PRHA Committee Meeting

STANDING COMMITTEE ON PROCEDURE AND HOUSE AFFAIRS

COMITÉ PERMANENT DE LA PROCÉDURE ET DES AFFAIRES DE LA CHAMBRE

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Thursday, June 3, 1999

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[English]

The Chairman (Mr. Peter Adams (Peterborough, Lib.)): Colleagues, we will begin. I've heard from the PCs that they will in fact not be here.

Our main order of business is the committee's mandate under Standing Order 108(3)(a)(iii), consideration of proposals on changes to standing orders.

Before we get to that, and in case anyone else leaves, I'd draw your attention to a letter you have that I received from the leader of the government in the House of Commons. In it he urges the committee, during our deliberations on the Canada Elections Act,

to study methods of prohibiting political contributions from boards and agencies under federal jurisdiction.

He goes on:

You will recall that in March 1999 the government released specific guidelines to Crown Corporations to forbid any kind of financial contributions to political parties. Recent information from Elections Canada revealed that certain federal boards and agencies had also made contributions to political parties. Hence, I request that your committee address the issue of prohibiting these contributions as part of the review of the Elections Act.

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It's my understanding that the act will be introduced for first reading on Monday. It's my understanding that the intent is that after second reading, three hours of debate, it will be referred directly to this committee.

I have some sense that the House of Commons is going to finish earlier rather than later, but if it does go until the final date this year, we will be considering it, and I assume then we'd be considering this matter raised by the leader of the government in the House of Commons.

Does anyone have any comments on that?

[Translation]

Yes, Mr. Bergeron.

Mr. Stéphane Bergeron (Verchères—Les-Patriotes, BQ): I would think that when a bill is referred to a committee, it becomes a priority, so to speak, on that committee's agenda. However, that's not always the case because sometimes, certain private members' bills are referred to a committee and never make it any further. Therefore, while I do have some reservations, I can understand that should the bill be referred to the committee, it could become a priority item on its agenda. However, I have a problem with the minister stating the following:

[English]

...I request that your committee address the issue of prohibiting these contributions as part of the review of the Elections Act.

[Translation]

By virtue of what authority can the minister compel us to do want he would like us to do?

[English]

The Chairman: I think the word “request” means “ask”, so he's asking the committee to do it. The committee can refuse if it wishes.

Any other comments? Yes, Marlene Catterall.

Ms. Marlene Catterall (Ottawa West—Nepean, Lib.): I should point out, on the same subject, that there is a private member's bill before the House—I think it's Madame Guay's private member's bill—on amendments to the Elections Act related to the participation of women in the political process.

Mr. Stéphane Bergeron: [Editor's Note: Inaudible]

Ms. Marlene Catterall: Okay. Merci.

I think that is also something the committee may want to give some consideration to, specifically the recommendations of the Lortie commission. Many of them were not related to the act itself but to the roles of parties, but there were several that were in fact related to the act. I think in preparation for this we might want to have a summary of those. In fact, I think the Lortie commission went as far as to prepare legislative amendments on many of its recommendations, and I'd certainly like us to consider those.

The Chairman: Stéphane Bergeron.

[Translation]

Mr. Stéphane Bergeron: I'm not sure what the procedure is, but I agree that we should keep this suggestion in mind. Unless I'm mistaken, I don't believe that Ms. St-Hilaire's bill has yet been drawn or deemed votable or not. In fact, it's not even on the House Order Paper because it hasn't yet been selected. I think it's fair to say that.

However, continuing in the same vein, there is a bill that was randomly drawn and that is not before the House. Mr. Lavigne's bill calls for the photographs of candidates with identical names to appear on ballots. I don't believe that this bill will be deemed votable, but I do believe it is currently before the House.

I don't know whether we should consider this bill at the same time, but since it is not a votable item, I won't get too far in any event.

[English]

The Chairman: The first hour of Raymond Lavigne's bill is in fact later today, and it's a question of having photographs on the ballots.

I would say, colleagues, and I mention this simply because I received it as formal correspondence, that when the committee gets to the Canada Elections Act, I think there's a remarkably broad base of information for the committee to consider that particular legislation. You recall we had the very unusual but generalized discussion in which almost everything was at least mentioned, and we have the report available for the committee for that.

We separated out administrative and technical items. We have received a report on that from Elections Canada. Remember we recommended that the chief electoral officer revive his advisory committee. They have worked; we have received those recommendations.

In addition to the comments today, and the House leader's letter that we have before us, there's a great deal of information out there, I think, which is an excellent basis for consideration of the Canada Elections Act.

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I was mentioning it today simply because it is going to be introduced on Monday. If the House does go two or three more weeks, we will be facing it soon, but my sense is that unless we work through the summer, it's mainly a fall project. I was trying to get this on the record, and we now have your points on the record, Stéphane, and we have Marlene's.

If we could then proceed to the main item of business, which is our review of the standing orders....

Stéphane Bergeron.

[Translation]

Mr. Stéphane Bergeron: Could you clarify something for me, Mr. Chairman? I want to be certain that I understand your position. If the bill is referred to committee, we will consider it, as is our duty. Will we continue to look at the proposed legislation once the House rises or will we adjourn our proceedings at the same time as the House does?

Secondly, if the bill is not referred to committee, does that mean that we won't be considering it until September?

[English]

The Chairman: I don't know the answer to some of those things. My present sense is that the realities are that it will be introduced for first reading and then will be considered again in the fall. That's my present sense.

As chair of the committee, I don't really know when the House is going to finish. Therefore, I don't really know whether or not we will receive the bill this session. But my sense is the House is going to finish before we receive the bill; therefore it will be considered in the fall.

Mr. Stéphane Bergeron: Okay.

The Chairman: If we can proceed to the standing orders, I think everyone has the sheet we had the last time, which is dated May 20. It was the chart we were considering. The chart looks like this. That's where we were the last time. Do you remember? It's called “House of Commons Standing Orders Review: Concerns and Proposed Amendments”.

[Translation]

Mr. Stéphane Bergeron: Do you have additional copies?

[English]

The Chairman: We have copies over here. Could we have copies for Mr. Bergeron and the others, please?

This is the document we were considering the last time. We had some discussion based around that document and there were some comments. Stéphane and others made comments.

In addition to that we now have a number of other documents with us. Let me do them in order: November 4, 1998, “Concerns and Suggestions Regarding the Standing Orders”; November 5, 1998, “Standing Order 51 Debate: Summary”, and you remember we had the full-day debate on the standing orders, which is this one; thirdly, because of a specific question, April 6, 1999, we have “Rules for Joint Committees: Status Report as of April 1, 1999”.

Colleagues, I'm in your hands here, but again, I would point out to you that it seems to me the session is coming to an end. The committee has the responsibility for the standing orders. My sense is that in this session we do not have many more meetings. From the discussion last time I had a very real feeling that in many cases if we change one part of the standing orders, it affects the rest. In other words, it's not something that can be done piecemeal, although there were two or three points made, I think, that we could deal with individually and might be very useful. But if we start dealing with the thing in general at this point in time, I have a feeling we will not have enough meetings to finish what we start. So I'm in your hands.

Mr. John Solomon (Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, NDP): I move that we adjourn.

The Chairman: John Solomon moves that we adjourn. I see people nodding.

[Translation]

Mr. Stéphane Bergeron: Yes.

[English]

The Chairman: Then we'll get comments.

I want to thank Jamie for taking the time to do this and for taking the time to produce this material, which does show that we have a lot of background again for the committee to proceed now in a study of the standing orders.

John Solomon and Lynn Myers.

Mr. John Solomon: I was not being facetious when I suggested perhaps we adjourn.

What I would like to propose to the committee is that we take this information back to our caucuses, have a look at it over the summer, and come back in the fall with recommendations from some of our caucus colleagues on these particular issues.

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The reason I say that is because I don't have a monopoly on knowing all the standing orders and other rules and procedures of the House of Commons. I have some experience, but I wouldn't mind bouncing some of these things off my colleagues, Bill Blaikie, Nelson Riis, Svend Robinson, and so on, to see what they think of these issues. That's why I don't want to make any decisions today on these particular matters.

The Chairman: Lynn Myers, Randy White, Marlene Catterall, and Chuck Strahl.

Mr. Lynn Myers (Waterloo—Wellington, Lib.): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I want to echo first of all what you said about Mr. Robertson and the great work he's done in trying to give us a road map here in terms of the kinds of rules that are necessary for us to look at and study and think about. I agree with my colleague opposite, Mr. Solomon. I think there's a great deal of merit to moving on and throughout the summer break thinking about these matters. While you may talk about input from caucus and other things, that's something that maybe we on this side of the table want to think about too. I think there's a great deal of thinking that we need to do, because this is a very complex subject, a very complicated area. It seems to me that we need the time taken, in fairness to the whole process, to ensure that what we get at the end of the day is something we can all live with, and hopefully there would be a strong consensus arising as a result of the discussions we would have. But to do that now I think would be rushing the process, and I think ultimately would be detrimental to whatever decisions we would be looking at and taking at the end of the day.

I have to say Mr. Solomon makes a great deal of sense, and certainly it's something that I think we should take seriously, and that would be my recommendation as well.

The Chairman: Randy White, Marlene Catterall, and Chuck Strahl.

Mr. Randy White (Langley—Abbotsford, Ref.): I'll be nice and calm and cool about this. I get a kick out of this organization called the House of Commons when you want to get something done. We had a standing order review in this committee in 1994. Not a whole bunch happened then. It took a long time to study it. We've had these before this committee for, what, over a year, isn't it? It's around that anyway. Most people know that some of the standing orders need to be changed. Now we're saying “Well, I don't know enough about it”, or “I'll check with my colleagues”, or “It's a real complex thing we're doing, so we should study it and maybe we should pass it to the cabinet to see if they want to change things in the House of Commons”.

I look back on this committee and recall the discussion on the elections issues, on the Elections Act, some time ago when we reviewed all of the composite parts of the Elections Act at that time. Unless there was total consensus, the issue didn't go forward. Not much happened there. I remember the unanimous consent we had on the televised committees; nothing happened with that. That's really gone nowhere.

So really, standing order changes...I don't hold much of an optimistic point of view that things are going to go anywhere on this. I think quite frankly it's a bit of a joke to be sitting here and pretending it will. I guess I can say do what you want with it because the end result will be very little anyway. It's just yet another disappointment in how this committee and many other committees in the House of Commons don't work. That's all I have to say about it.

The Chairman: Marlene Catterall.

Ms. Marlene Catterall: That's very discouraging, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Lynn Myers: Very cynical.

Ms. Marlene Catterall: I guess I do agree with John to some extent. Parliamentarians rule as to how they want Parliament to work for them or not work for them. I do think it deserves some fairly serious consideration. I also think it is something that should, as much as possible, be developed by consensus. So that's a problem, taking some time for discussion with our various caucuses. Maybe some caucuses have already done that, but I think each caucus should have the opportunity to consider the suggestions made by others as well. I also think some of these are issues that should be discussed among the House leaders, and that could certainly happen before this committee has to deal with them.

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There are two areas, though, that I don't think necessarily fall into the same category, and one is it's clear to me that there are a number of redundancies that have developed in the standing orders over the years. One thing is amended and the other amendments are not made, or the situation has changed. It seems to me it might be worthwhile for Jamie, over the summer, to look at what are those redundancies that don't really belong there anymore.

The second one, which I think we all agreed on, is gender neutralizing the language of the standing orders, and this is a complex area. Stéphane suggested, for instance, that the legislature of Quebec has done a fair bit of work on this. There may be others as well. It's far more complex in French than it is in English. So I'd like to see what we can find out over the summer about how other jurisdictions have addressed the gender neutralization in French particularly. I think we have it fairly well down in English, in writing our own laws. I'm not sure we've got it as good in French, frankly.

The Chairman: So that's redundancies and gender neutrality. We can come back to that.

Chuck Strahl.

Mr. Chuck Strahl (Fraser Valley, Ref.): I share some of Randy's frustration in that the speeches many of us gave on this subject were back in April 1998. We put our minds to it a year and some ago. Either we have forgotten what we said then or else.... I don't know. It is a little frustrating.

Even something as simple.... For example, at the House leaders' meeting the other day, on private members' motions, there's an assumption that private members' bills are coming back after prorogation at the same stage they went into prorogation, but private members' motions aren't listed under there.

So when there's an agreement, everybody understands that that should be done; it's just an oversight, I think. Could we do even something, just to say let's fix that private members' motions thing so that it's in the standing orders? That would be nice to do, and we could have something.

That's a small thing, I realize, but it does seem as though parliaments go by and nothing happens. I don't know why it has to be.... I don't mind consulting. I can consult with the caucus, but the speeches were all made a year and two months ago. I don't know. Either people didn't consult then or they had no intention of changing them anyway.

Anyway, I'm prepared not to spend any more time. So let's go.

The Chairman: John Solomon.

Mr. John Solomon: My intent was not to kill this. My intent was to try to have a return visit to the issues that we can make decisions on.

For example, perhaps we could have a meeting in August; spend a day in August looking and making some decisions to make recommendations to the government so that when the House resumes we can table these recommendations. The problem with that is if there's a prorogation, all of this has to be resurrected somehow. I'm not sure if the standing order provides that we table a document that hasn't been tabled that was prepared in a previous parliament.

Mr. Chuck Strahl: Resurrection is a theological thing more than a standing order, I think.

Mr. John Solomon: Yes, but these are administrative things that make our work more efficient and more logical. I think they are things we have to continue to review and really modernize as quickly as possible.

I don't disagree with Randy or Chuck. I agree that we have to get these changes made. Perhaps what we're looking for is our researcher to give us some documentation in late July or early August, outlining something that says, here are some standing orders that are generally agreed upon; here are some that there is some contention with; and here are some that need additional work. Have a visit for a day and discuss these things and make some decisions on them.

That's what I was getting at. I didn't mean that we deflect this hard work into nothing, but we should culminate our study on this and have a report for the fall session. We're not going to have one for next week, I don't think.

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The Chairman: No.

My introductory remarks were to the effect of the practicalities of doing it now, which I think is what most members were addressing. I don't want to be overly defensive, because we rarely missed a meeting, but in this particular committee it seems to me we have things referred to us that have to do with a variety of things, and they tend to appear to be immediate at the time. So we've rarely missed a meeting.

Can we pick up Marlene's point about the redundancies and gender neutralization? Jamie and Carol, is that something that can be done?

Would the committee agree that we direct the clerk and the researcher to do that?

Some hon. members: Agreed.

The Chairman: Okay, we'll do that.

I have a motion to adjourn.

Mr. John Solomon: Mr. Chairman, can we schedule tentatively something in August pending the research being done? Is that possible to do?

Mr. John Richardson (Perth—Middlesex, Lib.): I think we could suggest a date. John, I don't know when your party has its summer caucus, or Stéphane with the Bloc, but if we're going to do it, if we could put it on at either the beginning or the end of that so that we wouldn't be coming all the way down here for two trips.... We could satisfy our own summer caucus and then probably get together here, as like-minded...having had a chance to review it ourselves in more depth, I guess.

I know we all like to have a knee-jerk and have things fixed tomorrow, but that isn't the way the House of Commons works. You said the right thing when you said you were going to go back and consult with people in your own party, to each caucus and maybe other people. I think it's wise that we do that. I really do.

The Chairman: Lynn Myers.

Mr. Lynn Myers: Mr. Chairman, I think as chair, and with the clerk and so on, you will have to canvass the members. I don't know about you, but my summer schedule is quite tight. I guess at some point you'll have to see whether or not there is a meeting of the minds in terms of times and such. I would find it personally very difficult, and I think we'd have to tread very cautiously. Perhaps some sort of quick informal survey can be made of members' availability throughout the summer, August or whatever, but I can tell you right now that I suspect I will not be able to be here because I've made plans accordingly, based on a lot of pre-commitments. So I'm saying you have to be very careful.

The Chairman: I'd be quite willing to look into the feasibility.... My concern, John, is rather different. Whatever one says about it, if you look at the documentation we have received, this is a complicated body of information, and I'm not convinced that appearing cold, even if we took a whole day, is the best way of dealing with it. That's why, in effect, we have not done it. You need a block of time when the members of the committee can get their heads around it again, and then they can have two or three meetings of briefings, and then you have a meeting, perhaps a full-day meeting or some evening meetings, at which you finally say, yes, here we are, this is what we're going to do with the standing orders.

My difficulty with some time during the summer will be that we'll all have gone about our various affairs and our level of knowledge will be lower than it otherwise would be. But I'd be quite willing to circulate to members...and I will do that.

I would suggest, on that note, unless anyone else has any other business—we have made the direction with respect to redundancies and gender neutralization, which I think is essentially a technical matter, which means the committee, when it resumes, can deal with that very quickly, and something will have been done.

We adjourn to the call of the chair.