Stephen Harper

[Budget Implementation Act, 1994, March 25th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I am rising on a point of order to make a procedural argument concerning the omnibus nature of this piece of legislation.

This is a new Parliament which I think has been working reasonably well in spite of our recent difficulties. I really would like to call the attention of the Chair to the nature of this particular bill and to urge the Chair to re-examine a practice we have fallen into.

The particular bill before us, Bill C-17, is of an omnibus nature. I put it to you, Mr. Speaker, that you should rule it out of order and it should not be considered by the House in the form in which it has been presented. I would hope that in making your decision on the acceptability of Bill C-17 in its present form you

will refer to the famous ruling by Mr. Lamoureux of January 26, 1971 in which he said:

However, where do we stop? Where is the point of no return? The hon. member for Winnipeg North Centre, and I believe the hon. member for Edmonton West, said that we might reach a point where we would have only one bill, a bill at the start of the session for the improvement of the quality of the life in Canada which would include every single proposed piece of legislation for the session. That would be an omnibus bill with a capital O and a capital B . But would it be acceptable legislation? There must be a point where we can go beyond what is acceptable from a strictly parliamentary standpoint.

Even though the Speaker in that case went on to rule that this point had not been reached, I submit to you that it has become a standard practice with governments to bring in omnibus legislation following every budget under what we might call the kitchen sink approach.

Beauchesne's sixth edition, citation 626 bears directly on this aspect of the matter. It states:

(1) Although there is no specific set of rules or guidelines governing the content of a bill, there should be a theme of relevancy amongst the contents of a bill. They must be relevant to and subject to the umbrella which is raised by the terminology of the long title of the bill.

Mr. Speaker, I would argue that the subject matter of the bill is so diverse that a single vote on the content would put members in conflict with their own principles.

In this present case, the drafters of Bill C-17 have incorporated in the same bill the following measures: public sector compensation freezes; a freeze in Canada assistance plan payments and Public Utilities Income Tax Transfer Act transfers; extension and deepening of transportation subsidies; authorization for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to borrow money; and changes to unemployment insurance with respect to benefits and the payroll taxes.

First, there is a lack of relevancy of these issues. The omnibus bills we have before us attempt to amend several different existing laws.

Second, in the interest of democracy I ask: How can members represent their constituents on these various areas when they are forced to vote in a block on such legislation and on such concerns?

We can agree with some of the measures but oppose others. How do we express our views and the views of our constituents when the matters are so diverse? Dividing the bill into several components would allow members to represent views of their constituents on each of the different components in the bill.

The bill contains many distinct proposals and principles and asking members to provide simple answers to such complex questions is in contradiction to the conventions and practices of the House.

As well this will cause fairly serious difficulties in committee. This bill will ultimately go to only one committee of the House, a committee that will inevitably lack the breadth of expertise required for consideration of a bill of this scope. Furthermore, the workload of that committee will be onerous and it will be very difficult to give due consideration to all relevant opinion.

In concluding my point of order, I would like to quote the hon. member for Windsor West, the government House leader who said on May 30, 1988: "For all the reasons I have given, I respectfully submit that this bill is of improper omnibus nature. This is consistent with what I consider and I respectfully submit to be, the relevant precedents. This is consistent with the traditions of the House and, more important, the purpose of those traditions in terms of the relevance of this House to the life of the country now and in the future".

This is a new Parliament. I do ask that we take a new approach to this in spite of previous rulings on this matter. I would ask that you give consideration to this, Mr. Speaker. I would also ask the government members, particularly those who have spoken on precisely this question in the previous Parliament with precisely the same concerns, to give serious consideration to this issue of democracy and the functionality of this Parliament now.

[Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Suspension Act, March 24th, 1994]

Madam Speaker, I listened with great interest the other night to the speech of the hon. member for Beaver River who talked extensively about her riding. We all remember the time she was first elected in the House to represent the new riding of Beaver River. I had the honour of being her assistant at that time and of assisting her in planting the flag of Reform in the House of Commons. That was a momentous day. Obviously she feels very strongly about some of the proposed changes under the current scheme for her riding.

I was concerned during her speech on Monday. Some comments were hurled across the way which maybe do not appear in the Hansard transcript. They really raised questions about the partisanship or lack of partisanship and integrity of Elections Canada and its senior officials. There were a number of comments hurled across the way to the effect that Elections Canada was a partisan body. Its members have strong affiliations to another political party which is no longer recognized in the House.

The hon. member for Beaver River has been a member since 1989. She has run in two elections and a byelection. Could she comment at some length on her experiences with Elections Canada as a candidate and as a lone member of Parliament for a good deal of time? Did she find that Elections Canada was a partisan organization, that it had that kind of orientation, or was she happy with her dealings with that organization as an independent member and now as a Reform member?

[Points Of Order, March 23rd, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, on a point of order. I would ask you to examine the blues from Question Period. You ruled my supplementary question out of order before I had a chance to put it. My question was: "Would the government simply consider looking into these matters with its constitutional lawyer-"

[Electoral Boundaries, March 23rd, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, we have offered to meet with the government any time to negotiate a reduction in the number of members in the House, and the government has refused to do that.

My question is on the constitutionality of this act. During the last suspension of the process, Bill C-67 in the last Parliament, considered legal opinion, indicated to a parliamentary committee at the time that there was an implied time limit for carrying out readjustment under section 51 of the Constitution Act. Delaying it past the next census was a violation of the Constitution and had an impact upon other sections such as section 42(1)(a) of the Constitution Act.

[Electoral Boundaries, March 23rd, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, the House has been considering the matter of suspending the process of redrawing electoral boundaries in Canada before the public can have public hearings on the matter and after we have spent $5 million. Apparently also, we hear rumours, the government is intending to impose closure after only one day of debate.

My question is for the Minister of Justice. Will the minister inform the House whether the government sought an opinion on the constitutionality of this law before it was tabled in the House? If it did, will it table that opinion? If it did not, will it explain why not?

[Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Suspension Act, March 21st, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I took great interest in the comments of the secretary of state.

I would like to make a couple of comments. I was interested in the fact that there was the motion to extend the sitting, once again another attempt to rush this bill through.

This bill was tabled in the House on Friday and is being debated for the first time today. There has been virtually no public discussion. The public discussions the process allows for are the independent commission hearings that the bill seeks to terminate.

I find this all very interesting in that we have had a number of speakers today and this is really the first debater from another political party other than the hon. member for Kamloops who gave a very reasoned and considered intervention. We had the first two speakers from the government and from the Official Opposition. It is not questions and comments, not true debate. They just state their position. Since then we have been talking here to ourselves.

I find it peculiar this great effort we are going through to make sure that the public does not have a right to go to the hearing process.

Perhaps the hon. member could explain to us precisely why that is such an important public policy objective, why it is so important that we not get some reaction from the public before we continue to debate this particular issue?

The member raised some of problems, some of which I am more sympathetic to than others. He raised two complaints, particularly in relation to the province of New Brunswick. This bears some examination. On the one hand he noted the radical changes that the commission has proposed in some parts of New Brunswick because of population shifts. On the other hand he raised concerns about increasing the number of seats in the House of Commons.

I suppose if we were ultimately to revise the formula, which would require a revision to the senatorial clause, so that we were able to resist the increase in seats then we would have fewer seats in provinces like New Brunswick and we would have even more radical changes to the boundaries. This is what I find particularly disconcerting. The various reasons that are being used, not in this House but sort of in the hallways, for stopping this process are a complete contradiction to each other in terms of the results that they would bring about.

Besides his commenting on the necessity of killing this, as a government minister would the hon. member favour having a public policy objective to this whole thing that the public would support limiting the number of seats so that we can proceed to at least give the public some reason why we would be interested in killing Bill C-18 after we have spent $5 million on the process?

[Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Suspension Act, March 21st, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I also would like to comment on the hon. member's speech and the whole issue of change.

Members on this side who have been speaking against this particular bill are not opposed to reviewing or changing the process. What is interesting about this bill is it makes no such proposal. There is no proposal to review or to change the process in any meaningful way. It is simply to kill it and substitute nothing other than parliamentary committee hearings controlled by politicians on a matter which is supposed to be the purview of an independent commission.

Let us look at the recommendations of the Lortie commission on redistribution. The previous Parliament set up a commission to look at all aspects of electoral reform and election law. I am not saying that we necessarily approve of those things, but they were studied at considerable expense to the taxpayer of Canada. Now they are just off the table, we are talking about another study.

The Lortie commission recommended to amend the representation formula found in section 51 of the Constitution Act, 1867 so that Quebec would be assigned 75 seats and other provinces would be assigned seats on the basis of the ratio of their population to Quebec. The senatorial clause would be kept. No province would lose more than one seat from a previous distribution. No province would have fewer seats than a province with a smaller population.

Of course, that formula would lead to a more rapid growth in the number of seats in the House of Commons than the formula we are dealing with today. That was the last time we spent money to discover what was wrong with the process and how we could improve it.

Actually, the Lortie commission said: "Maintain the current composition and manner of appointment of the electoral boundaries commission". The last study was not proposing that we change the method or that we kill this particular process.

One other recommendation from that commission was that electoral boundaries commissions would justify their proposals with reference to communities of interest, et cetera and discontinuance of the procedure of parliamentary committee hearings on electoral boundaries. Instead, the commissions would hold a second set of public hearings if their second proposals departed significantly from their first proposals. In other words far from suggesting that Parliament should get itself involved again in the process or in examining the process, it suggested quite the opposite.

We spent millions of dollars to find out from that particular commission that the opposite should be done. Parliament has no power to change but it does in fact review the recommendations of the boundary commission. We would actually cancel that to go to a second set of public hearings instead of one set of public hearings.

With those observations I would appreciate the comments of the hon. member for Fraser Valley West on whether those recommendations are consistent with what he is hearing from people. Do they at all affect his view of whether we need to amend this act and whether we should be doing it in this way?

[Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Suspension Act, March 21st, 1994]

I listened with some interest to the speech by the hon. member for New Westminster-Burnaby, although I did miss a small portion of it.

I wanted to draw the attention of the House to how this kind of redistribution would affect a riding like this in a population sense. New Westminster-Burnaby is an urban British Columbia riding. Under the current boundaries this riding has a population of 112,510; 16.5 per cent above the electoral quotient established for British Columbia. Under the new boundaries, which I appreciate are not entirely satisfactory to the hon. member, there is a population of 101,881, or only 5 per cent above the electoral quotient. There is a considerable improvement in representation there.

It is interesting because that is allowed for under the current sets of acts that are leading us to this process in giving British Columbia two more seats. Maybe we do not want an increase in seats overall but we certainly recognize that British Columbia is entitled to more seats by virtue of the representation by population provisions of our Constitution.

We will all remember that the previous formulas were not so generous to British Columbia. We will also remember that, as I indicated earlier today, in the Charlottetown accord of only a year and a half ago the party opposite and what remains of the other two parties in the former House got together to limit on a permanent basis the number of seats and the representation in the House of the province of British Columbia.

I am sure that is colouring the reaction of members from that province when they see a committee being given an open ended mandate, a committee of this House, to re-examine the formula and to re-examine all kinds of other aspects of electoral reform.

I am wondering whether the member for New Westminster-Burnaby had any comment on that, whether he shared those concerns, whether his constituents shared those concerns. Since the boundary decisions or proposals have been published by the commission, has he had a widespread reaction from ordinary constituents or is this a reaction he is getting primarily from members of Parliament or politically active individuals?

I would appreciate his assessment of that situation.

[Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Suspension Act, March 21st, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, as always I enjoyed the speeches from the hon. member for Lisgar-Marquette. He raised a number of issues which I would like to comment on and which maybe he would like to respond to. First, I would note his concern about regional representation and rural representation and the fact that both he and the previous speaker from Calgary Southeast have indicated the importance of Senate reform. I think that is very important to recognize.

I have heard a lot of complaints in the last few weeks from members who are being affected negatively by redistribution in various parts of the country. They wish there were some protections for large rural and remote ridings and that they did not simply just grow and grow in order to represent a certain level of population. I understand that concern. This is why our party has been so outspoken and persistent in pursuing the issue of Senate reform. That is of course what the Senate was designed to do. I find it strange that some members who are now in the context of their own riding, not the hon. member for Lisgar-Marquette but others, complaining about lack of regional representation

and are opposed to the kind of meaningful Senate reform that our party supports.

I point out to the member, and I am sure the hon. member for Lisgar-Marquette is aware of this or he would not have made reference to these matters, that section 42(1)(a) of the Constitution Act of 1982 states:

An amendment to the Constitution of Canada in relation to the following matters may be made only in accordance with subsection 38(1):

That of course is the two-thirds amending formula. That:

(a) the principle of proportionate representation of the provinces in the House of Commons prescribed by the Constitution of Canada;

In other words, some members not of this party but of other parties who are indicating that they are willing to look at the issue of regional representation in the context of reform of the House of Commons are really inadvertently misleading the public. There is no such opportunity to do so unless we enter into constitutional negotiations and get approval by two-thirds of the provinces. That is definitely off the table. I am glad the hon. member brought those matters to our attention.

The hon. member also discussed his concerns about boundary and name changes in Manitoba. My understanding of past practices has been that it is very common for commissions to accept recommendations, particularly on name changes. I am sure he will want to approach the commission on that basis. I am just wondering if that is simply his own viewpoint or whether he has heard this complaint from other constituents, whether there have been other kinds of complaints and what mechanisms are available.

I understand there will be hearings at some point in Portage la Prairie. Perhaps he could tell us a little bit more about what he has heard from his constituents and what they intend to do.

Finally, his comment about the constitution of the Soviet Union I thought was very interesting and something I would like to hear more about. Of course it is true that some of these autocratic or totalitarian states have had highly democratic constitutions but there are no structures of government behind them to protect people's actual rights. They are just pieces of paper. Maybe he could tell us whether he and his constituents feel that their rights in terms of representation would be better protected by the independent commissions that exist today and are operating as we speak that this bill would close or whether they would be better protected by a committee of this House controlled by partisan politicians.

[Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Suspension Act, March 21st, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for Calgary North for her comments. The hon. member for Calgary North and I and other members of the Reform caucus from Calgary have been co-operating on a submission to be made to the public hearings in Calgary on April 20. We certainly appreciate her efforts in that regard and also the fact that she has really been in the forefront of making sure that her constituents are aware of this and are able to participate in the process.

The question I would like to ask the hon. member for Calgary North flows from the previous comment from the hon. member for Carleton-Gloucester. So far today every speaker has indicated a desire to see the number of MPs capped or even reduced. Certainly nobody seems to be saying they want the number of MPs increased.

Blocking the public hearing process will not accomplish that. In fact, having the public hearing process will not accomplish it either because it is not a matter of the boundaries commission. It is a matter of the formula to which the House in conjunction with the Senate could make some alterations.

This whole process could be facilitated if we could agree on the issue of capping the number of MPs. I am curious as to whether the hon. member has observed the same thing in debate. Why does she believe the government is so reluctant to make this commitment if there seems to be support for this kind of measure from all sides of the House. I am sure she is hearing the same thing from some of her constituents.