I would invite new members to do what I did at one time when I was in the House, and that is go way up into the top public gallery and look down into what is happening. What you see there is the structure of a battle pit, with two sides ranged there, and the journalists and all the spectators looking down into this pit. Until you have actually gone up and looked at this physical phenomenon, you do not recognize how extensively the structure determines the culture. 

People say, well, there should be better manners or something like that in question period. Forget it. Until you change the structure, you cannot change the culture. This is all set up as an adversarial system. Fine, that is the way ours is, but not all parliaments are like that. Many are in the circle, in the round. 

The adversarial system is seen as dysfunctional in other parts of our society. In the courts Alternate Dispute Resolution (ADR) is a growth industry. It provides a way that we do not have to fight like combatants but instead get together and talk reasonably. So there are alternatives. 

My second recommendation would be the introduction of electronic voting.  Rapid voting, tabulating the results quickly, would be a very important step. When I was in Helsinki, I remember seeing their Parliament go through about 12 or 15 votes in about a quarter of an hour. Every member had the key to unlock and push a button: red for against, green for yes, white for abstention. Within a few seconds, there were the results. 

Contrast that with our system. Three times when I was in Parliament, on the government side, I actually voted against legislation that the government was sponsoring and that I was expected to be supporting. It is  not the easiest thing in the world when names are being called out row by row, it is  being televised, everybody’s watching, and you’re standing not with your party but with the opposition, and voting with the opposition. At that point the jeers and the catcalls come, and stories such as “Split in the party ranks.” This is punishing, and it sends an inhibiting message to parliamentarians. 

I think electronic voting could overcome some of the institutional weight that is suppressing a lot of MPs. They talk about free votes in Parliament. Well, the real way to make that happen is to bring in electronic voting. 

The final point I want to mention is about committees. I think the real engine driving the work of Parliament is what happens in committees. Once someone is chosen to be on a committee, I believe he or she should be there for the duration of the Parliament, unless appointed into the cabinet or unless by their own volition they want to resign. It is that MP’s position to be on that committee and not to be yanked or moved because all of a sudden his or her questioning is upsetting somebody in the power structure. We have seen too many examples, under different governments, of where the independence of parliamentarians on committees was cut down and undermined. They should be on for the term, building up expertise in the legislated areas of that committee’s mandate. 

Finally, I am also concerned about communications.  The public does not know what is going on in committees. We are told you cannot see the good work we are doing in committees because nobody covers it any more. But that is not a problem that should be left alone. Parliament itself decided to create CPAC. Parliament itself can deploy resources for the use of the Internet in relation to committee work. We are in a new age of communication, and parliamentary committees can harness that, can link directly with citizens, can have all kinds of interaction using television, the Internet, and Parliament-generated communication. Tell the story and they will hear it. 

Don Boudria:  I agree with the Chair when he notes it is not true to say that Parliament has never changed and has never reformed. Not every single rule we have passed has made the place better.  Some of them clearly have been the other way around, and we have gone too far in some directions. 

As a matter of fact, remember the debates some years ago about restoring report stage to what it used to be. It was after we stayed here nights and nights voting on amendments that were not really amendments, on the Nisga’a, and a number of things like that. Report stage had been allowed to go out of its original definition such that you could produce anything that sounded like an amendment and the Speaker would allow it to remain on the order paper. After the 2000 election, I was House leader, and we went to Westminster and simply passed a motion upon our return that from here on in, the Speaker shall deal with report stage in the way in which the Speaker had dealt with report stage historically.  This meant that we got rid of those so-called improvements for report stage and brought it back to what it used to be. Now legislation can move again after it had effectively ceased to do so.  So not everything is an improvement. 

From 1985 on, the McGrath report played a very important role. I do not think that we can speak of parliamentary reform without mentioning this report. It brought about many changes. I was here before and after it was published. All the changes that the report brought about were not immediately visible. When we changed the way of electing the speaker, it was a theoretical change. We certainly did not get a new speaker on the very same day. 

We only got a new speaker two years later. That was when John A. Fraser was elected. We felt that this new procedure worked fairly well. It was a new set of rules. In my opinion, the results were extraordinary. Basically, from that time on, the speaker was no longer the prime minister’s speaker or the government’s speaker: he was our speaker. And that is still the case today. 

If there had been nothing else in McGrath but that recommendation, that would have been a worthwhile report. It changed a whole pile of other things too. It is  true that after McGrath, for a number of years, there wasn’t much in the way of changes. After 1993, Herb Gray, without much fanfare, introduced two changes with the support of the opposition. One of them had to do with the plans and priorities, estimates to do with future years as opposed to current years. I do not think that one was particularly meaningful. Or is it that parliamentarians never really used it to the extent they could have? It is  an interesting debate. 

The second thing was the budgetary consultation process, which is now an institution. Could you think that a committee would not go and hear witnesses about preparing the budget, now that we have done it for a decade? I do not think it would be possible any more. Any Prime Minister who’d want to go back would be seen as being hopelessly retrograde. 

Then there were the three modernization committee reports. I sat on all three. We changed a whole number of rules. All private members’ hours became votable. I think that was modernization phase three. Modernization one dealt with a number of other features of the rules of the House of Commons, including the way in which we deal with the annual estimates—for example, target one minister and bring him in the House for one evening in June. 

With regard to appointments officers of the House of Commons and officers of Parliament are now appointed by a committee and then the House as a whole. That was all in the modernization committee reports that I as House leader had helped put together, of course with the support of all political parties at the time. So I believe a number of important changes were made there. 

Insofar as committees are concerned—and here I differ in opinion with Mr. Boyer— I do not think appointments are defective in terms of the whip having the authority to do so on behalf of the parties. Committees are a microcosm of the House, we all recognize that, and that reflects itself in the way in which people are appointed. I think that part is okay. Where it is  hopelessly defective is that every September you have to pretend that there was an election during the summer, restart all of the committees, and waste weeks and weeks of House time getting the committees kick-started again.  

That is absolutely wrong. It wastes the time of everybody around here. Lots of valuable work can’t start because one party can’t produce its list on time, negotiating with one of their backbenchers who does not want to really sit on this committee. The whole thing is stalled and grinds to a halt every September as a result of things like that. There is no logical reason for that. Make that list permanent for the Parliament. 

Here I do meet Mr. Boyer’s view, except that I do not think you should revoke the power of the whip to replace a member. So it is  a little bit what Mr. Boyer said, but not quite, if I can make that differentiation. 

On the work of committees generally, I have been to the United Kingdom to France, to Australia, to New Zealand, and a number of other places on some of these modernization reports. None of them have committees as good as ours. We may be lacking in many places, but generally every single piece of legislation in Canada goes to committee. Just about every piece of legislation has witnesses, including the minister, including the citizenry, or civil society, and others who testify to tell us how good or bad is every clause of the bill. 

That is unprecedented anywhere else. Compare that to what they do in France or the United Kingdom or elsewhere. It is  not even possible to compare. It is  not the same at all. It is  very good here. I think those who have put together some of these structures need to be encouraged, and the structures need to be made to work better. 

Committees have access now to two television rooms all the time, plus a third on an ad hoc basis. My criticism here is that they don’t always use it. Many times the TV room is used in its untelevised mode because MPs do not want to use it for that. So it is  not always a shortage of resources, it is  also a shortage of wanting to use the resources on occasion. If MPs could perhaps get their heads around using it more, it would be a good thing. 

On partyism I think it is  up and down depending on how you look at it. Yes, it is  true that question period is now more party-structured. It resembles the United Kingdom model more today than it did at one time. Today it is  reasonably similar, except that the whole government is targeted in Canada, whereas on any given day only four ministers are targeted in the United Kingdom, except Wednesday, when three are targeted. 

So it may be up there, but it is  also down in terms of committees. Election of a committee chair is done by secret ballot, and so on. Partyism is down in committee, and it is  up in certain areas. It is  not as clear, I think, as we would want to portray it. 

What are three things we should change? The first one and I’m glad Patrick referred to it—is electronic voting. I had it on the tip of my fingers and I let it go. In 1997 we had all-party agreement. Then there was a little bit of resistance in my own party—and it wasn’t much, it was just a little bit of resistance—and the powers that be said, “Do you want to back off a little while?” I did, and I shouldn’t have. I should have insisted. We would have gotten it. That is a major shortcoming. 

No one can explain to me why the Parliaments of India, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and so many others have electronic voting and we cannot have it here in one of the most liberal democracies on the face of the earth.  (Don Boudria)