44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 2, 2022 10:00AM
Mr. Speaker, I would like to talk a little bit about the Alberta nation.
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
Mr. Garnett Genuis: This is not a joke, Mr. Speaker. We have a distinct culture, different festivals. We use the same language as some other parts of the country, just like Quebec uses the same language as some other parts of the world.
Does the member agree with me that Alberta is a nation and has the right to be recognized as such?
This is not a joke. It is very serious.
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Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time.
This really is quite incredible. There is one day in the entire life of Parliament set aside for debate about the state of our democracy, and in particular the rules of order that govern this place. Unfortunately, we see other parties that want to debate a different motion and therefore overwhelm the time set aside for this important debate on the health of Parliament and the health of our democracy.
In particular, the member for Winnipeg North, who seems to be the only person speaking most of the time in the government caucus, has already eaten 40 minutes of the day that would otherwise have been set aside for this conversation on the Standing Orders, the rules of Parliament, and the state of our democracy.
It is very clear why the Liberals do not want to have a debate about the state of our democracy and the rules that govern it. The sad truth is that ours is a Parliament in decline. This is evident to many of us and is shown in the objective metrics of the health of our democracy. Under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the use of time allocation and prorogation of Parliament provoked conniptions from Liberals and from the commentariat concerned that such measures were hurting democracy by curtailing debate and limiting the ability of other parties to hold the government accountable.
Today the Liberals, with the NPD's support, not only regularly use time allocation to limit debate but have normalized the routine use of programming motions that completely skip over whole stages of deliberation on bills, including blocking all committee study and preventing opportunities for amendment. These parties have gone from being apoplectic about any limiting of time at a particular stage of a bill, to passing motions to wholesale skip stages of consideration.
This Parliament has also spent substantial portions of the past few years suspended, and when it is sits, it is partially reduced to a Zoom call. Duly elected members of Parliament and their staff are barred from entering Parliament because of personal health choices, even while those same people mix unmasked and unvaccinated with staff and MPs at receptions only a block away.
Many of the same people who decried time allocation under Stephen Harper now defend the wholesale running over of the normal functioning of this institution on multiple fronts as allegedly necessary to prevent the so-called playing of partisan games and delay tactics, as if members of Parliament were obliged to do everything possible to pass government legislation quickly without serious review.
Today we have Motion No. 11, which is another attack on democracy. It allows the government to change the adjournment time at will without any notice and without a vote, which makes it extremely difficult, by design, for opposition politicians to do their jobs.
We are not just a Parliament in decline; we are a democracy in decline. To observe as much is not to say that we have ceased to be a democracy, but that our democracy is weakening and we need to act in response. The globally recognized authority on democracy measurement is called IDEA: the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. It is based in Stockholm.
IDEA recognizes that democracy is not an absolute: It is a measure of a country's performance across a series of metrics, such as representative government, impartial institutions and fundamental rights. According to IDEA, Canada's performance on key variables of checks on government and effective Parliament are in sharp decline. Our performance, in terms of checks on government, is at .68. That is lower than the United States and any nation in western Europe. Our score for effective Parliament has dropped precipitously from .73 in 2015 to .59 now. It is just barely above the world average.
It is not just Conservatives who say our Parliament is in decline. It is the world-leading experts responsible for measuring the health of parliaments and parliamentary democracies who say that we are a Parliament in decline.
Unfortunately, I do not have time to do a complete analysis of democratic decline in Canada, but I want to talk about what we should be talking about today, which is how the proper functioning of the Standing Orders provides tools for us to resist democratic decline. As the rules of the House of Commons, the Standing Orders have a particular role to play in trying to help preserve the vitality of our institutions.
The purpose of Parliament is to bring Canadians together who are chosen by and speak for the experience of different localities, to deliberate about the common good of the whole nation and pass laws in accordance with it. Within that, the role of the Standing Orders is to prescribe the form of that deliberation, such as who gets to speak, for how long and in what ways on what subjects. This balances the need to hear from a multiplicity of perspectives with a need to proceed with legislation in a reasonable amount of time.
The Standing Orders and traditions of this place are finely tuned to achieve that necessary balance. Ultimately, in a democracy the majority should have its way. The rules of the House exist, to some extent, to slow down the majority and to give other points of view the opportunity to be heard and to create space for the minority to try to persuade the majority.
Democracy is the idea that the majority should rule, but not that the majority is always right. Majorities can get vital issues wrong. In particular, since the dawn of democracy, thinkers have worried about how the stimulation of short-term passions in the majority can make for a kind of mob rule mentality and lead to bad decision-making. Even unanimous decisions stirred up around short-term impulses and passions can be deeply regretted afterward when the tyranny of the moment has passed.
The framers of modern democracies perceived these risks. They have noted that the world's first democracy killed the world's first known philosopher. Modern democracy has sought to improve on ancient mob rule by liberating the people from both the tyranny of elites and the tyranny of short-term thinking, and has thus sought to stimulate decision-making based on the considered judgment of the people over time.
The majority should rule, but should still be expected to hear contrary points of view and to sleep on decisions before finalizing them. Such requirements still do not provide a guarantee of right decision-making, but they do improve the chances.
Individuals and collectives make better decisions when they think about those decisions first. It is a key function of Parliament in general, and of the Standing Orders in particular, to create the time and space required for authentic, deliberative democracy and for the considered judgment of the people over time.
Those who have developed and refined Parliament as both an expression of, but also a check on, majoritarianism understood well that proportionate deliberation increases the chance that the majority will get both the big and the small questions right without unintended consequences.
The Standing Orders that we have are not perfect, but they are generally tuned to help strike this vital balance between majority rule and deliberation. A problem that is substantially driving the decline of our Parliament today is not so much the Standing Orders themselves, actually, but the casualness with which the rules contained therein are frequently abridged.
In principle, if rules are established and structures are as they should be, there is no need to abridge them, yet it is a veritable constant that we hear some delegate of the government rise in the House to propose that the House take some action notwithstanding any Standing Order or usual practice of the House. Every time we accept this, we are choosing to act contrary to that long-standing wisdom and, as such, we should be very careful.
Unanimous consents, even on mundane procedural matters, involve the House derogating from established practice. I am certainly not against the limited use of this abridgement in such cases, but I still think we should acknowledge its risks.
What is much worse is what we see more and more of in this Parliament, which is the way that the House now frequently goes beyond rule abridgement by unanimous consent for procedural simplicity. We are now operating under a series of special rules, passed by a majority of the House over the objections of the minority, that have fundamentally changed our operating practices to limit opposition input and government accountability.
We have government programming motions, which I have already discussed. We have the routine efforts of members of the House to get the House to pronounce itself on substantive issues through unanimous consent, without notice, where members are asked to unanimously endorse something, oppose something, or even adopt a piece of legislation at all stages with no advance notice or debate.
The use of these unanimous consent motions does respond to a real problem: It is that members of Parliament do not, I think, have enough opportunity to put substantive proposals forward. I would support changes to our Standing Orders that expand the available opportunities for members to put forward substantive motions or private members' bills for debate.
I still suspect that even with those opportunities, we would see MPs stand up out of the blue and expect the entire House to pronounce itself on substantive matters without formal notice or debate, and we would still see government motions that try to abridge long-established Standing Orders.
Those who obsessively use unanimous consent motions are, perhaps unwittingly, seeking to abridge vital checks and balances and bring us back to democratic mob rule, where the tyranny of the moment, instead of the considered judgment of the people over time, is what rules. I oppose these efforts to roll the clock back to a purely majoritarian democracy instead of a functioning, deliberative democracy.
The use of unanimous consent motions also lends itself to significant gamesmanship: efforts to move such motions when particular members are out of the House, or to actively engage certain members in conversation so that they will not notice that a motion is being moved. It is a given, with committee assignments and other responsibilities, that all members are not able to be in the House all day.
This is why we have, for instance, bells before votes. Unanimous consent motions override the rights of members who are not present. The Standing Orders and the Speaker should work to preserve and protect the rights of members and the health of our deliberative democracy by constraining these kinds of Standing Order—
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Madam Speaker, the Bloc members point out we are into a debate on a different motion than what was scheduled for today, which was the one day when we were supposed to be talking about the rules of the House and the impact on our democracy. I will endeavour to make the link.
The Standing Orders and the Speaker, I believe, should work to preserve and protect the rights of members and the health of our democracy by constraining these practices of Standing Order abridgment. Requests for unanimous consent motions should not be entertained outside of certain very narrow circumstances, and those circumstances should involve a required consultation with all elected members, not just three or four.
The Standing Orders should constrain the use of programming motions, such as through prohibiting the use of time allocation or closure on a programming motion. The deadly combination of a programming motion and closure is allowing the government to pass a bill at all stages in an afternoon.
By constraining their own abridgment, the Standing Orders could reduce these abuses that are weakening our Parliament and roll us back toward unconsidered mob rule. I have no desire to see our Parliament reduced to a body that ritualistically gives perfunctory approval to bills that ministers assure us are very good, while endorsing unconsidered motions simply because they sound nice at first hearing.
Our parliamentary democracy, providing the mechanisms for the people's representatives to genuinely debate about important ideas over a reasonable period of time, is worth defending and preserving, and that is the issue we need to be discussing today.
However, we have Liberal members, and one in particular, who want to talk for a great deal of time on a different Bloc motion: a motion that we are formally debating right now, but we could be debating at any time. They want to discuss it at great length to avoid this vital conversation about the health of our democracy, and that is shameful.
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Madam Speaker, the hon. member did not listen or he did not want to listen. IDEA, the organization I referred to that ranks global democracies across a series of metrics, draws on various metrics, and Freedom House is part of the input data that IDEA uses.
IDEA ranks democratic performance across a range of metrics including civil liberties, checks on government, pluralism and other metrics. What I said is specifically on the metric of checks on government. I did not talk about civil liberties. There are issues there but I did not talk about them. On the issue of checks on government, our objective ranking is declining.
The member's question completely ignored my comment on how checks on government and metrics on effective Parliament are in decline. On checks on government and effective Parliament, we have dropped massively in international ranking since 2015. That is a different metric from civil liberties. It is an extremely important metric and the member should be aware of the difference.
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Madam Speaker, with respect to these issues of representation, the Conservatives supported the bill saying that no province's number of seats should drop, and I think I have been clear about that. I also think the principle of representation by population is an important principle in our democracy. We need to recognize that Quebec's identity is important, Alberta's identity is important and British Columbia's identity is important, and that every person in this country needs their voice to be heard in the House. That is my view.
However, if Parliament is not functioning properly and is not the mechanism through which individual MPs can actually be heard, check the power of government and debate legislation, the Standing Orders are not working properly. If Parliament is not working properly, then it barely matters who is here, because Parliament is prevented from doing its job. Even prior to the issues the member is raising is the question of whether Parliament is able to be that deliberative assembly of one nation. That is what I think is really important.
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Madam Speaker, I have no choice but to find myself in violent agreement with the member that there should be proper consultations. I would just emphasize that those consultations should be with members of the House, not just with House leaders of recognized parties.
When there is a unanimous consent motion, the idea is that the House as a whole is expressing itself. There needs to be a mechanism for all members of the House to be properly and officially informed prior, just as we have with bells and the normal notice procedure. That is extremely important for protecting the rights not just of parties, but of all members.
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Madam Speaker, why does the hon. member want to prevent this House from debating the Standing Orders on the one day per Parliament set aside for doing precisely that?
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- Jun/2/22 3:05:40 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance in Stockholm is the global authority on evaluating the performance of democracies. It provides objective analysis on the health of democracies. In the key category of checks on government, Canada’s score has dropped precipitously since 2015. We are now lower than the United States and every single country in western Europe. Weakening checks on government power is weakening Canadian democracy, and international experts are noticing.
When will the government face up to the problem it is causing and commit to reversing democratic decline in Canada?
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