AGRI Committee Meeting

37th PARLIAMENT, 2nd SESSION

Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food

EVIDENCE

CONTENTS

Monday, November 4, 2002

¹

1530

The Clerk of the Committee

Mr. Howard Hilstrom (Selkirk—Interlake, Canadian Alliance)

The Clerk

Mr. Howard Hilstrom

The Clerk

Mr. Howard Hilstrom

Mr. Larry McCormick (Hastings—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, Lib.)

Mr. Rick Borotsik (Brandon—Souris, PC)

Mr. Howard Hilstrom

The Clerk

Mr. Howard Hilstrom

¹

1535

The Clerk

Mr. Howard Hilstrom

The Clerk

Mr. Howard Hilstrom

The Clerk

Mr. Howard Hilstrom

¹

1540

¹

1545

Mr. Larry McCormick

Mr. Howard Hilstrom

The Clerk

Mr. Larry McCormick

The Clerk

Mr. Larry McCormick

Mr. Howard Hilstrom

Mr. Ovid Jackson (Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound, Lib.)

Mr. Howard Hilstrom

The Clerk

Mr. Howard Hilstrom

¹

1550

The Clerk

Mr. Howard Hilstrom

¹

1555

º

1600

The Clerk

º

1605

Mr. Mark Eyking (Sydney—Victoria, Lib.)

Mr. Paul Steckle (Huron—Bruce, Lib.)

The Clerk

Mr. Rick Borotsik

Mr. Ovid Jackson

Mr. Rick Borotsik

Mr. Ovid Jackson

The Clerk

Mr. Howard Hilstrom

Mr. Paul Steckle

Mr. Claude Duplain (Portneuf, Lib.)

The Clerk

Mr. Howard Hilstrom

The Clerk

Mr. Howard Hilstrom

Mr. Rick Laliberte (Churchill River, Lib.)

The Clerk

The Chair (Mr. Charles Hubbard (Miramichi, Lib.))

º

1610

Mr. David Anderson (Cypress Hills—Grasslands, Canadian Alliance)

Mrs. Suzanne Tremblay (Rimouski-Neigette-et-la Mitis, BQ)

Mr. David Anderson

Mrs. Suzanne Tremblay

The Chair

The Clerk

Mrs. Suzanne Tremblay

The Clerk

Mr. Claude Duplain

The Clerk

Mrs. Suzanne Tremblay

The Clerk

Mr. Claude Duplain

The Clerk

Mr. Claude Duplain

The Clerk

Mrs. Suzanne Tremblay

The Clerk

Mr. Rob Merrifield (Yellowhead, Canadian Alliance)

The Clerk

Mr. Murray Calder

The Clerk

Mrs. Suzanne Tremblay

The Clerk

Mr. Dick Proctor (Palliser, NDP)

The Clerk

º

1615

Mrs. Suzanne Tremblay

The Clerk

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CANADA

Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food

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NUMBER 001

l

2nd SESSION

l

37th PARLIAMENT

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EVIDENCE

Monday, November 4, 2002

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

¹  (1530)  

[Translation]

    The Clerk of the Committee: Pursuant to Standing Orders 106(1) and 106(2), the first item of business for the committee is the election of a Chair and Vice-Chairs.

[English]

    Members of the committee, in conformity with Standing Order 106(1) and (2), your first item of business is to elect a chair. I am ready to receive motions to that effect.

    Mr. Howard Hilstrom (Selkirk—Interlake, Canadian Alliance): Excuse me, I have a comment. You're asking for elections to be held here, and we need to know under what electoral rules we're going to proceed. You have a choice of two procedures. One is an open show of hands, the other is a secret ballot. I would like to know from you what your decision is on how this is going to proceed.

    The Clerk: I am presiding over the election. It isn't my decision. It would be the decision of the committee to proceed as they wish.

    Mr. Howard Hilstrom: Then I would make a motion and ask that the election be held by secret ballot, and I would ask for unanimous consent of the members of Parliament seated at this table.

    The Clerk: Is there consent? I don't see consent.

    Mr. Howard Hilstrom: I didn't hear anybody say no.

    Mr. Larry McCormick (Hastings—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, Lib.): Madam Clerk, I can read the paper and listen in the House and hear all my friends and colleagues on both sides of the issue regarding secret ballots, but I enjoy free votes. I've voted against the government. What does that prove? But in this case, whoever I'm going to vote for, I'm happy to stand up or put my hand up. I have no reason to have a secret ballot, so I don't agree with that. Let's move on. It takes one person to--

    Mr. Rick Borotsik (Brandon—Souris, PC): There's a democracy in this country, and a democracy has electoral rules that allow for a secret ballot to be made, so that people can vote according to their conscience and not according to some dictatorial scheme with repercussions.

    Mr. Howard Hilstrom: Repercussions from how someone votes could be effected by those in power, in this case the Prime Minister. So I'm going to argue very strongly that unless we have unanimous consent, we not hold the elections today and wait for the House to deal with the issue of mandatory secret ballot elections through a vote in the Parliament.

    The Clerk: There's no unanimous consent to proceed with the secret ballot. Do we have a motion?

    Mr. Howard Hilstrom: Madam Chairman, before you get onto that, I've got to continue speaking here about this issue. The issue of secret ballots is tremendously important. It is not proper for the Speaker to exercise control over committees. Committees are and must remain masters of their own procedures, and in this case here the committee is not having the opportunity, by a majority vote, to decide whether or not to have this by secret ballot. We're going to end up with a very undemocratic process if this goes ahead.

    The point the clerk is trying to make is to have this meeting elect a chair and a vice-chair. It's my understanding that the House rules only allow you to call for a chair to be elected. Could you clarify why you're having a vice-chair elected also under that rule?

    A voice: Look on page 2, Howard. It will tell you what the rules are.

¹  (1535)  

    The Clerk: Standing Order 106(1) does say the reason for this meeting is to elect a chair. We don't necessarily have to elect vice-chairs.

    Mr. Howard Hilstrom: Then I think you should have this reconstituted to take out any references to a vice-chair and suspend this committee hearing until tomorrow in order to do that. Is it possible for you to do that?

    The Clerk: I'm sorry, I can't.

    Mr. Howard Hilstrom: You can't do that.

    The Clerk: I don't have that power. I'm only here to preside over the election of the chair.

    Mr. Howard Hilstrom: In an election, the majority has to be able to express their will without fear of favour or retribution from anybody. If we cannot agree among the MPs situated here to go for a secret ballot on this, it will be a real travesty of justice.

    The Clerk: Once again, I'm sorry, there's been no agreement.

    Mr. Howard Hilstrom: Election by a majority gives great assurance the committee will function well, as the chair will have the respect and confidence of the majority of members. It is much too important to simply pass this by without having a fair amount of discussion and debate here, prior to any nomination process.

    The question of whether or not there will be more than one nomination cannot be decided until the nominations actually start. We could have two or three nominations; therefore it is absolutely important to decide on the electoral rules before we go to the nomination process.

    Secret elections eliminate both the application of pressure and intimidation, as I've said, and this retaliation. The votes on the committee...who would be doing this? We have the whip, the leader, other colleagues, and people who have a political agenda to proceed with. We also have the fact that rejected candidates should not know who voted against them.

    We've had a long tradition here, from Mr. Harvard right through to the past chair, Mr. Hubbard, of having an agriculture committee that really worked together as best we could, with only minor discussions and arguments over given issues. Now we're going to have the possibility of a committee chair elected to the seat--where we had two nominations--and that person is going to know that certain members of the committee voted against him or her.

    We know that every political party, in particular the Liberal Party right now, has internal party politics on the go--leadership races. That applies to the Progressive Conservatives and the New Democrats, and it certainly applies very extensively to the Liberals. That is why democracy is clearly based on an issue of secret ballots when it comes to elections.

    If you'll recall, Madam Clerk, when we came down to this place in 2000 after the last election, our first job was to elect the Speaker of the House of Commons by a secret ballot. Today, the Liberal House leader indicated there were 26 amendments to Standing Orders that govern how the House of Commons is run. That's been instituted and agreed to by his government.

    Now we have another one that has big support in the Liberal majority government, to the effect that elections in the committees should be done by secret ballot for the same reason the Speaker of the House is elected by secret ballot: so we all have confidence in them, and they can do their job without fear of favour of those who voted for or against them. This basic principle will be lost if we go ahead and have this nomination today.

    The Liberal caucus elects its internal committee chairs by secret ballot. So we're not talking about something here that is pertinent only to the Canadian Alliance, the Bloc Québécois, the New Democrats, or the federal Progressive Conservatives. The Liberal majority, in fact, elects internal committee chairs by secret ballot. But here we are in a committee of all of the parties of the House of Commons that are not able to elect a chair by secret ballot.

¹  (1540)  

    I'd like to point out to Madam Clerk that in fact when we do get on to the vice-chairs, again there should be a secret ballot, because heaven forbid if the chair of the committee should fall ill or be unable to continue, the vice-chair would take over. Eventually that's the importance of this secret ballot.

    Chairs right now, the way you're proposing, Madam Clerk, are in effect appointed and not elected. Madam Clerk, the issue of being able to have an election that is in fact an election and not an appointment is tremendously important. The membership of a committee can reflect gender parity and regional interests according to the Prime Minister. There is no reason why our committee would want to follow any rules except those of a democracy. The democracy would be that a majority vote in the committee by secret ballot would decide who the chair of that committee is. Until we have assurances that in fact an election can be held by secret ballot, we do not have a real democratic process here, and I don't think the people in Canada really want to have a situation where the committee is appointed.

    I appreciate, Madam Clerk, that in the past that has been the process many times over, but the fact of the matter is you can't just keep going by the past and say that what was fine enough in the old days is what we should still be doing today. We are trying to change the way Parliament operates. It's not just the Canadian Alliance. In fact, one of the leadership hopefuls--I don't know the member's riding, but Mr. Martin, if I can use his name, wants to see democratic reform. As a result, when we have democratic reform available, then in fact, Madam Clerk, we should be able to partake of that.

    How does Parliament get changed? Parliament gets changed, quite clearly, by the members of committees saying, okay, that's the way things went before, but we're the master of our own destiny and we can do things differently. In this case, what I saw here today was one member saying that he didn't think there should be a secret ballot, but I look around and I see that there are eight members on the government side and there were seven on the opposition side, and those other fourteen members never had any say whatsoever about this process.

    That brings me back, Madam Clerk, to the importance of having this vote in the House of Commons tomorrow take place before this committee tries to elect a chair, or, in the case of only one nomination, simple approval. But as I say, we can't proceed to that until such time as we clearly have established what the electoral process is here.

    This process is something we have to deal with as the meeting unfolds here. You're the clerk and in charge of this attempted process of having an election of the chair of the Standing Committee on Agriculture. It is not your fault that we've reached this point. It's the fault of the members of Parliament that we have not been able to deal with the issue of secret ballots for the chairs of committees.

    Having said that in defence of yourself, Madam Clerk, I hope you don't feel that you have any extra authority or responsibility to fix this issue, because you really don't. It's up to members of Parliament to have this issue decided and dealt with in an appropriate way.

    What I'm discussing here and fighting for are the basic democratic responsibilities and rights that every backbench MP, on both sides of the House, wants to have with his or her party, cabinet, or in our case, a shadow cabinet.

¹  (1545)  

That is so fundamentally important that I feel I'm fighting, along with my Canadian Alliance colleagues here and the other members of the opposition, on behalf of Liberal backbenchers to have this democratic principle of not only one member, one vote, but also the principle that a member should be able to vote, based on what is impartial, and for which he or she can expect no retribution or retaliation for how he or she actually votes.

    It's really, really unfortunate that the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Agriculture has seen fit to be the one in this committee to say he doesn't think there should be a secret ballot to that. I don't understand that, because if one or more of the Liberal members are nominated for chair, surely we can vote for that member, whichever one it may be, a man or a woman.

    We have the member from Ontario, and--

    Mr. Larry McCormick: Howard, can I speak to that, just for a moment?

    Mr. Howard Hilstrom: And, Madam Chair, in trying to run this election, now we have another problem here besides a lack of democracy. We don't really have any kind of a quorum around here. So I'm asking that this meeting be adjourned until tomorrow.

    The Clerk: I can't--

    Mr. Larry McCormick: All right, we'll get our members in here. How many members are required for a quorum call?

    The Clerk: Nine members.

    Mr. Larry McCormick: How many minutes do you have after someone calls the quorum call? You must be given a bit of time.

    In the House, we are.

    Mr. Howard Hilstrom: Not in committee, though.

    Mr. Larry McCormick: Well, we should discuss this.

    Mr. Howard Hilstrom: Can I have a ruling on that, Madam Clerk? If there's no quorum, then the meeting is over.

    Mr. Ovid Jackson (Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound, Lib.): There is quorum.

    Mr. Howard Hilstrom: There's no quorum. This is unfortunate.

    The Clerk: It's not in my power to adjourn the meeting.

    Mr. Howard Hilstrom: Then I think I'll continue on speaking about this issue of whether or not we should have a secret ballot, because it is so important. The fact that the clerk cannot rule whether a quorum is constituted is something that is beyond my immediate ability to look up in Beauchesne’s, or wherever, to determine exactly if in fact the chair has that right.

    I take it under advisement, and I will check into that at a later time and try to deal with whether or not we could actually go ahead and elect a chair without a quorum here. That's even more undemocratic than what we had when we had a quorum.

    Madam Clerk, this is as serious as not having a secret ballot, the fact that, according to the House rules, somehow you have to let this process go ahead with only as few as eight members here. In effect, I assume that you would be letting someone be nominated, and in fact, eight people out of 16 would end up deciding who the chair is.

¹  (1550)  

    The Clerk: I can't receive motions to adjourn the committee meeting. I can only entertain a motion to elect the chair. I can't do that now, because there isn't a quorum.

    Mr. Howard Hilstrom: Yes, and that's fine, Madam Clerk. What will happen here today then is clearly we are going to go through until the end....

    A voice: Aboriginal Affairs just had their election by a secret ballot and it went very well.

    Mr. Howard Hilstrom: Okay. We can go through this in order to determine if in fact we should go right to the end of the committee meeting. It's my understanding that this committee meeting was set for two hours. We are obviously going to continue to talk for two hours about the fact that we should have a secret ballot here. The end of the meeting, we should take note of it...it started at 3:30, so I believe that by 5:30 in fact this meeting to elect a chair will be over, and if we haven't managed to elect somebody by 5:30, I'm assuming that that in fact will be the end of the meeting.

    Madam Clerk, should you at 5:30, under advice from experts Marleau and Montpetit, decide that in fact the meeting doesn't end even after two hours of being in session here, then I would think we would continue to discuss this into the evening, and possibly we could order some food in.

    The advice that's coming in and what's happening elsewhere in the House of Commons is that the aboriginal affairs committee have just elected their chair by secret ballot. Imagine that. They have a chair and the committee work is ongoing. The parliamentary secretary for our Indian Affairs minister was there and somehow that person managed to agree that there should in fact be a secret ballot.

    It sure seems funny to me that the Minister of Agriculture and his parliamentary secretary feel so incensed and divided in their own ranks that they can't see fit to have a secret ballot. Obviously this brings up the point that if the Liberal caucus is so divided in who they want to have as chairs, and the Prime Minister wants so-and-so and the members want somebody else, well, rather than...I would hate to see the Liberals fighting amongst themselves. What would be better than to have, Madam Clerk, the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food have a vote in secret so that there would not be any disagreement on the Liberal benches.

    The government is obviously running this country, and it's very important for all of agriculture that in fact we have a committee chair who is supported by all, or at least not have it publicly known who supported that chair and who opposed that chair, because we see that even in political parties, and my own party is not immune to this.... We sometimes fight amongst ourselves in the Canadian Alliance. We see the Liberals fighting amongst themselves. The Bloc members don't fight amongst themselves very much, although we do have two byelections happening in Quebec. But the Bloc members have some very important things to say about this issue of electing chairs by secret ballot.

    So there's no point in asking for unanimous consent again, Madam Clerk, except that I see the member who had opposed it is no longer in the room and possibly now we would have unanimous consent. I'd certainly be open to some calls from the government side indicating that they are now prepared to go with unanimous consent to have a secret ballot election. So I'll just wait and see if we hear that coming up.

    But I don't see, Madam Speaker, or Madam Clerk--sorry, I get a little confused here with the procedures of the House and the procedures of this effort to form a committee. I don't see why, once again, anyone should be so against a simple secret ballot. It bears restating, Madam Clerk, that this is a democracy. And it bears restating that in fact the reasons I have made for having a secret ballot are tremendously important.

¹  (1555)  

    I'd like to point out that we take issue with this whole process, the process of the appointment. These positions, the chair and the vice-chair of the standing committee, should not be controlled by the Prime Minister. Let's be clear that this is exactly what we're fighting about in committee: who controls the committee. The committee is supposed to be the master of its own fate, the controller of its own agenda, and that is the way the committee has been attempting to work in the past and the way we'd like it to work in the future.

    The difference between the past and the future is that in fact on the government benches they have a leadership race. In the past, they all kind of agreed on a lot of stuff, but now the caucus is split between the different leadership candidates.

    So at this time the Canadian Alliance cannot accept having a chair go into the seat here elected by open vote. That would end up with us having a divided committee on agriculture, not only with the opposition parties doing their job and going after the government and the government ministers, but we would end up with majority government members of the committee going after the chair, and that is just totally untenable.

    I have to say, the previous chair we had did an excellent job, and whether that chair would get elected again is not up to me to decide individually here, but it is up to this committee to decide, and as I said, the responsibility of this committee to make that decision, free of favour and retribution or retaliation, is tremendously important.

    This agriculture committee made a report in June to the House of Commons. In that report, recommendation 14 was put forward, that there be a voluntary trial period of three years for the Canadian Wheat Board. The fine clerk who wrote that part of the report did an excellent job, and when the members of the committee sat down to deal with that, they in fact said, let's include this in the report. What has happened since then that makes this election even more important is that we have farmers sitting in jail in Lethbridge, Alberta, who in fact need to have somebody advocating on their behalf here in the House of Commons. The only place that can happen is in this committee, and this committee has to be formed. So that is very important.

    But should it just be formed willy-nilly, with whoever in charge who doesn't care about agriculture or has a separate agenda, an appointment agenda of the Prime Minister? I don't think that's a good way for this committee to go ahead, and that's why we have to have this secret ballot, because the chair, then, as I said before, would have the confidence of the members around the table, and those who voted against the chair could just quietly accept that the majority wins, because that's how democracy works. A majority wins, and even though I know in my own heart that I voted against a given nominee, I would still accept that person because the majority of my peers decided that this person is the one who is best able to chair and lead this agriculture committee in as non-partisan a way as possible.

    That leading by non-partisan means is really what is required here. The members of the committee know each other, and surely we should be able to make an intelligent voting decision as to who we know would make the best chair, who would do the most impartial, non-partisan job. Many of the nominees-to-be on the committee, both from the opposition benches and the government benches, have been on the committee before. We know each other, and so it's really important that we end up with that kind of a chair.

º  (1600)  

    I've mentioned, of course, some of the important issues that we're going to be dealing with and the requirement for that chair to speak on behalf of all of us. In fact, it's important also that the committee chair be able to put forward a farmer's perspective, a primary producer's perspective, and to stand up to other ministers in the government who are really against farmers' best interests--and I speak kind of as an example. I think I have to give an example once in a while of what I'm talking about.

    We have the case of tuberculosis in Riding Mountain National Park, where the heritage minister, who's responsible for the parks and the parks' bureaucrats, doesn't want to do anything about that, but of course for primary producers and the livestock industry this is absolutely vital.

    The way I saw committees work before when we did have a chair who was relatively impartial--and before the proroguing of Parliament we had one of those kinds of chairs--I have no doubt we would have taken up the tuberculosis issue and really done a good job of it.

    So, at a minimum, the Speaker should propose the candidates for the junior chair occupants, not the Prime Minister. As we said in the House of Commons, the chair and the vice-chair of the committees should be elected by secret ballot, and I'll give you a couple of other reasons why.

    The legislative council of the State of Victoria, down in Australia, passed the world's first secret ballot law in March 1856. It was British Columbia that enacted the Dominion's first secret ballot legislation in February 1873.

    We have to be careful not to get me going here, Madam Clerk, because when I think of the suffrage movement by those women from western Canada, who finally got the vote for women in this country...that shows it's very important that we try to move our democracy along from the terrible state it was in back in the suffrage days, to the state we are in now, where secret ballots aren't even allowed in the House of Commons, which is the parliamentary summit of democracy in this country. That is why this is so important, and we have to have a full airing of it, right here, right now, while we're trying to form this committee.

    It was British Columbia that enacted the Dominion's first secret ballot legislation, in February 1873, and the secret ballot method of voting spread to other provinces and jurisdictions. Can you imagine that, having to spread the good word, the message that in fact secret ballots are how you run a democracy that doesn't end up in a dictatorship? A form of that dictatorship has arisen in the Parliament of Canada, and that's why we have spent so much time amongst all parties talking about democracy inside the parliamentary process. The committee is also where this can happen.

    Madam Clerk, I think the speech and the points I have given are having an effect, and maybe if you were to ask once again, we could have unanimous consent to have a secret ballot election for chair, if more than one nominee is up there.

    The Clerk: Is there unanimous consent to proceed this way, by secret ballot? Agreed?

    Some hon. members: Agreed.

    Mr. Howard Hilstrom: Thank you, Madam Clerk.

    The Clerk: I will receive nominations.

    Mr. Eyking.

º  (1605)  

    Mr. Mark Eyking (Sydney—Victoria, Lib.): I would like to nominate for chair my honourable colleague, Mr. Charles Hubbard, from the lovely area of Miramichi.

    Mr. Paul Steckle (Huron—Bruce, Lib.): I second that nomination.

    The Clerk: Are there any other nominations?

    Mr. Borotsik.

    Mr. Rick Borotsik: I would move Paul Steckle.

    Mr. Ovid Jackson: He's not here to accept or reject the nomination.

    Mr. Rick Borotsik: Paul would be this one here, Ovid.

    Mr. Ovid Jackson: Sorry, I missed him.

[Translation]

    The Clerk: Are there any other nominations?

[English]

    My colleague will help me distribute the ballots. We'll put the names of the nominees on the ballot.

    Mr. Howard Hilstrom: Madam Clerk, can you tell me who seconded that nomination?

    The Clerk: It's not necessary to have a seconder.

    Mr. Howard Hilstrom: Okay, you don't have to second it.

    The Clerk: Mr. Steckle.

    Mr. Paul Steckle: I guess my point is, do I have a chance to decline?

    The Clerk: Yes, absolutely.

    Mr. Paul Steckle: I want to thank you for the nomination, but I'm going to decline.

    The Clerk: Monsieur Duplain.

[Translation]

    Mr. Claude Duplain (Portneuf, Lib.): I move that nominations for the position of Chair be closed.

    The Clerk: Your motion is out of order.

[English]

     Mr. Hilstrom.

    Mr. Howard Hilstrom: She can ask for further nominations.

    The Clerk: I have two names, Mr. Hubbard and Mr. Hilstrom.

    Mr. Howard Hilstrom: I decline the nomination, the same as Mr. Steckle does.

    The Clerk: Mr. Laliberte.

    Mr. Rick Laliberte (Churchill River, Lib.): In light of the fact that the only motion you would entertain is a motion for the election of a chair, I move that Charles Hubbard be elected as chair of the committee.

    The Clerk: Is it agreed?

    (Motion agreed to)

    The Clerk: Mr. Hubbard, would you take the chair?

    The Chair (Mr. Charles Hubbard (Miramichi, Lib.)): First of all, I would like to express my extreme gratitude to the people who elected me so secretly--Howard.

    Some hon. members: Hear, hear!

    The Chair: Again, I will try to do the best I can as your chair. It's certainly an honour to be chair of such an important committee. From the number of people who are here today, members, I can see that it's important to a lot of members in our House. I hope that we will get the same continued interest and support in our future meetings.

    With the rest of our agenda today, we have a decision to make as to whether or not we'll elect our two vice-chairs.

    It apparently has been the practice that we have elected all three at the first meeting, but the call today is apparently only for the chair. I would entertain, then, a motion from the floor as to whether or not we'll continue with the election of the two vice-chairs, that we will proceed.

    David, is that agreed?

º  (1610)  

    Mr. David Anderson (Cypress Hills—Grasslands, Canadian Alliance): With the provision that it be done by secret ballot.

    The Chair: Madame Tremblay.

[Translation]

    Mrs. Suzanne Tremblay (Rimouski-Neigette-et-la Mitis, BQ): What did the member propose?

[English]

    Mr. David Anderson: I propose that we continue with the nomination of vice-chairs--

    Mrs. Suzanne Tremblay: By secret ballot.

    Mr. David Anderson: --with the provision of a secret ballot, yes.

[Translation]

    Mrs. Suzanne Tremblay: If it's by secret ballot, then there's no problem.

    (Motion agreed to)

[English]

    The Chair: We are agreed, then, with the secret ballot. The clerk apparently will preside over that, and that permits me to vote.

    Madame Ouellette, would you proceed, then, please?

    The Clerk: Should we deal with the government or opposition vice-chair first?

[Translation]

    Which vice-chair shall we elect first? The government vice-chair, or the opposition vice-chair?

    Mrs. Suzanne Tremblay: Let's start by electing the opposition vice-chair.

    The Clerk: I have unanimous consent to proceed with the election of the government vice-chair.

    Do you have a motion for us, Mr. Duplain?

    Mr. Claude Duplain: Yes, I move that Murray Calder be elected government vice-chair.

    The Clerk: Ms. Tremblay.

    Mrs. Suzanne Tremblay: I move that Mr. Claude Duplain be elected to this position, to ensure francophone representation from Quebec in this, a bilingual country.

    The Clerk: Are there any other nominations? Then, we'll proceed as I explained to you.

[English]

    We will distribute the ballots, and you may write the name of the member you choose on the ballot. Then we will pick them up and count them.

[Translation]

    Mr. Claude Duplain: What happens if the person declines the nomination?

    The Clerk: Do you accept the nomination?

    Mr. Claude Duplain: No, I wish to decline.

    An hon. member: Pity! There won't be anyone from Quebec.

[English]

    The Clerk: The only nomination we have is for Mr. Murray Calder.

[Translation]

    Mrs. Suzanne Tremblay: How bizarre. Nominations are closed and people are taking five minutes to say they are declining the nomination. We'll never get around to voting.

    The Clerk: They have the right to decline.

[English]

    I have the motion for vice-chair. Mr. Duplain moved that Mr. Calder be elected vice-chair of the committee.

    (Motion agreed to)

    The Clerk: Would you like to proceed by secret ballot to elect the vice-chair of the opposition?

    Some hon. members: Agreed.

    Mr. Rob Merrifield (Yellowhead, Canadian Alliance): I nominate Howard Hilstrom.

    The Clerk: Mr. Calder.

    Mr. Murray Calder: I'd like to nominate Dick Proctor.

[Translation]

    The Clerk: Ms. Tremblay.

    Mrs. Suzanne Tremblay: I nominate Mr. Louis Plamondon, the permanent Quebec member on this committee.

[English]

    The Clerk: Are there any other nominations? We have Mr. Hilstrom, Mr. Proctor, and Mr. Plamondon.

    Do you wish to proceed by secret ballot?

    Some hon. members: Yes.

    The Clerk: Mr. Proctor.

    Mr. Dick Proctor (Palliser, NDP): With great thanks to my nominator, I will decline.

    The Clerk: So we have two nominations: Mr. Hilstrom and Mr. Plamondon.

    I will pass the ballots. Write down the name of the person you want.

    The ballots have been counted. Mr. Hilstrom is elected vice-chair of the committee.

º  (1615)  

[Translation]

    Mrs. Suzanne Tremblay: I move that we adjourn.

[English]

    The Clerk: Is there consent to adjourn?

    Some hon. members: Agreed.