44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 2, 2022 10:00AM
Madam Speaker, what I know is that the Prime Minister is a great defender of the French language. I know that first-hand, not only in the province of Quebec but in all regions of our country. We understand. We can have that debate. I would encourage the members, if it is the French-language debate that the member wants to see, to bring it forward in a motion.
I would suggest to my colleague across the way that having that debate could be a positive experience for all of us here in the House of Commons. For the people of Quebec or the people of Saint-Boniface and Saint-Pierre-Jolys in my home province, there is a very strong French connection. There is a high sense of pride in the language from coast to coast to coast. If that is what the member would like to debate, I am happy to debate it.
To me, what we are really debating is a political manouevre to try to get legislation held up at committee stage, when we should not be doing that. We need that legislation to pass through committee.
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Madam Speaker, apart from expressing his love for the French language, why does my colleague oppose the recommendation that a parliamentary committee review Quebec’s political weight and, by extension, its citizen representation and the foundations of democracy?
As elected members of Parliament, are there other more important subjects for us than the quality of our democratic life and respect for Quebec communities and the Quebec nation? Why is he opposed to this? I find it pretty benign.
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Madam Speaker, we understand that the legislation is unanimously supported in the House, that everyone wants 78 seats to be maintained. Bill C-14 would guarantee that. It would guarantee the province 78 seats. We should be able to pass that legislation. It should have been done by now, as far as I am concerned, and if the political will was there on all sides of the House to make that happen, it could be done. In fact, we have the power to do it today if we wanted to. I can say that the government's desire would be to see the legislation pass.
In terms of the debate that the member is suggesting, nothing prevents a standing committee to conduct a study of that. They could establish that at any point in time. All they have to do is raise the issue at the most appropriate standing committee. They could raise it at two or three different standing committees, but that is not the essence of what we should be debating today. What we are doing today is ultimately feeding the Conservative agenda, which the Bloc is indirectly supporting by bringing forward yet another motion in a standing committee that will enable them to continue to filibuster, and I do not think that is a good thing for the people of Quebec or Canada.
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Madam Speaker, in listening to this debate, I think about representation across the country. We are talking about 78 seats in Quebec, but if we think about the rural parts of the country in smaller provinces like Newfoundland and Labrador, which is geographically large, but in terms of population, of course, it is small, we have seven seats in the House of Commons. We come here to do our lobbying for the province, vote on different legislation, and so on. We would love to have more seats. In fact, we are dwarfed by provinces like Quebec and Ontario, larger provinces with huge populations, which I understand, but in terms of representation, I think Bill C-14 strikes a good balance. We would also like to encourage more seats in Newfoundland and Labrador. We would love to have another seven, but the reality is that if we were to allow the system to continue as it currently exists, we would fall even further behind in terms of striking a balance in representation.
I would ask my colleague if he sees Bill C-14 as striking a good balance in terms of representation across the country.
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Madam Speaker, the member mentioned that there are only seven seats in Newfoundland and Labrador. One would never know it, given the power of the Atlantic caucus. It is exceptionally effective, I must say, and Newfoundland and Labrador is represented exceptionally well in the House and in the committees in terms of the amount of workload that the members carry and their impact on government policy.
However, the member raises a very valid point. People as a whole in Canada understand our federation and why it is important that Prince Edward Island has four seats, and why it is important that we guarantee that the province of Quebec never goes below 78 seats, which is what Bill C-14 would do.
My colleague planted a seed asking about the future, about the province of Newfoundland or other provinces and the representation that they have. There are other opportunities, no doubt, both in opposition and in government, for us to enter into that dialogue. Canadians as a whole understand what is happening, they support it and it is time that we move on.
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Madam Speaker, that is just amazing. I think there is a picture of my colleague from Winnipeg North beside the definition of “bad faith” in the dictionary. In fact, I am eager to check the latest edition to make sure.
The hon. member for Winnipeg North speaks of the maritime provinces, and I think that is good. I think it is a magnificent region of Canada. It is wonderful to visit. However, I am trying to remember when in history Prince Edward Island or Newfoundland, for example, were recognized as nations. I would like to remind my colleague that the goal, the idea and the intention of what the Bloc Québécois is proposing is that we walk the talk. It has been recognized that Quebec is a nation. It has been recognized that Quebec has its own identity, an identity it must protect, and that it should be given the tools to protect its unique identity and its values. That is precisely what we are talking about today.
Can my colleague tell me in a few words whether, yes or no, he understands the importance Quebecers place on this principle of defence—
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- Jun/2/22 12:08:27 p.m.
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Order. I have to give the member time to answer, and we are running out of time.
The hon. parliamentary secretary has roughly 30 seconds to answer.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to believe that I have a decent understanding of the uniqueness of the province of Quebec and its distinct nature, its culture and its heritage. I would love the opportunity to spend more time in Quebec as a province.
I can assure the member that when I look in particular at the Prime Minister, I see someone who has a love and passion for the province of Quebec and the French language. As a party, we encourage and we want to see the growth of the French language throughout our country. We recognize the unique nature of the province of Quebec when it comes to French in North America, and we have to preserve that.
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Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise in the House today to speak to this motion, which I find interesting. We welcome it because it raises an important issue.
The Bloc is calling on the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs to study the issue of the political weight of Quebec. We are very open to this possibility because it is a matter of democracy and equality, recognizing the Quebec nation, protecting Quebec in the House and the weight we can have as representatives of our constituents.
I think it is a truly important topic and studying it would not get in the way of parliamentary business on other files and other issues.
I am also very proud of the work done by the NDP as a first step towards protecting Quebec's political weight and place in the House. We made sure that the agreement we negotiated with the minority government guaranteed the protection of the 78 seats allocated to Quebec, which risked losing one, as members will recall. That guarantee is set out in Bill C-14.
I am very proud of this NDP achievement. We can clearly tell Quebeckers that we kept our promise to represent them with this first step in the right direction. They are now protected whereas before they stood to lose some ground. We were there. We kept our promise to defend Quebeckers.
This is an important issue because, when we talk about the political weight of Quebec or a province, we are talking about something that affects all citizens, almost the entire population, not just small groups or one sector.
I find it interesting that we are discussing this today at a time when Ontarians are on their way to the polls, and have been all day, to elect their MPP. I encourage everyone to vote, and it will come as no surprise that I am encouraging Ontarians to support the provincial NDP. I hope that their leader, Andrea Horwath, has a good day, and I hope that she will end the day with a strong caucus. We will be watching the day unfold with great interest.
Speaking of the provinces' political weight, I want to talk about some of the more technical details of our Canadian federation's rather unique system.
There is also the whole issue of immigrants. There are political, administrative and legislative tools that can help, but the basic tool is demographic weight. I think that we are encouraging open and inclusive immigration that enables Quebec to welcome more immigrants and to have the means and resources to help them integrate properly and learn French if necessary.
This is all part of the effort to maintain fair representation for Quebec, which is about 23% right now. This also makes it possible to guarantee the 78th seat.
The NDP is strongly in favour of encouraging a path to citizenship, rather than throwing up roadblocks in the case of temporary workers and permanent residents who come to work in Quebec and Canada. I think we need to set up mechanisms to properly welcome new citizens and to expedite the process, because wait times are extremely long right now. I want to stress that we know that the Department of Citizenship and Immigration is currently having a lot of problems. I think that is part of the reflection and debate that we need to have on citizenship in general.
Basically, democracy is a revolutionary principle under which decisions are made by the people, not by a king who rules by so-called divine right and whose family has reigned for centuries by dividing power among aristocrats. A major revolutionary movement occurred in France, obviously, but also in England and the United States, driven by the belief that all citizens are equal in the eyes of the law and that it is up to them to choose their leaders and how they will be represented.
Of course, things started out far from perfect. The first democratic system was based on selective suffrage, where only the wealthiest people had the right to vote. People who were too poor to own property or pay taxes could not vote. It was a two-tier system that claimed to promote equality, but that was not an established right.
In our current system, roughly the same number of people are represented in each riding, in order to ensure fairness and equality in the right to vote as expressed in the House or in a Parliament, so that people are not unduly overrepresented or under-represented. There is a genuine concern for fairness and equality. It is one of the basic criteria recognized by Elections Canada for the redistribution of electoral boundaries, which is conducted by the provincial commissions. Is it the only factor? No, it is not.
We live in a system of exceptions, because other criteria apply to representation in the House of Commons. Currently, there are three criteria.
The senatorial clause ensures that no province has fewer MPs than it has senators. This creates significant distortions in representation relative to demographic weight and population size, but it is recognized and accepted. For instance, it clearly and blatantly benefits Prince Edward Island, and that is fine. It was negotiated and agreed to. That is how the system works.
There is the “territorial clause”, or the representation rule, for Nunavut, the Northwest Territories and Yukon. It would be difficult to strictly apply the rule to the number of people who live in these ridings, because this would mean that huge territories with their own identities and sense of community could not be represented, or would be drowned out in a riding so large and immense that it would be meaningless. This representation rule is important; it is respected, and it must continue to be respected.
I am thinking in particular of my colleague from Nunavut, who represents communities with a common identity, culture, language and interests. Every day, she fights here in the House to promote and defend the interests of such important communities that have very specific needs in specific contexts.
There is the grandfather clause, which had not applied to Quebec until now. However, the NDP managed to negotiate a guarantee that no province would lose seats in the event of electoral redistribution, immigration, or differences in provincial demographic weights.
Taken together, the senatorial clause, the representation rule and the grandfather clause for four provinces, if memory serves, demonstrate that there are already exceptions in the system and that demographic weight is not the only criterion, but it is controlled, improved or amended in accordance with certain provisions.
This brings us to today's motion, which asks us to consider the possibility of a Quebec clause. As parliamentarians, we recognized that Quebec is a nation, so we must consider the political, democratic and administrative implications of this recognition.
Ottawa and Quebec have already negotiated a number of asymmetrical agreements in the past, and that is to be expected. The NDP recognized the Quebec nation when it adopted the Sherbrooke declaration and other resolutions at its conventions. There is also the notion of asymmetrical federalism, which would allow Quebec to negotiate special powers or agreements with respect to particular issues.
As progressive New Democrats, we support the recognition of the Quebec nation and the idea of asymmetrical federalism. I think that we need to discuss what this means in practical terms in order to think about the potential consequences. If certain clauses were negotiated and drafted for certain provinces and territories in the past, I think we need to be brave and coherent and move forward in this special context.
The idea of protecting Quebec's political weight in the House is neither new or revolutionary.
It was negotiated by Brian Mulroney's Conservative federal government and Robert Bourassa's Liberal Quebec government. The provision was included in the Charlottetown accord. It is nothing new. It was accepted in the past, so it has already been normalized. There were discussions on the subject, and on many others as well, since the Charlottetown accord addressed many other issues. The NDP supported the Charlottetown accord. We reflected on the issue and discussed it, and the NDP accepted it.
I also think that it is in line with the historical view of the two founding nations. Consider the Laurendeau-Dunton commission on bilingualism and biculturalism. Consider also the historic agreement that began by saying that we would be together but that there were two founding nations, one British and the other French. I think we need to bear this in mind in our work and in the representation we have in the House. We must preserve this vision in the Official Languages Act, which recognizes French and English as Canada's two official languages. That is the rule used in the House of Commons. It is not always followed by the Liberal administration or by some companies that are subject to the Official Languages Act, but that is a separate issue.
That being said, I feel uncomfortable saying that we need to respect the concept of two founding nations. Of course it is important but, at the same time, it is historically insulting to the first nations, who were here long before any French or British settlers. We need to keep this concept of two founding nations in mind, and as a Quebecker, I will always defend it, but we must remember that, by the time these two founding nations arrived, other nations had been living here for thousands of years. They were shunted aside, forgotten, disrespected. Some were even subjected to cultural genocide, an attempt to annihilate them. Awful things were done, like the residential schools, and that is part of our history.
We must therefore discuss the role and weight of the first nations in our democracy and in the House. Personally, I am open to studying various scenarios, like the system used in New Zealand, where seats are reserved for indigenous New Zealanders. This is another way of looking at things and building a unifying political system and democracy that could correct the historical mistake of thinking that there were only two founding nations.
To strike this balance, which is not an easy thing to do, we need to have an open mind and approach this in a spirit of reconciliation with the first nations and indigenous peoples. This is an issue that I think is important and that the NDP caucus is promoting. We should also have a discussion about the role and the political weight of the first nations in the House.
I want to come back to the issue of equality because, while we are on the topic of democracy, the political system and representation, I will say that, unfortunately, the very idea that all votes are equal is currently not true. This is not because of the provisions of our electoral system that I have just mentioned. It is because our voting system is unfair.
We live with an archaic first-past-the-post system that allows for startling democratic discrepancies between what the people decide and how they are represented in this House.
Let us talk about it. If we want to have the best possible system, we need to be able to talk about proportional voting, which would respect the popular will and the choices of voters. We live in an absurd system where a government can sometimes be elected with less than 40% of the vote. This is a common occurrence. A political party can get 37% or 38% of the vote and 55% to 60% of the seats in the House, which means 100% of the power. That is absurd. A majority of the people voted against a political party, sometimes by 60% or 62%, but that political party is given the keys to absolute power for four years.
In 2015, the Liberals made a promise to change this. The 2015 election was supposed to be the last one under an unfair and archaic voting system.
I sat on the Special Committee on Electoral Reform. We travelled the country for a year listening to members of the public, stakeholders from interest groups, local elected officials, university professors and experts. We conducted online surveys and listened to people. Overwhelmingly, everyone saw that the current system is broken, that it does not ensure equality among all Canadians and that the House does not represent the will of the people. Ninety per cent of the witnesses who spoke at committee told us that, and 90% of the briefs we received said the same thing. Then the Liberal government realized that this was going in the wrong direction and that this was not necessarily where they wanted to go, so they conducted an online survey. It was an incredibly biased survey, but 75% of respondents still said they wanted a proportional representation voting system.
At the Special Committee on Electoral Reform, there was an agreement between the Conservative Party, the Bloc Québécois, the NDP and the Green Party. We agreed to hold a referendum and suggest that Canadians and Quebeckers adopt a proportional voting system. The majority of committee members reached a consensus to move forward and propose real change. The Liberals shocked us by responding that there was no consensus. They took that work and threw it in the garbage. That was the end of it. Then they walked away. They did that because it was not the direction they wanted to take. It was absolutely false to say that there was no consensus. There was a strong consensus among the witnesses, the people we consulted and the political parties represented on the committee. The Liberals were the only outliers. However, because they were in power, they did what they wanted. They broke their promise, and we missed an historic opportunity.
I believe we need to put this issue back on the front burner. It is important for improving our democratic system. I was saying earlier that a political party can be elected to a position of absolute power with less than 40% of the votes. We have even seen worse. One political party received more votes, but it became the opposition party, while the party that came second in terms of the popular vote got to form government. It is not just a distortion, it is hypocrisy. It goes against the popular will. If we are true democrats who believe that we must represent the people's choice in the House, then we must have a real conversation about adopting a much more suitable voting system, the one used by the vast majority of the world's democracies.
Canada is one of few countries, along with the United Kingdom and the United States, that still has this system. Most other countries have proportional voting systems of one kind or another. We could spend a long time talking about all the different systems, but my point is that proportional representation is much more respectful of the people's will.
I am very happy to be participating in today's debate. I think that our voting system, recognition of the Quebec nation, the political weight of various jurisdictions, communities and nations in the House are major issues, crucial ones. As a democrat, I always enjoy talking about democracy, about the people's power and about how we can improve our system.
I am ready to answer questions, but I do want to say that I think the recommendation in the motion is a good one and that it makes perfect sense to ask a parliamentary committee to study Quebec's political weight. This is an issue we should be talking about in the House.
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Madam Speaker, I listened to my colleague's intervention, and in the last point he made, he said it was appropriate for a committee to be studying this. The committee is already going to be studying this. What this motion is really about is telling the committee in more detail exactly how to study it and perhaps what the outcome should be in advance of letting it do the work.
More importantly, the member spent a lot of time talking about proportional representation. The NDP seems to come from this perspective that proportional representation is all or nothing. However, the reality of the situation is that my riding is unique. It is different from his riding. It is different from the ridings out west. It is different from many, if not all, ridings throughout the country. When constituents have an issue, they like coming to see me. They want a door they can go to and knock on so they can talk to local people about their issues, people who will represent them locally.
In the NDP's version of proportional representation, how do we ensure that people continue to have local representation? I know the member said there are a whole bunch of different models we could be studying and deliberating on, but could he comment more generally on this?
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for that excellent question. Earlier I said that I was part of the Special Committee on Electoral Reform, which travelled across the country to hear what people had to say. This is an issue that came up many times. I know that in my colleague's riding, people like to know who their MP is, sometimes so that they can congratulate him, sometimes so that they can criticize him, sometimes so that they can hold him to account and sometimes so that they can ask for federal government services. That is entirely appropriate. We could have a big discussion about that, but there is a way to maintain that contact.
Let us look at Germany, which has a mixed member proportional system. Half of the members are elected in local ridings, like in our current system. The other half are elected by a proportional voting system. Proportional representation corrects the major distortions created by a purely local electoral model.
Why is it that Conservative voters have basically no representation in Toronto? Why do Liberal voters have no representation in the Prairies? I think we also need to keep that in mind. There are models that can help us maintain that connection with voters while correcting problems with the system.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie for his speech, the first part of which I thought was quite nationalist and even independentist. It was good. I thank him for supporting the Bloc's position on Quebec's representation in the House of Commons.
My question is this: If we were to base this “Quebec clause” for example on the Charlottetown accord, which gave Quebec 25% representation in the House, would my colleague agree that we could go that far, 25%, which would mean six more members for Quebec?
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question. However, I am not sure about how he interpreted the start of my speech. I think that he took the rubber band and stretched it a bit.
I believe that this is a legitimate and reasonable target. That is part of the discussion that we need to have. We need to see what the current situation is. Is what was negotiated in 1992 necessarily applicable today? Maybe so, or maybe not, although I do think that we need to at least have this discussion and see how we can move forward to protect Quebec's political weight in the House.
I am very proud of the work that the NDP did in their negotiations; they at least protected what Quebec has right now and saved the province from losing a seat. I think that the NDP won a great victory for Quebec in its negotiations with the Liberal government.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie for his speech and especially for having once again raised the issue of our current voting system. I, too, was a member of the Special Committee on Electoral Reform.
I was particularly amused to hear the hon. member recall the weird survey the government did, called “vox populi”. It turned out that even when it tried to torque the questions to get the answers it wanted, the survey was never clear, because no one ever had a chance to just mark down “I want proportional representation.” It was very twisted. We did find out that 70% of Canadians who did the survey said they would rather see a lot of smaller parties work together, even if it takes longer, to come to decisions in a co-operative fashion by consensus. Our system here is way too adversarial and way too partisan, and it is not necessary.
Can the hon. member imagine a time when we can get rid of the perverse voting system we have here? We have been promised it over and over again by the Liberals, but it was snatched away from us.
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Madam Speaker, my colleague is absolutely right.
If we look at the number of members that the parties get elected and the number of votes they get nationally, it creates distortions, as I was saying earlier. There was one election where it took an average of 35,000 votes to elect a Liberal member, 40,000 votes to elect a Conservative member, 80,000 votes to elect an NDP member and practically 300,000 votes to elect a Green Party member. It is completely unfair to the voters.
I think that we do indeed need to work together, collaborate on finding a better system that will be fairer for everyone and will likely produce governments that will have to work together. A proportional voting system is not just more respectful of the voters; it also changes the political culture.
I know that my colleague is keen on that notion and that idea. It creates parliaments that are less aggressive and confrontational with a lot more dialogue and consensus building. I think that is best for our democracy and it is also what people want from us.
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Madam Speaker, I am going to take the liberty of passing the puck to my colleague from Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie. He can decide whether it lands on his stick or his skate; it depends how he takes it.
We are trying to make the Liberals understand that the Bloc Québécois does not want to pick a fight. We just want to maintain Quebec's political weight and representation in Parliament. That is the rationale for the 25% representation that Quebec is requesting, which is the same ratio that was entrenched in the Charlottetown accord, as my colleague mentioned.
When asked about this, the Liberals repeat that they have already given Quebec what it wanted, 78 seats. However, they set that number without considering representation, which is still at risk based on demographics and the gradual increase in the number of House seats.
I would like to hear my colleague from Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie offer his opinion and expertise on the Liberals' attitude. They do not understand what we are trying to say when we demand that Quebec's political weight be maintained in Parliament.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague from Drummond for his question.
I am not yet sure if his pass will hit my stick or my skates; it depends on how fast I can get to the puck.
My colleague asked an excellent question. I find it hard to understand the Liberals' stubbornness in refusing to discuss this. I am very proud that we were able to get the government to protect the 78 seats in Quebec. However, that is not the end of the discussion, or the end of the story.
I think we need to be open to this discussion, and I do not understand why the Liberal members from Quebec are not. They probably need to discuss it within their caucus. Why are they not showing more support for this motion so that we can discuss it in committee and determine next steps?
We protected 78 seats, and I think that this first step was absolutely necessary. However, this is not the end of this story or of this historic demand from Quebec.
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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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- Jun/2/22 12:46:50 p.m.
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Order. The member for Drummond on a point of order.
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Madam Speaker, I have two quick points that I feel are valid.
I could have been handsome or intelligent. Unfortunately, I am neither. I am trying to see the link between the passionate speech by my colleague from Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan and the Bloc Québécois's proposal to broaden the scope of Bill C-14 and study it at the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs. There may be a link, but I need some clarification.
Second, I do not mean to be critical of my colleague's passionate style, but I would very respectfully like to point out that he is speaking very quickly and that the interpreters are sometimes having a hard time following. It is very important for us to be able to properly hear his comments.
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