Scott Reid

[Government Business No. 26—Amendments to the Standing Orders, June 15th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, I do not think I can provide an argument against it because I am not actually against hybrid. I am not against the voting app, nor indeed is the motion proposed by our House leader, which would allow the voting app to continue for the rest of this Parliament and one year into the new Parliament. I am really against the removal of the consensus requirement for changes to the Standing Orders.

[Government Business No. 26—Amendments to the Standing Orders, June 15th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, there is just one thing I would like to say today about all the speeches from the Bloc Québécois.

There is a party in the House that wants to separate Quebec from the rest of Canada, and that party is more respectful of our institutions and our democracy than the government itself is.

[Government Business No. 26—Amendments to the Standing Orders, June 15th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, did the member have cotton wool stuffed in his ears during my speech? I was talking about the fact that the government is using closure to ram through this amendment. That is what I was discussing. I was not discussing whether or not there should be hybrid voting. I did point out that the opposition motion allows for hybrid voting to go on for the entire rest of this Parliament and a year into the next Parliament.

If the member ever paid any attention to what anybody else says, he would know that his argument is complete nonsense and has no bearing on reality. Frankly, I will say tonight that the member should be ashamed of the ignorance he brings to every debate he participates in. He is a disgrace sometimes.

[Government Business No. 26—Amendments to the Standing Orders, June 15th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, from a strictly procedural perspective, I am speaking in favour of an amendment proposed, two days ago, by the House leader for His Majesty's loyal opposition, to the government motion to adopt a series of amendments to the Standing Orders. I will not read out the amendment here, because it runs several pages, and I will certainly not attempt to read out the government's set of proposed amendments to the Standing Orders, which run to 25 pages in 12-point type. My speaking slot is only 10 minutes and I simply would not get through those things before I ran out of time.

The general thrust of the government's package of amendments is to make permanent the interim Standing Orders, which would otherwise expire at the end of the month, that allow MPs to participate in the House debates and at committee meetings remotely, using Zoom, and to vote remotely as well using the app on our telephones.

The government amendments would make this change permanent, extending not merely beyond June but also beyond the life of the present Parliament.

The thrust of the opposition motion is that the expiry date should be pushed back from June to a date that is described in the amendment as “one year after the opening of the 45th Parliament”. This would provide a full year subsequent to the next election, during which a consensus could be developed as to which aspects of the rules for virtual sittings and remote participation would be retained. If, at that time, no consensus were achieved, then, after the year expires, it would be necessary for all MPs to attend sittings of the House in person, as was the case prior to the pandemic.

Of course, if a consensus was achieved, then we could carry on with some form of virtual sittings. Very likely, the addition of a further year or two of experience with virtual sittings and online voting would allow us to make incremental improvements to the rules over the voluminous package being voted on today.

Of the two alternatives before us, I prefer the one presented by the opposition House leader, but that is not the subject that I wish to address today. Rather, I want to focus on the entirely inappropriate way in which the government is attempting to push through changes by means of a whipped party line vote.

I have been in this place for 23 years, nearly a quarter of a century, and until the present Prime Minister took office, that was never how changes were made to the Standing Orders. I could go back to the prior century and that was also not the way things were done. Some kind of non-partisan path has always been sought.

There are two distinct ways in which the House of Commons has been able to achieve non-partisan changes to the Standing Orders. The first way, which is used more frequently, is to have a committee develop the details of any proposed changes to the Standing Orders and to have that committee present a consensus report, which contains only proposed amendments that have won the support of all groups that have party status, which is to say of all parties, and which have at least one MP on that committee.

The centrepiece of the committee's report is always the exact wording of the proposed Standing Orders. The House then concurs in the report. A recorded vote may be taken or in some cases there may be approval by unanimous consent, but the key point is this: a consensus has been sought and the party or coalition of parties that have the majority in the House of Commons and on the committee judiciously refrains from attempting to impose measures that are not also supported by the minority.

The purpose of the Standing Orders is, of course, to protect the rights of whoever is in the minority in the House of Commons, whoever is, in one form of another, on the opposition benches. In a political system where the majority can act with complete freedom and with no restraints in its actions, Standing Orders of any kind are a mere impediment. This kind of unbridled majoritarian system is not the Westminster system and has no place in Canada.

It is with reason that this kind of unbridled majority rule is referred to as the “tyranny of the majority”, a term or a phrase developed in the 1840s by Alexis de Tocqueville, who was trying to distinguish between the unexpectedly moderate governing practices he had encountered in a trip to North America, as compared to the tempestuous situation in his native France, where one majority coalition would succeed another in an apparently unending series of revolutions, coups and counter-coups, with each majority coalition then proceeding to trample of the rights of the newly created political minority until it, too, would be overthrown, following the defection of one faction or another and the cycle of oppression would continue with new masters and new victims.

Returning to the committee for a moment, the work of creating and then sorting out the details of a series of changes to the Standing Orders, particularly in the case of technically complex changes, is often too much for a committee that is burdened with other matters as well, as is frequently the case for our procedure and House affairs committee, on which I served for 15 years.

We were in the habit, when I served on the committee, of delegating the task of drafting such changes to ad hoc subcommittees. One such subcommittee developed a code of conduct for MPs regarding sexual harassment, which now forms Appendix II of the Standing Orders. Another subcommittee, which I chaired, dealt with the definition of “gifts” under the MP conflict of interest code, which forms Appendix I to the Standing Orders. Whatever the case, the rule was always to seek out consensus and to go no further than was possible on a multipartisan basis.

The second way of achieving consensus is to have the procedure and House affairs committee review a set of proposed amendments to the Standing Orders and then to present the amendments to the House of Commons without making an actual recommendation. This is what was done in 2015 with regard to a motion that I had brought forward to change the manner in which the Speaker is elected, from a series of runoff ballots to a single preferential ballot. My motion was made in the Commons and then referred by the House of Commons to the procedure and House affairs committee, which examined it in detail, including hearing from expert witnesses.

The committee then made a report to the House, stating:

The Election of the Speaker is a matter for all Members to decide. The Committee does not oppose nor endorse motion M-489 brought forward by [the member for Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington]—

As I was at the time.

—and feels that the entire membership of the House of Commons should have the opportunity to vote on whether or not to change the Standing Orders in the manner suggested by M-489.

In order to accomplish this purpose of having a vote in the House, the Committee recommends that Standing Order 4 be amended as follows...

In the committee's report, this was followed by the text of the Standing Order amendments that I had proposed.

As part of this arrangement, which is not written down in the official record but which can be gleaned from the debates that took place in 2015 in the House and in committee, it is clear there was an all-party agreement to allow all members from all parties to vote freely on the proposed amendment. No party would apply a whip to its members, and this is exactly what happened. The vote took place in the very last division of the 41st Parliament in June 2015, in fact almost exactly eight years ago today.

Every single party in the House of Commons allowed a free vote, with the result that 27 Conservatives voted differently from their leader, 15 New Democrats voted differently from their leader, one Liberal dissented and even the Bloc Québécois, which only had four MPs elected in the prior election, recorded votes on both sides of that division. This is a reasonable model as an alternative to the consensus model, although I do worry that achieving a genuinely free vote is notoriously difficult in this place, which is why we elect our Speakers by secret ballot.

In the event that a consensus cannot be achieved at committee, it would be reasonable to follow the model laid out by the procedure and House affairs committee in that 2015 report with the addition of a secret ballot in the House of Commons on the motion that the committee has proposed. I note that this kind of secret ballot is not currently possible and would itself require a change to the Standing Orders, but I think that it is worthwhile to put the idea out there for future reference.

Nothing remotely like either of the two models I just outlined has been used in the present case, however. The procedure and House affairs committee signalled a majority preference for changing the Standing Orders in a report that features two dissenting reports from parties that, together, represent nearly half of all MPs in the House of Commons. This is as far from a consensus as it is possible to be.

Worse yet, the committee did not actually endorse any specific set of amendments to the Standing Orders, only the idea that such amendments should exist, and the government then produced a text drafted by bureaucrats confidentially to the text of the Standing Orders. This process makes detailed changes to those proposed Standing Orders, those 25 pages, virtually impossible as any micro changes of this sort that are done in committee can only be done if the House of Commons chooses to sit as a committee of the whole, which is clearly not going to happen.

Then, of course, there is the matter of closure. We are actually limiting debate and ramming through changes to the Standing Orders, something utterly unprecedented in this country, utterly without precedent and, I would say, utterly disgraceful.

From a process perspective, this is a retreat from the Westminster model to the majoritarian tyranny that de Tocqueville warned against. It is grand being a tyrant while the tenure lasts, but it is terrible to suffer the tyranny of those whom one had formerly oppressed, as many former leaders have learned, after the tools that they had forged are turned on their former masters. That is the real lesson to be learned today, and since the way in which we will be voting does not allow this lesson to be easily teased out, I thought it best to commit these sentiments to words and to express them today.

I have one last thought. This whole mess could be stopped if a standing order were adopted here that makes it impossible to amend the Standing Orders in the future using closure. If there was enough opposition, it would be possible for opposition parties to prevent a standing order change going through. That is not going to happen in this Parliament, but in the next Parliament, I will be proposing exactly such a change so that this kind of tyranny can never happen again.

[Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, June 9th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Immigration designed overly narrow criteria for admitting the families of Afghan language and cultural advisers, whose lives are now in danger. They cannot get to Canada and the minister refuses to schedule meetings with Afghans who want to fix the rules and save these lives.

Why can the minister find the time in his schedule to announce visa-free travel for people from other countries, but not to take a meeting with a brave Afghan who served Canada and whose family may be killed because of that service?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2023, No. 1, June 6th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, I will simply say that the presidencies of republics like the United States and France are not without cost. It is very expensive to have a big building like the Élysée Palace in Paris for the President. He is not a king, but there is a real cost.

The same things goes for the White House in the U.S. and all the other trappings that go with the presidency.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2023, No. 1, June 6th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, I, of course, came intending to talk about the Royal Style and Titles Act, and I was hoping for a question that would relate to that, but let me try answering this question, seeing as it was raised.

Speaking of having promised one thing and then going in a different direction, I cannot help but note that one of the most effective ways of capturing carbon is through reforestation. Of course, trees are composed largely of carbon. Wood is carbon. I cannot remember if it was in the last election or the one before, but the Prime Minister promised to plant two billion trees. He has produced less than one-tenth of 1% of that promise, despite the fact that a number of years have gone by.

If we are looking for concrete action to make this planet a greener place, a less carbon-intensive place, he is not setting a very good example.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2023, No. 1, June 6th, 2023]

I have to confess, Mr. Speaker, that I had come prepared to talk about the Royal Style and Titles Act, not about some of the other aspects of the budget bill.

I will make the general observation that in Canada, we do have a problem with too much taxation, not too little. I recognize the member's point that she feels this is frequently inequitable, and while I might disagree with her on some specifics, it is a good point that in Canada the welfare state increasingly is focused on taxing all of us, but very inequitably frequently, and then transferring that money to those who are politically connected and who are in a position to receive benefits from government funds. Therefore, in fact, it is not a distribution from the wealthy to the less wealthy, as it ought to be. On that point, the NDP, like its CCF predecessor, has a good general point.

On the specific questions she asked, I am less capable of giving an informed answer.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2023, No. 1, June 6th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, perhaps the hon. member who just inquired about the inclusion of the Royal Style and Titles Act in the bill will find my speech, which is on that very subject, to be helpful.

I thought I would start my remarks today by explaining, for the benefit of anyone who does not already know this, what an omnibus bill is and where such bills got their name. In the 19th century, the ancestors of today's diesel and electric municipal buses were horse-drawn coaches, typically with benches along both sides of the interior and sometimes with an exterior staircase to a further set of seats on the roof. They were typically crowded, uncomfortable and hot, and people with nothing in common were forced to sit or stand side by side and sometimes on each other's laps.

As a result of the endless comedic possibilities afforded by the numerous random and uncomfortably close encounters across otherwise impenetrable barriers of age, gender and social class that were created every day in the crowded interiors of rush-hour omnibuses, and even more on the overstuffed rooftop seats, omnibuses became a favourite subject for contemporary painters and cartoonists. Anyone who does a Google search for “omnibus” and “painting” will see what I mean.

It should come as no surprise, then, that when Victorians were searching for a word to describe enormous pieces of legislation that crammed many unrelated subjects into a single bill, the jostling and smelly omnibuses of their cities came to their minds. Today, more than a century has passed since the term “omnibus” has been replaced, at least when referring to means of transport, with the contraction “bus”, but the word “omnibus” survives, robust as ever, as a term for describing vast, multiheaded bills.

To say that Bill C-47, the budget implementation act, is an omnibus bill is to make an understatement. The bill is 681 clauses long, and if printed it runs to hundreds of pages. It is a bill that would make Marcel Proust green with envy. It is to legislation what Wagner's Ring cycle is to opera and what Gormenghast castle is to domestic architecture. It is what the SS Great Eastern was to shipping when it was launched in 1858: six times larger than any other vessel then afloat, and propelled forward by a bizarre combination of propeller, sails and two colossal paddle wheels.

Lost in the middle of this vast, ramshackle legislative edifice is clause 510, which would enact the royal style and titles act, 2023. It reads as follows:

The Parliament of Canada assents to the issue by His Majesty of His Royal Proclamation under the Great Seal of Canada establishing for Canada the following Royal Style and Titles:

Charles the Third, by the Grace of God King of Canada and His other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth.

This provision really ought to have been enacted on its own as a stand-alone bill, as it involves no expenditure of public funds and therefore truly has no relationship whatsoever to the budget. If it had been enacted in such a manner, the debates in this place would have provided a record of the government's rationale for the royal style and titles act, 2023. The responses of the various opposition parties would have provided some useful feedback as to how the rest of us feel. However, since that is not to be, I thought I would make a few comments outlining my own observations on this matter.

The first thing to note is His Majesty's current title, which would be changed by this enactment. Currently, the king is titled “Charles the Third, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom, Canada and His other Realms and Territories King, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith”. The new, shorter title would eliminate the reference to the United Kingdom and would remove the title “Defender of the Faith”.

I note that the current title was adopted in 1953 by the Parliament of Canada shortly after the accession to the throne of Her late Majesty, our much-loved Queen Elizabeth II. At the time, the goal was to have a title as close as possible to the one in use in the U.K. With that goal in mind, titles similar to the one that is still in use in Canada were adopted by parliaments throughout the Commonwealth. However, since that time, most Commonwealth realms have chosen to drop the reference to the United Kingdom and to eliminate the title “Defender of the Faith”.

In Australia, for example, the King is “King Charles the Third, by Grace of God King of Australia and his other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth”. To take another country whose name starts with “A”, in Antigua and Barbuda he is “Charles the Third, by the Grace of God, King of Antigua and Barbuda and of His other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth”. In Australia, this style dates to 1973. In Antigua and Barbuda, the title dates to 1982. In the Solomon Islands, the title was altered to something similar in 2013, and so on. Similar titles are used in over a dozen other independent Commonwealth countries.

Canada is merely bringing its title into conformity with the ones used in most of the other Commonwealth realms. In doing so, I think we keep with the spirit of the 1952 Commonwealth heads of government conference, at which assembled prime ministers agreed that there should be a non-binding but sincere effort to maintain a relatively uniform style for the monarch's titles in each of the different realms.

In Australia in 1973, the goal of removing the reference to the United Kingdom was to make it clear that the Queen's role as monarch was no longer simply a historical artifact of that country's colonial past and was most certainly not due to Australia retaining a subordinate relationship to Britain. Rather, her constitutional role was a consequence of her direct relationship with the Australian people, a relationship that was confirmed in a referendum 26 years later, when a majority of Australians in every one of the country's six states voted against becoming a republic.

This seems like a reasonable goal for Canada as well. Constitutionally speaking, we would remain a monarchy even if Britain chose to become a republic, and it is odd that our head of state does not have a title that reflects this reality. As a historical side note, it is worth observing that in the 1650s, when England did briefly become a republic under Oliver Cromwell, Newfoundland, which was then the only part of Canada under British rule, refused to abandon the Crown. David Kirke, Newfoundland's proprietary governor, was captured by a force sent from the American colonies and was forcibly repatriated to England, where he died in prison for his monarchist sentiments.

Now let me turn to the subject of the title “Defender of the Faith”.

Famously, this title was given to King Henry VIII by Pope Leo X in 1521 in honour of the king's defence of the seven sacraments against the challenge that had been made four years earlier, when Martin Luther had published his 95 theses. A few years later, Henry too broke with the pope when he was unable to obtain a divorce, but he kept the title.

“Defender of the Faith” is a title that might be viewed by some people as being appropriate for the U.K., where the King is the nominal head of the established church, but there is no established church in Canada. Thanks to the efforts of two generations of pre-Confederation reformers, the last traces of an established church in this country were abolished by an act of the Parliament of the Province of Canada in 1854. From 1854 onward, even though our successive kings and queens have retained the title “Defender of the Faith”, it is solely because we were using the same titles used in the United Kingdom.

Ninety-nine years after the abolition of the established church, in 1953, the title was then adopted by statute for reasons I have already discussed. However, “Defender of the Faith” was by then an anachronism, and it was already controversial. Its departure from the King's title is welcome.

I note that the King himself is not enamoured of this title. The title "Defender of the Faith" implies a kind of religious uniformity that is out of step with our times. Frankly, state-sponsored religious uniformity was pretty undesirable in King Henry VIII's time too when viewed from our vantage point. In the 1500s, dissenting Christians were persecuted across Europe, the Inquisition was burning heretics at the stake in Spain and Jews were banned from living in England. In today's world, where the U.K., just as much as Canada, is home to robust communities of Muslims, Jews, Sikhs and Buddhists, there is no such thing as “the faith”. It is worth noting that the current British Prime Minister is a Hindu.

It is for this reason that when he was still Prince of Wales, His Majesty speculated that a better title would be “Defender of Faith”, and I can also see merit in the title “Defender of all Faiths”. However, newfangled and novel titles would be inappropriate to include in a statute that is stuffed into a vast omnibus bill, with little opportunity for the kind of public discussion that would be needed to establish their legitimacy. Simply dropping the title seems the best solution of all.

My conclusion, therefore, is this: I will be voting against Bill C-47, but I do support the Royal Style and Titles Act, in clause 510.

[Correctional Service of Canada, June 2nd, 2023]

Madam Speaker, Corrections Canada tells us that offenders who find jobs in the community are three times less likely to reoffend. This is true, but it is also irrelevant because there is zero statistical correlation between participation in CSC's job-creating programs and getting post-incarceration work. Here is why: Instead of recognized third party vocational certifications, CSC issues informal statements of achievement that have all the authority of the ribbons issued at a children's bicycle-decorating contest. Will the government fix this problem?