In the fall of 2000, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs began a review of the Standing Orders (the rules) of the House. What follows are excerpts from comments made by Bill Blaikie as the Committee began its work:

September 28, 2000:

Mr. Bill Blaikie (Winnipeg—Transcona, NDP): ... We have before us just a very brief review of what previous committees did and a suggestion of many possible themes. I take it these possible themes have been drawn from comments and proposals of members. It seems to me what we need to do is try to see if we can find the common thread in these themes and let that be our guide, so that when we come to all these different items, we don't just try to ask if something is a good idea or a bad idea.

If our goal is to enhance the independence of members and to relax to some degree both the reality and the perception of party discipline, does this do that? If it does, does it do it in the right way, or does it go too far or not far enough? If one of our goals is to enhance the independence and the power of committees, then we judge individual proposals on the basis of that, and so on and so on.

That's what we need to do, or at least it's what I would prefer to do. If the committee doesn't want to do that, I'll go down the list, and we can debate item by item, but we'll all be arguing, either explicitly or implicitly, about things we haven't agreed on. It may make the process much more difficult if we don't have common assumptions we can hold each other to account on. If we can't come up with common assumptions, then obviously we may be reduced to just debating item by item.

If one takes seriously the comments from not just the opposition but the government backbench, there's a desire in the House for more ability on the part of individual members, both in committee and in the House collectively, to be less under the heels, so to speak—and I don't mean that in a pejorative way—than has been traditionally the case with the Canadian Parliament. That is to say, there is a desire for less party discipline and a lessening of the enormous power that accrues to the party leader, and of course the party leader with the most power is the Prime Minister, but it's also true of other party leaders. I think we need to have a discussion about that, for instance. Do we all agree that's what we're trying to do?

In that respect, just sharing experience from previous exercises like this, it may be..... Well, presuming that we will have enough time to do this—if we're going to have an election in two or three weeks, then this is all moot and the job for another Parliament, but if we find out we're not having an election and we have the time to do it properly—then it seems to me what's in order is a couple of really good in camera sessions.

Frankly, government members aren't free to talk on the record about how unhappy they might be with various aspects of our parliamentary system, unless they're a whole lot different from government members I've known before. That's important. We need to have that kind of sharing of ideas and then see if we can't come to some crystallization of what we're looking for.

You may not want to do that. You may just want to go down the list. There are a lot of things here that don't fit into a particular theme. There are a lot of things that are miscellaneous.

Some have to do with how to make the place more family friendly or human friendly in terms of when we sit and how long we sit and all that stuff. Then there's the whole question having to do with political parties. This is important for us, obviously. A lot of the rules were written as if there were a three-party House. We've had a five-party House now for two Parliaments and we still haven't gotten around to rewriting the rules.

In many respects, the rules were accidentally written for a three-party Parliament. If you look at the McGrath report, where it says that the lead-off speaker for each party should have 40 minutes—this is what we said when we were reducing the overall times for speeches—we didn't say "three parties". We said "each party". But when that was then written into the standing orders, it read "the first three speakers".

That seemed innocuous at the time because there were only three parties, but the clear intent of both the recommendation and the implementation of the recommendation was that every party should have an equal time at the beginning to express itself. That hasn't been the case for at least two Parliaments. Those kinds of things also need to be addressed.

That's not dissimilar to what I was suggesting, that we try to see how some of these many themes can be integrated or reduced to three, four, or five. I don't think we should set an arbitrary number but obviously a lot less than is the case.

I just want to say, partly responding to what Carolyn (Parrish) had to say, that I agree that people don't care about our working conditions and they probably shouldn't, but they do care about Parliament, or at least they have a lot to say about the extent to which they see it as a sort of rubber stamp for decisions that are made elsewhere. That touches on all the things that are here, the independence of committees and of individual members, the whole question of party discipline, free votes, etc.

In that respect I just want to correct what I think is a constant misperception of parliamentary and political history. I don't know if this is the prelude to the great debate on values we're going to have in the election, but it's not the stark contrast between the British parliamentary system being defended by the Liberal Party and the American congressional system being put forward by the Reform or Alliance. For one thing the British parliamentary system has a lot more free voting in it than the Canadian parliamentary system has. It has evolved. We have one of the more archaic parliamentary institutions here. This was true in 1983 and 1985 when the McGrath committee met. It was something we tried to chip away at and to some extent did, but certainly not to the extent we had hoped for.

We still have one of the most archaic parliaments. You try to explain to somebody from a third world country that almost everybody from the Supreme Court judges down to the dogcatcher is appointed by the Prime Minister, and you wonder in the end who has the undeveloped democracy. We're parading all over the world teaching new democracies how to be democratic, and yet in some respects we have one of the more undemocratic countries you could ever see. That's without even getting into the whole issue of the Senate.

So it's not this stark contrast.

For that matter, the call for less party discipline and more free votes was alive and well in this Parliament long before the Reform Party was a gleam in the eye of Preston Manning. The McGrath committee called for a greater range of issues on which there could be votes without party discipline. It was even implemented to the extent that all the language of confidence was taken out of the standing orders. There used to be language of confidence in the standing orders. That was all taken out so that every opposition motion, every supply day motion, for that matter every motion that is moved in the House of Commons to this day since the adoption of the McGrath report is not technically a matter of confidence in the way they once were.

We can sit here and kind of beat our gums to death forever about how we're going to change the rules to change the confidence convention. There's nothing to change. It has all been changed. The confidence convention exists in the head of the Prime Minister. The confidence convention exists in the heads of various party leaders. The confidence convention is part of our political culture. It has nothing to do with our procedures any more. It did at one time, but it doesn't any more.

My Alliance colleagues keep calling for changes in order to permit more free votes. The only changes that are needed are the changes in our internal party political cultures and in our political culture generally, so that if people do have free votes and they do vote against their leadership, this is treated as a healthy sign, rather than a sign that they don't have confidence in the leader, or the caucus is falling apart, or all the negative interpretations of this that arise in the media and elsewhere. We need to develop a political and media culture that does not routinely see this as being negative. This committee can't change that.

Procedurally, members of Parliament have already been led to water; we just have not been able to make them drink. It's all there. It's all there for government backbenchers. It's there for other members of Parliament. Of course, it's hard to drink if you have your leader or your Prime Minister saying, "Go ahead, drink". The axe is waiting.

Sure, we've had a bit more free voting; we've had free voting on private members' business. We've had some free voting on the government side, but nothing that ever endangered anything the government was trying to do. We've had no lost motions. We've had some political manoeuvring—manoeuvring is too pejorative—but some people have been allowed to vote against the party line on certain things, like gun control and a few other things. It's been more a sort of internal management of issues, as opposed to, I think, genuine free voting. But it's all there.

I just want to dispel the notion that somehow, before the Reform Party and the Alliance Party came along, there were no members of Parliament who ever had this notion that perhaps Parliament wasn't working very well and there needed to be more free votes. I made my first speech calling for more free votes in this House in 1982, and that's getting to be a while ago. I'm sure people made those kinds of speeches long before I got here.

So let's not kid ourselves that we have these two models. We have a long history of members of Parliament on all sides of the House saying there's something dysfunctional about this place. I think we were actually making progress, frankly, to some degree, during the early years of the Mulroney government, until the Prime Minister caught on. He was kind of new.

In the McGrath committee, we had a very conscious strategy: we have to act quickly, because this guy's new, he doesn't really know. Once he figures out how much power he has, he'll want to defend it. Unfortunately, we have a Prime Minister now who has been around for a long time, knows exactly how much power he has, and isn't likely to give it up. But that doesn't mean members of Parliament can't tilt at that windmill one more time, give it the old college try. Maybe one of these days something will happen.

I'm sorry, Mr. Chairman. With apologies to the committee, I am moved to one more history lesson.

You were talking about the use of our time both in committee and in the House. One of the ironies of the consequences—not the intent but the consequences—of the McGrath report was that we did away with the evening sittings, but the object of that exercise was that committees would meet in the evening, because people were feeling exactly what we feel now, only in different circumstances. They were torn between committees and the House.

You can't be in both places at the same time, so we said, well, let's shorten the parliamentary day. Committees used to meet regularly from eight o'clock to ten o'clock in the evening and the House sat from eight o'clock to ten o'clock in the evening. What was a drag, if you like, particularly from the point of view of people who had their families or whatever here in Ottawa, was that we would most often have the votes at ten o'clock. The votes we now have at supper time we then had at ten o'clock rather than at six o'clock—but it made for some interesting evenings.

The point I'm trying to make here is that the goal of that particular reform—something to keep in mind is that there are, a lot of times, unintended consequences of reform—was to free up time so that people could be in committee without having to be in the House. The goal was to eliminate that conflict.

Instead, as soon as it was changed so that people didn't have to be here for the House and didn't have the discipline of having a vote at 10 or 10:30, people who lived in Ottawa, particularly those who had their families in Ottawa, sort of won the day and said, no, they wanted to go home. "Now that I don't have to be here in the House, I want to go home," they said. Evening committee meetings disappeared from the face of the earth.

What happened was that work that was supposed to be spread out more rationally actually got telescoped into a smaller space, so that we now actually have more of a problem with people having to be everywhere at the same time than we did before the McGrath reform.

I just say that with respect to your comment about how to use time more effectively. What we had in mind was that the evenings would become a time when people didn't have to face votes at 10 or 10:30 and could go to a committee meeting after supper.

Of course then people used the parliamentary dining room. They didn't disappear to 10 million different places to have supper, so they could just go back to the committee meetings. But that's another story, Mr. Chairman.