[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]
Thursday, November 7, 1996
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[English]
The Chair: I'd like to call the meeting to order.
Yesterday, as you know, we did not have a recording when Mr. Ménard and Ms Meredith were presenting, but Jamie took very detailed notes. Those will be typed up, printed and made available to us.
Today we do have a recording, so it's business as usual.
Mr. Gallaway is here to present, and Mr. Bryden was asked if he could be deferred until today.
Do you have enough time that you can sit through Mr. Gallaway's presentation, Mr. Bryden?
Mr. John Bryden, MP (Hamilton - Wentworth): If he won't be long, I'll stay through. I'm interested in what he says anyway, but I'm going to plug my ears.
The Chair: You're so keen and interested.
Okay, Mr. Gallaway, dazzle us.
Mr. Roger Gallaway, MP (Sarnia - Lambton): Thank you, Madam Chair, for inviting me here today to address you on your study of private members' ballot items.
I believe that by making improvements to our system of private members' business we can increase the relevance of Parliament as an institution in the eye of the voting public. As members of Parliament we're not always held in the highest esteem by the electorate, and I'm not here to theorize as to why this is the case.
I'd like to suggest that one reason why MPs don't rate highly in public opinion polls in terms of respect is the fact that most of us toil away in relative obscurity. It's not very often that the individual member captures the spotlight for doing something positive as a ``legislator''.
The Chair: Or becomes the darling of the cable companies...
Mr. Gallaway: When it does happen, such as when a private member's initiative clears a major hurdle in the House or in committee, there's a sudden realization that individual MPs can actually accomplish something in Ottawa. This perception benefits not only the sponsor of the bill or the motion on those rare occasions, but it also benefits Parliament itself as an institution.
Canadians elect their MPs and send them to Ottawa not just to represent their views, but also to hopefully have some impact while they're in office. One way to accomplish this task, obviously, is to act as a legislator.
For most of us who are not part of the cabinet, private members' business is our only avenue or opportunity to live up to this expectation.
As a member who was fortunate enough to have a private member's bill recently passed by the House, I can assure you it's not simple to legislate from the backbench, and most of us here know that. There is no shortage of procedural hoops and hurdles you have to go through to get a private member's bill on the road. There's no shortage, might I add, of political hoops that you must go through.
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That's why I'm here today, to urge members of this committee to remove just one of those obstacles by making all private members' bills votable. Your committee could still determine whether or not a bill is qualified to proceed. Once approved, I don't see any reason why it should not move to the House as a votable item.
I think to do otherwise is simply a waste of time and a waste of the limited resources available to members of Parliament in the drafting and the preparation of such bills. I really want to underline the time element involved. Whether a bill is votable or not votable at the moment is so inordinate that to deem a bill non-votable just isn't fair.
I realize that a change in the rules would necessitate other changes to accommodate the increase in debating time required if all the bills were votable. Perhaps the list of items in the order of precedence could be reduced to 20 from 30. That's something the procedural experts can ponder and come up with a solution for.
I'd like to briefly comment on a suggestion made by the Clerk of the House, Mr. Marleau, when he came before this committee on October 29. As I understand his proposal, private members' bills could be replaced by motions to have a committee draft and report a bill. I should point out that this already exists under Standing Order 68(4)(b). In fact, I've tabled one that's numbered M-271. It involved a consumer advocacy board for bank customers, pursuant to this very order. It's not new. It was the ideal legislative vehicle for the concept I had for M-271, but I wouldn't want to lose the option of tabling a private member's bill directly in the House.
In part, when you start dealing with motions, the wording can be interpreted or construed in such a way by committees and others that sometimes they're more a statement of intent or principle, as opposed to the very specific wording you can devise with a bill.
On the disposition of private members' bills at committee stage, after second reading, these bills should be dealt with in a timely fashion.
Committees, as we hear in the House all the time, are obviously masters of their own destiny. For the most part, we're also told that committees are free to develop their own procedures and schedules. However, we also know that certain mechanisms exist to prioritize government bills before a committee.
I'd like to recommend that a committee develop a similar mechanism for dealing with private members' bills. This could be done at the beginning of each session, which is sometimes twice a year. Such a mechanism or policy would establish that the committee would deal not only with government business in a timely fashion, but also with private members' bills in a similar fashion.
In this regard I tabled a motion in the justice committee some time ago that passed. It requires the justice committee to review, on a monthly basis, all private members' business, which I refer to as being in the in-basket of that committee.
It's been referred to the committee. During the first meeting of the month while the House is in session, the committee actually has that before it on the agenda. We allow the sponsor to come to the committee and speak to the members directly for five minutes on why it should be done immediately.
The committee in turn responds to that sponsor of the bill. It keeps in the minds of all the committee members that we have private member's business before us in the in-basket, although we're not necessarily dealing with it. It forces us to somehow work this private member's business into the schedule of that committee.
I've been on the justice committee for approximately two years. In the first session there were a number of private members' bills that died. They were in the in-basket. For most of the committee members, unless you were on the steering committee, you weren't aware they had been referred to the committee. You also had no daily or monthly reminder that it was in fact there.
It's not fair. It's absolutely wrong, not from a political point of view, because these things should be regarded as apolitical...in terms of the individual standing committees, they can in fact be the masters of their own procedure. And in this way they're forced to deal with it. Otherwise, as we've heard, you're just saying that private members' business is somehow secondary or perhaps tertiary to government business.
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That's all I have to say. Thank you for having me here. I'd be pleased to answer any questions.
The Chair: Mr. Gallaway, while it's fresh in my mind I want to ask you a couple of quick questions. Val Meredith was here yesterday. She has the same concern, that when it goes to committee sometimes it just disappears and we don't know it's there. She suggested we put in a six-month limit, because once it passes in the House, it is no longer a private members' bill but a House bill -
Mr. Gallaway: That's correct.
The Chair: - and should have the same weight as a government bill, in her opinion. She is reasonable in that she suggests there are urgent government bills that may take precedence. But if at the end of six months it hasn't been dealt with, she felt there should be a report back to the House as to why it hasn't been dealt with.
Your concept of making members aware of pending bills by having this agenda every month seems a good way of balancing what she suggested and making it work. Do you have any other comments on how we could make sure each committee functions that way? Justice functions that way right now, but I don't know of any other committees that do.
Mr. Gallaway: It probably has more to do with the realization by members that they can do this. The idea of the six-month cap or limitation period is fine, but six months in this place can mean the difference between having your bill considered, perhaps, or the House proroguing, as we have seen more recently.
I'm not opposed to the six-month limitation period, but at the same time I prefer the one-month review period. If members are aware of the bill, that it's before the committee or should be before the committee, knowing that a break may be coming, they may want to deal with it.
The corollary to all of this - this is just my experience on the justice committee - is that in the first session we really didn't do any private members' business, although there was considerable volume there. We were often told we're not going to do that because the government is bringing in legislation on this topic in the near future.
Although I understand that committees are supposed to give priority to government business, I don't think private members' business should be pulled or set aside simply because some bureaucrat or some minister says we're going to deal with this topic with our own legislation. That is a nice way of derailing or not giving priority to private members' business.
I think those are all things that can be handled by the committee if the committee wishes to do so. That's the problem; some committees actually have a lot of time, but just don't want to deal with private members' business.
The Chair: The other thing you brought up, and this is my job as chairman of this committee - we're non-partisan. We're made up of all three main parties. Our recommendations are going to hit a brick wall too if we don't sweeten them somehow. Unless we make some element of every votable bill attractive to the powers that be, I'm afraid we won't get our bill through either, or our recommendations.
One of the things we looked at... Out of the mouth of Mr. Marleau came jewels. Right now it's $1.5 million a year to draft all these bills - every half-baked idea that comes out of an MP's head, and I'm suggesting that some are more half-baked than others. If we could somehow come up with a third category... I know a motion is one concept. Some day in the future we may think this is great, boom, we pass it and it's cool. But a bill is far more precise. It deals with a piece of legislation or whatever.
If there was some middle ground where a bill could be a draft bill, not finely tuned but the four corners are laid out - I think Mr. Marleau put it that way - and it's a bona fide bill... It will affect legislation; it will be very precisely worded, but on first presentation through this committee and the first hour in the House, it's not as finely drafted as what its final position will be.
I don't agree that it should go to a committee to be finely drafted. I think it's up to the private member who's mothering that bill to get it through in the shape they want.
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But if the concept gets through the House on first reading, with no guarantee - I may vote for it on that second reading and not vote for it when I see the final draft because I don't like the translation or whatever - if we would at least be able to propose to the powers that be that they're going to save $500,000 a year, our chances of getting our recommendation through are much better. I'm playing politics here, but of a more individual nature.
As a lawyer and someone who's very particular about drafting something like a bill, is there some way we could come up with a middle ground recommendation saying motions go the way they are? A preliminary or draft bill doesn't take all the hours of the legislating lawyers. It comes through in pretty good shape, but 50% of the time is devoted to it. Then when it's passed in the House, you get the full benefit of the legal department to finely tune it to your specifications before it goes any further. Could you accept that as a compromise?
Mr. Gallaway: I don't think so -
The Chair: Roger, you just wrecked it.
Mr. Gallaway: - simply because from what you've said - if I understand the premise of this - part or all of it is motivated by the fact that the private member's office costs $1.5 million to operate.
I mean, $1.5 million in this place -
The Chair: It is not a lot of money.
Mr. Gallaway: If you're going to start operating based on the fact that we have to cut one-third out of the cost of this office, and at the same time you're espousing the principle that private members' business is important or in some way should be elevated in importance, then what are you doing...? I'm not saying you have to pump more money into the private member's office, but I don't think you're doing the office of member of Parliament, of whatever political stripe, any service by saying we have to cut costs in this office.
On the Hill, $500,000 is nothing when it pertains to legislation and the dignity and importance of the role of the member of Parliament. I think something is seriously wrong here if that's the motivating factor - simply to cut some money out of the way -
The Chair: Don't misinterpret; the object of this committee was not to save money. Politicians are never here to save money. What I was looking for was something to hang our hats on - I'm trying to get a rise out of Jack; he's been very quiet - to sweeten the proposal so that all those sage and august people who pull on their beards and sit there and say, young lady, you've got a good idea... What we're looking for is a way to dress it up.
I trust your opinion, actually. If you believe that would not be part of making all the bills votable, I would accept that opinion. That's why I'm asking you. I'm not advocating one or the other; I'm just suggesting it might be a way we could guild the lily a bit, so that when they get it they say there is something here for us too.
Thanks, Roger. You've answered that question.
Mr. Gallaway: Thank you.
Are there any other questions?
[Translation]
Mr. Langlois (Bellechasse): Thank you, Madam Chair. Mr. Gallaway, your presentation has been as clear as water from the rock, like my grandfather used to say. I guess you would say in English it has been a crystal-clear presentation.
I have witnessed the repeated efforts of the Committee on Justice and Legal Affairs to deal with private members' bills in a timely manner without rushing it, and I have seen the results you got. That committee may not be the most eager as far as reforms are concerned, and you deserve praise for your success.
I think we could use this as a reference for the guidelines we could prepare here, and House rules of the House for all committees providing that they prioritize private members' bills. After that, committees could report to the House, which would make a decision, ultimately.
As I mentioned yesterday to one of my colleagues, it is really too bad that a bill that has been passed on second reading... Whether we agree with it or not, when a bill has been passed by the House and referred to a committee, it is too bad that some people refuse to consider it or refuse to report it to the House after they have considered it because they have decided it should not go through. They should at least report to the House what has happened.
First of all, it seems to me this is a matter of principle. The bill is the House's property, and the whole House should ultimately make a decision on the bill.
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Secondly, what I get from your presentation and from what Mr. Ménard said yesterday, is that if we are to have a good bill in the legal sense, statements of intention are not good enough.
It would have been impossible for you to have your bill on negative billing passed, had you relied on a general proposition. There would have been one more hurdle to clear. In preparing your bill - we and two witnesses discussed this yesterday - you probably had to examine all the whys and wherefores of your ultimate goal, which is to prevent the practice of negative billing by cable companies. You probably had to go through a whole process and examine with the legislative counsel the obstacles you had to steer clear of in order to keep on track.
I am not sure you could have succeeded the same way, had you simply said you wanted to prohibit negative billing by cable companies. I can see your position clearly on this, and witnesses of three different political parties say exactly the same thing.
If you feel like expressing your views on this, I will ask you a question with the kind permission of the Chair.
As a member, I opposed your bill on negative billing, but now that it has been passed and has been sent to the Senate, this bill, as I said yesterday, is the bill of the whole House and the efforts made by a third party who is obviously paid by a government agency to lobby the Senate are clearly unacceptable and warrant an examination by the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs.
I would like to know your position on this. What is your feeling on what is happening now, after you went through the whole process of preparing and polishing your bill to make it as acceptable as possible, of doing all this political lobbying with your colleagues, of making it a votable item, having it passed on second reading, referred to committee, and passed on third reading after report stage? As a member of Parliament, I would like to know what it feels like for someone who has been at the forefront. I would like to understand.
[English]
Mr. Gallaway: I'll talk to your comment about reporting bills to the House, your first point. I must confess, and I say this with a slight bit of embarrassment, that with respect to Mrs. Jennings' bill, the grandparents rights bill, and Mr. Nunziata's bill concerning section 745 - both of those were dealt with in the justice committee, and in both cases I was the one who moved that they not be reported to the House.
I'm not a procedural expert, but the clerk recommended... The first time we consideredMrs. Jennings' bill, because it had been defeated in all aspects, on every line, the only procedural route we had was to move to not report it to the House. So if he's correct, and I have to assume he is, then the rules should be changed to ensure that even if a bill is defeated in every aspect, the fact that it has been defeated must be reported to the House.
One member who's been here for quite some time told me the clerk was wrong. I don't know what the answer is, but these people are there to give us advice and that was the advice given to the committee.
I happened to move it the first time. The second time I moved it because I was the only member of the committee who was there the first time. So on that point -
[Translation]
Mr. Langlois: Mr. Gallaway, I will interject, if I may. There are two things. First, the clerk told us a committee member can move the reinstatement of all clauses at report stage if they have all been defeated in committee. That tends to confirm what you said. Secondly, I will have to read later on the transcript of your answer, because I have to leave to table a bill myself right now. So, I will be reading the transcript of this meeting.
[English]
Mr. Gallaway: Fine.
Secondly -
The Chair: I'd like you to answer the question even though Mr. Langlois is gone.
Mr. Gallaway: All right.
The second part of Mr. Langlois's question had to do with what he characterized as outside interference when a bill is being studied by either the House or the Senate. Obviously there are lobbyists up here, and there's nothing we're ever going to do about that.
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In this particular case he is referring to the apparent intervention of a commissioner of the CRTC while the bill is before the Senate. In other words, if I could characterize it as being the deputy chair of the CRTC...he was called by a senator, and he met with this particular senator and gave him advice on a bill that is before the Senate.
My position has been that the bureaucrats - those in the employ of the government who are in administrative positions - cannot in private give advice to members of the House or of the Senate.
Mr. Bryden: Excuse me. I'm going to go out and help them with the quorum, because they're obviously having trouble getting a quorum. I'll be right back.
The Chair: Okay.
Mr. Gallaway: I don't know how you prevent that. The problem in this particular case is that the individual is an Order in Council appointment, which is often the case around here - that's not a criticism - and the question is, who do you complain to? An Order in Council...it is a Privy Council appointment, and you don't go and complain to the Clerk of the Privy Council. The minister in this case is saying that in fact it's not her responsibility. But in this particular case, the agency - the CRTC - does not reply or report to the House.
I think this is the case of a commissioner who sits on a quasi-judicial body who has made a big mistake. He doesn't know what he's doing.
The Chair: Thank you, Roger.
Mr. Frazer.
Mr. Frazer (Saanich - Gulf Islands): Thank you, Madam Chair.
I have four things I want to cover, but I don't think they'll take a long time.
The Chair: When Mr. Bryden comes back, I'd like to make sure we give him at least twenty minutes, so if you could do this in ten, that would be perfect.
Mr. Frazer: I promise you I won't be long.
First of all, I wanted to congratulate you on your move to have the committee review private members' bills each month. I think that's a super idea. What I found surprising was that in fact the committee members weren't advised when a bill was referred to the committee.
I suppose if we were tracking all the legislation as members, we would know that a bill was referred to committee. But it strikes me that it wouldn't be too much to ask that the clerk of the committee inform each member that this bill has been given to the committee to consider. Would you agree with that?
Mr. Gallaway: Oh, absolutely. I think that's an excellent idea.
Mr. Frazer: You mention government legislation to avoid dealing with a private member's bill. I wonder here - there's the vague idea that there is government legislation coming. Do you think it would be appropriate to say, well, if you have legislation coming, what is the number of the bill and when can we expect to see it? Would that be a reasonable thing? I realize the government obviously has a lot of authority here, but would it be too much to ask that they be asked to say what it is and when it will appear?
Mr. Gallaway: I think that's a reasonable question, but in any event, at least in my experience, the government doesn't have a bill. They may have one drafted somewhere, but no one's ever seen it. But that is often used as an excuse to not consider a particular private member's bill.
Mr. Frazer: Right.
Mr. Gallaway: I think as a statement of principle - and I don't know how you reduce this to a rule or a regulation - the fact that the government may have legislation contemplated or drafted should not be used as a bar to considering private members' business.
Mr. Frazer: Yet it is amongst the items in our 13 criteria.
Mr. Gallaway: Yes.
The Chair: We can change that, Mr. Frazer. We have that power in this committee to change that criteria.
Mr. Frazer: Exactly. I'm wondering if it would then be appropriate to put a time limit and say, all right, government, if you've got a bill coming, or legislation that's going to carry with this, would you present it within, say, four months? Would that be reasonable?
Mr. Gallaway: Yes.
Mr. Frazer: My last point is, you mentioned in your presentation, referring to prioritizing government bills before a committee, ``I would recommend that each committee develop a similar mechanism for dealing with private members bills.''
Can you amplify as to how that could be done?
Mr. Gallaway: What I was referring to was that each committee could technically have the same mechanism as the justice committee does. As I understand it - I'm like everyone else, as we all arrived on more or less the same date - the objective of committees is to, first, deal with government business referred to it, and second, deal with the business of private members.
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I don't know where that comes from, whether that is a tradition of Parliament in parliamentary committees or if in fact it is written in a rule somewhere so that you can actually find the written authority for doing that. We've heard ministers, both in this Parliament and previous Parliaments, espouse the fact that committees are masters of their own destiny and certainly their own procedure. Then if we as individuals - I referred to this earlier - regardless of party, have any belief in, first, the dignity of the office of a member of Parliament, and second, the importance of private members' business, it behoves us in committee to in fact set up a rule or mechanism so that when private members' business arises, everyone is aware of it and there's some way of dealing with it in a timely fashion.
We all know it doesn't have to be dealt with on the day it's referred or within a month of referral, because you may be engaged in something else in that committee at the time, but at least if you have some way of dealing with it in a timely fashion, you are saying to those persons who went to a lot of work to get it to that stage that you believe in what they're doing. You may not agree with the bill, but you believe in what they're doing and in the office of member of Parliament. Also, you're going to deal with each of them as a legislator, not just somebody who has concocted an idea.
Mr. Frazer: Ms Meredith, in fact, expressed the opinion yesterday that bills should arrive in order and be dealt with in order. She did, however, accept the fact that if a government had a priority bill that for obvious reasons should be pushed ahead, she would accept that. But basically, she said that bills should be dealt with in the order they come to the committee.
Would you subscribe to that?
Mr. Gallaway: I don't think so. I don't think you can tie the committee up to the point at which you must deal with things as one, two, three, four and five.
Mr. Frazer: Then I'll go back to this: how do you prioritize private members' bills?
Mr. Gallaway: I think that's for the committee to decide.
You get into these situations. Our committee meets five times a week, sometimes more. They're meeting right now.
We will have a bill that we can do in two days, so we'll slot it in and do it then. We may have another bill that will take six weeks. Once we get engaged in that, it's a question of juggling the time of the committee and juggling witnesses.
So I think to say that you must consider them in the order of the priority they come in...
You may not be able to get a witness in. Does that stop the work of the committee? No, you can't do it that way.
Mr. Frazer: I would agree with that, I guess.
I guess, though, that a lot of this really depends on the committee. Of course, in our committee, we're very fortunate because we have a super chair and our clerk never makes a mistake.
Mr. Gallaway: I know both individuals, and I totally agree with you.
Mr. Frazer: Thank you, Madam Chair.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Frazer. I'm sure there's at least one person out there who doesn't agree with you.
Thank you, Roger. As always, it's very educational.
Mr. Gallaway: Thank you. Nice to see you.
The Chair: Nice to see you drop by.
Mr. Bryden, this is your moment.
As Mr. Langlois mentioned, he will - he's very meticulous - read whatever your presentation is, and he probably will pop back in before the end.
Mr. Bryden: First of all, I agree with what Mr. Gallaway was saying about the importance of your deliberations on private members' business for basically the reasons he puts forward.
May I say at the outset that I'm a great believer in party democracy. I think the party democracy system we have here is a much more efficient - it's at least much more honest - parliamentary process than what you have in the United States, where individual congressmen have a great deal more latitude. Party discipline enables MPs to resist the heavy-duty lobbying that often comes in the United States.
That being said, the credibility of MPs has suffered in the last two decades because of the absolute imposition of party discipline, particularly when you have egocentric prime ministers. I would say that Mr. Mulroney and Mr. Trudeau fall into that category. So to give private members' business credibility is an important endeavour.
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I find myself disagreeing quite emphatically with the idea of making all private members' bills votable. What would happen then, in my mind, is that you'd flood the system with private members' legislation that would be difficult to handle. You would get the good with the bad. I think you would debase the coinage, shall we say? You would lose credibility in terms of the good material that's coming through, as opposed to the material that's just not thought out very well.
Where I would make the first screening step with respect to private members' bills would be on the question of whether they would prompt new expenditure. I believe in the party democracy system and that we have to give the government the right to introduce legislation that creates new expenditure.
This is why there is a budget motion every year. The people of Canada, through their Parliament, give spending power to the government, which it needs to enact new legislation. So I think the first stage in determining whether a bill should be votable or not should be whether it creates new expenditure.
That might seem to you to create quite a substantial barrier to the type of new legislation that might come from private members, but I would submit to you that it actually still leaves enormous opportunities for private members to introduce valuable legislation that hopefully can go all the way through. I don't think it's sufficient to have it come before the House, be debated, and be thrown out either in committee or elsewhere. If we really want to enhance the credibility of private members in their legislative role, we want to give them the opportunity to create legislation that goes all the way through the House, is ultimately proclaimed, and ultimately becomes law.
So I would suggest to you that the area in which private members can be active and contribute substantially without interfering with the government's proper role to create new legislation based on its spending power is in the area of amendments to existing legislation or in the very few instances in which there may be a bill that doesn't create new expenditure.
One of the great deficiencies I found in my three years of looking at what happens in this place is the reluctance of government and the bureaucracy - I think this is simply because it has so much on its mind in terms of new legislation - to entertain the fine-tuning of existing legislation, even though we know there may be problems with various income tax, immigration or justice legislation, or whatever else. Very rarely does the government actually go in to make a fix, even though we know something is wrong. We have to wait until the government actually introduces legislation in which there are a whole bunch of amendments.
Private members have the opportunity to look at all existing legislation and to put forward amendments to existing legislation that I think can contribute very significantly.
In summation, I'm a great believer in party discipline and party democracy. I believe the Canadian system is a superior one and is well proved, as opposed to the American system in which individuals have a great deal of freedom.
That being said, I don't think private members' business should be in direct competition with the government, because the government achieves its right to introduce new legislation because of the spending power granted to it every year.
I'm not a fan of making all private members' bills votable, simply because you would debase the coinage. You would be getting all kinds of bills through, some meritorious, some not meritorious. You would get a flood of bills that would be difficult to handle. I think we would lose credibility in private members' business if everything were votable.
My suggestion is for us to set terms to make bills votable or not. The primary condition for a votable private members' bill, in my opinion, would be a bill that does not demand new expenditure from government. In other words, there would be no new expenditure whatsoever. This would limit private members' business primarily, but not exclusively, to introducing amendments to existing legislation.
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I would suggest to you that this could be a very valuable endeavour, because there are problems in existing legislation identified by members on all sides of the House from time to time. The government's agenda does not ordinarily address these individual problems. Occasionally, it will come with a large omnibus bill that will make a number of amendments. But private members could do a great deal of good by introducing bills that actually amend the existing legislation.
Here's the value of this. For private members' business to be effective, it has to result in an actual legislation succeeding. It is not enough for the legislation to merely get to the House and get through second and third reading. It has to go all the way in order to have credibility. It has to be proclaimed.
I would suggest to you that when private members are endeavouring to introduce brand-new legislation, we don't have the expertise or the support staff to produce legislation that could go all the way, for the most part - that's certainly so for major legislation - but amendments are possible.
So I would suggest that the first test of whether a bill should be votable or not votable is whether it involves new expenditure. If a member wanted to come forward with a suggestion for new legislation that goes beyond simply an amendment and it didn't involve expenditure, I would suggest to the committee that there's an opportunity to turn this into a motion.
You would have two streams. A project would be presented before this committee presumably in whatever form the MP deems necessary in order to convince this committee. The committee would then determine whether it goes on to be votable - that's if it doesn't involve new expenditure - or whether it is turned into a motion.
I think motions are an important part of private members' business. They're very important. I'll just give you an illustration of what happened in the House just this past week.
We had two motions that came before the House. One was a Bloc motion dealing with the abolition of the Senate, which was amended by the Reform Party. It basically suggested that the Senate be reformed.
Another motion was from a Liberal MP. It involved special taxes, tax breaks, for caregivers.
I would suggest to you that in both instances these motions reflected the mood of the country on these issues better than any referendum could.
In the first instance, which was the abolition of the Senate, if you remember the way the vote went, there was more support for the Reform amendment than there was for the original motion to abolish the Senate.
The case of the caregivers was even more dramatic. Despite the fact that the government sent out a fact sheet illustrating all the tax breaks for caregivers that now exist, the vast majority of the House, exclusive of the front benches and the parliamentary secretaries, supported that legislation, which I think sends a very strong message to the government about what the mood of the country is on that particular issue.
I will use that information in my householder, because this is a way of telling people that even though I wasn't the author of any of those motions, strong messages have been sent to the government.
So again, if you turn non-votable legislation into a motion, you're getting value for money. I think that's a very positive thing.
The only other thing I'd like to mention is the question of the lottery. One of the problems that exists now is that when an MP has a very good idea with respect to a private member's bill or, if you will, a private member's motion, it goes into a lottery, from which it may or may not be drawn.
I don't mind the lottery system, because you have some kind of control, but if it's a particularly good bit of legislation, I think we have to have a mechanism by which that MP can get it forward despite the lottery system.
I would suggest that one way the MP could do it would be to get all-party support of about 60 members of the House. When I say all-party support, I mean those parties that are actually parties as far as the House of Commons is concerned, rather than the very small groups like the existing NDP or Conservatives. So right now, that would be the Reform, Bloc Québécois and Liberal parties. I think that MP ought to have to get support that's relatively proportionate to the members of those three parties. Just for the sake of argument, that could be about 60 members. That should be a mechanism by which the MP could get his bill into the House and circumvent the purely lottery process.
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That's basically my presentation, Madam Chairman.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Bryden. Thank you for your patience in sitting through yesterday and today.
Mr. Bryden: Actually, it's an important issue. It's worth waiting for.
The Chair: I just wanted you to clarify your last statement, then I'll let the others ask questions.
You're saying the lottery system is fine for run-of-the-mill stuff, but you want an override system -
Mr. Bryden: That's exactly right.
The Chair: - so that proportionately, if you were to come to the Speaker of the House to say that you had 40 from the Liberals, 20 from the Bloc and 20 from Reform who support this bill, you could ask for leave to present it.
Mr. Bryden: Exactly. Then, if we accept the principle that private members' business is private members' business, the members should themselves have the option to decide whether legislation is worth pushing forward.
On the other hand, you still have to allow for the fact that some private members' business submitted will not be very well thought out, will not have particular support or will have very narrow agendas of individual MPs. So it's just an override mechanism.
The Chair: Very good. Thank you.
[Translation]
Mr. Langlois: I find Mr. Bryden's idea quite interesting. We should at least take the time to examine it. It is the first time it has been raised and I hear about it. And because it is a new idea, it does not mean it is bad.
If I am not mistaken, a bill could be made votable through this mechanism if it has stronger support from official political parties in the House.
Yesterday, Mr. Ménard made another suggestion. If a sufficient number of voters supported a bill, it could be made votable. I think these proposals are quite important.
Just like you, I prefer political systems like the American Congress, but I would not want to import it here unchanged, because it is not a system we are used to. We do not live in an ideal world, but in the real world.
I tend to agree with you. When Mr. Szabo's motion was passed, we certainly wanted to send a clear message to the government. Personally, I voted that way because of representations of voters in our riding offices and because of various comments we have been hearing.
The government obviously is concerned with balancing its budget, which is not our top priority. But we had to voice our opinion and the government had to take it into consideration. As soon as the motion was passed, you have probably seen the finance minister, Mr. Martin, take out his wallet to show he was wondering where he would get the money. But I am sure he agreed on the principle of the motion.
Another vote taken which, incidentally, was not widely reported in the press generally dealt with the Senate. If we examine the way the vote went, Mr. Bryden, we can say that if other members of the Bloc had supported the motion of the hon. member for Vegreville, Mr. Benoit, which had the support of many Liberal members, of Reform members and mine, as a member of the Bloc, the motion would have been passed, and the House would have asked for the abolition of the Senate in its present form. The message coming out of this debate in the House is that the institution should be reexamined.
Unfortunately, a few isolated votes have influenced the outcome. The reform of the Senate was supported by 68 per cent of the vote, its abolition by 40 per cent, and so on. But the motion was ultimately defeated.
But I think a clear message came out of this exercise: members of the House have expressed an opinion concerning the Senate. This was a major step. Even if a motion has not been passed, as some would have hoped, a major step has been made concerning Canadian institutions.
There is a desire on the part of private members, of all those who are not ministers and do not partake of the executive, to be able to have an influence over the course of events.
But it is as if one tried to have the Titanic change its course in the St. Lawrence near Montreal. It would make waves. So we should go slowly in the parliamentary process, because we do not always see clearly the ultimate outcome of a simple motion or bill.
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That being said, I would like to ask you the same question I asked of your three colleagues before you. When a bill is put forward, would you rather have it in a definitive form and look after all the steps in its preparation, clearing all the successive hurdles, or have the House vote on a general principle on which the bill is based, on its general orientation, and take care of the final legal wording later on?
[English]
Mr. Bryden: I think that has to be up to the individual MP who is trying to get his bill forward. At this first stage, we're talking about a proposed bill that comes before this committee. It may be deemed votable or otherwise.
Say an MP is sufficiently confident that his bill does not create a new expenditure. I might add that it's very important to define what's meant by a new expenditure so that later governments don't deliberately block private members' business.
I think it's up to the MP to sell that bill. He can put it forward as a simple proposal, saying what the implications are. That's if he doesn't want to work too hard on it. Or else he can actually put it in the form of polished legislation.
Say we do it as I suggest. Say the majority of these bills that we expect to go the whole route actually have to do with amending existing legislation simply because they cannot involve new expenditure. I don't think it's going to be much of a task for the most part to present the bill at the very first stage in the form of actual legislation. If it's an amendment, it's something that may only take two or three pages of text.
The Chair: Can I interject? We've only got about two minutes before another committee comes in here.
If we'd like, we can have Mr. Bryden, who just seems to be part of this team now, come back for the session right after. We can have him first before we do our in-committee session.
If you have a quick question, though, Mr. Frazer, I'd like you to feel free to ask it.
Mr. Frazer: No, I just have a comment, if I may, on your idea to avoid the lottery. You would indicate substantial support to the Speaker and then you would have the ability to jump the list. I think that's super, except that I think it would substantially increase the amount of lobbying that all of us MPs would get by having our confrères come to us to ask for our support on this thing. We already get a fair amount of that. I just suggest that this is one of the downsides to that type of thing, although it certainly is a new idea and one that I think we have to consider very seriously.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Bryden.
I'm going to ask Jamie, before we meet again - it will be two weeks - to very lightly draft the preamble to this, giving the history of private members and some changes that have occurred over the last twenty years. I'll ask for the current practices to be summarized so we can have them clear in our minds. Before we start making changes, we should know what we've got.
There should also be a summary of the suggestions we've heard, and that which has been submitted to us, under three categories: addressing the draw or lottery, addressing votability, and addressing committee reference. I hope he could give us that summary before we go into talking to the lawyers, etc.
When we come back, I think we'll start formulating in our heads the suggestions that we arrive at through consensus as ones we want to recommend to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs. It will also give us an opportunity to ask them when they're here how doable these things are.
So if that's okay with everybody on the committee - I like to work from written stuff - we'll do that.
In the next committee meeting, we may give Mrs. Jennings one more opportunity to appear for the first ten minutes. If anybody thinks of any questions for Mr. Bryden, we'll invite him back. Then we'll have a good two and a half hours for a committee session with the lawyers.
Mr. Bryden: Madam Chairman, I'll put my remarks into a summary note for you. That might assist the clerk as well.
The Chair: I only anticipate maybe one or two more meetings. Then I think we should be ready to report to procedures under our schedule, so we'll be okay.
Mr. Langlois: It's not over until it's over.
The Chair: That's right. Something dramatic could happen.
I thank you very much.
Mr. Frazer: When is the next meeting?
The Chair: The House is not in session next week. The week after that I'm going to be out of the country. So it will be the second week back. It will be a Wednesday perhaps, but the clerk will check with all of you. We've got to find a time for all of us to come.
Mr. Loney is welcome to join us, but we will proceed without him if we can, because we've done this much.
The meeting is adjourned.