. I have never been quite sure where he stands on this. It seems his position with regard to the use of the notwithstanding clause depends on whether we are in an election or after an election. It is there for a very specific purpose. Thankfully, it has been rarely used because legislators have generally been more respectful of our civil rights and civil liberties.

[Judges Act, June 20th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, to be blunt, I do not believe the government has responded responsibly. Why is its judgment to be taken over that of the independent commission? We have a rule of law in the country, and it provided for that. Would the parliamentary secretary take the same position on any number of cases involving an independent arbitrator and binding arbitration where one of the parties can say it is not going to agree? That is what we have here. The government is unilaterally overthrowing this system.

With regard to the government's speedy response, it is easy enough to do a speedy response when it is not complying with the recommendations. He knows this as well. Bill C-9 and Bill C-10 are in front of the justice committee. This issue will not be dealt with by the justice committee this year. It is as simple as that. Bill C-9 and Bill C-10 will take up the rest of the year after the summer break, so it will not be a speedy process.

The Liberals and the NDP are on line. If the Conservatives came on line and moved the royal recommendation back to the recommendation from the commission, this could be resolved in a speedy way. It could be done at all three stages and done before the end of the week.