Official Hansard
Mr. Speaker, we may be asking for quiet, but we are not asking for members to be muzzled and, unfortunately, that is exactly what I will be talking about today. When members take the floor, we tend to say that we are pleased to rise, but that is always a little less true when the government has just announced a gag order or closure motion on a bill or motion. Unfortunately, that is what is happening again today. It seems as though this will not be the last time, and that is the problem. We are here today to talk about the composition of committees. That may seem rather innocuous and it may not be of interest to those watching at home. As my predecessor would say, no one is going to come to blows on buses about how many members from which party will serve on committee, but this is a sign of a deeper problem, which we are going to talk about today. I will come back to that. Most importantly, this is being done rather quickly. In just seven days, we went from the government promising to work with the parties after it secured a majority in the April 13 by-elections to a unilateral approach in which the government is refusing to engage in discussions, despite the customs and practices of the House. This has not been discussed or raised in the House, and now the government wants to impose a gag order just to make sure that the House has been sufficiently steamrollered. So the first thing the government is doing with its majority is shutting down debate in the House on something that is at the very heart of parliamentary democracy, namely committee work. The government made a nice promise to collaborate, so we might as well remind the government of that promise. The day after the by-elections, the Prime Minister said that the government would listen to all voices in Parliament and promised to work collaboratively. He said, “The work ahead demands collaboration, partnership, and ambition to deliver at the speed and scale Canadians are counting on.” As I was saying, unfortunately, the government is breaking with a parliamentary tradition that has always existed when it comes to the composition of committees. We are in a unique situation, and we acknowledge that. This is the first time that a government has gone from a minority to a majority midway through a Parliament. The usual procedure for the composition of committees is already set out in the Standing Orders. The parties determine by consensus how the committees could reflect the situation in Parliament. If there is a majority in the House, it makes sense for committees to have a majority as well. If there is no majority in the House, it makes sense that committees should not have a majority either and should reflect roughly the same percentage of representation as in the House. In addition, this is usually done collaboratively. In fact, chapter 20 of the new manual we received says, “Party representation on committees reflects the standings of recognized parties in the House, and each recognized party determines which of its members will represent it on a committee.” It also says that, by convention, the parties meet, discuss, negotiate and agree on the wording of a motion adopted subsequently through a report of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs. Most of the time, this report is adopted by unanimous consent. That just goes to show how committees have always been set up in a spirit of collaboration and consensus. However, we are now in a situation where, just a week after promising to collaborate, the government is imposing its approach on us. The government is telling us that committees must reflect party standings in the House and that we must therefore ensure that we have roughly the same percentage. We agree with the principle that committees should reflect party standings in the House, but we do not agree with the way the government acquired its majority, particularly by way of floor crossers. Having said that, it would serve no purpose for us to deny the current reality that the House now has a majority. From there, what should a parliamentary committee that is proportional to the House look like? The government is proposing to add not just one but two Liberal members to every committee. We are going from committees that are mainly made up of 10 people, with five Liberals, four Conservatives and one Bloc member, to committees made up of 12 people, with seven Liberals, four Conservatives and one Bloc member. That would give the Liberals what we call a supermajority in committee. This morning, I heard the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons saying that there is no such thing as a supermajority in the House and that supermajority is an American term. However, the fact is that what the government is proposing does not reflect the composition of the House. I want to do a little math, and I hope that members will be able to follow what I am saying. After the general election, at the very beginning of this Parliament, the Liberals held 169 of the 338 seats in the House, or about 50%. At that time, they also held five out of the 10 seats in committee, or about 50%, which was relatively proportional. The Conservatives held 144 of the 338 seats in the House, or about 42% or 43%. They held four out of the 10 seats in committee, or about 40%, which is quite close. The Bloc Québécois held 22 seats in the House, or about 6.5%. That meant that we should have had 0.6 members in committee, but since that is obviously impossible, our representation was rounded up to 10% or one committee member. However, all of this was still relatively proportional. What the Liberals are proposing here is that committees have 12 members. Let us do the math again. Let us say we want each party to have the same percentage of seats it currently holds and committees are made up of 12 members. Let us start with today’s standings. There are currently 174 Liberal members, out of a total of 343, which is about 52% of the seats in the House. The Conservatives have 140 seats, so they represent about 40%. The Bloc Québécois has not changed much, and our percentage is 6.5%. Let us look at it from the opposite angle. Let us say that the committees will now have 12 members and that we want to maintain the same percentage of representation. Let us do the math. The Liberals have 174 members, and let us multiply that by 12 and divide it by 343. That comes out to 6.12 members. If we round that off, we end up with six Liberals per committee. Let us do the same calculation with the Conservatives. The Conservatives have 140 seats, so let us multiply that by 12 and divide it by 343. That comes out to 4.79 members. Let us round that number up. That means five Conservative members on each committee. Let us do the same with the Bloc Québécois. If we multiply 22 by 12 and divide it by 343, that comes out to 0.78 members. Once again, let us round that up. Here is what it would look like in a scenario with 12-member committees: six Liberals, five Conservatives and one Bloc Québécois member. The problem is that this does not give them a majority on the committee. Based on the Liberals’ proposal, if they really wanted a committee of 12 members, that is the composition they should have had. In that case, why not have a committee made up of 11 members? If there were six Liberals, four Conservatives and one Bloc member, we would be much closer to the parties’ standings in the House. Using the same principle that the Liberals are defending tooth and nail to justify making changes to the Standing Orders, we would be much closer to reality. However, the government is saying that this would mean that, once in a while, the chair of each committee would have to break a tie. The government cannot have it both ways. In a context where the government has a majority, albeit a slim one, the least it could do is not be so arrogant, which it was even back when it was a minority government. The least it could do is not resort to the extremes of arrogance by changing the makeup of committees and saying that it will continue to collaborate, as it promised to do. If the government wants to avoid having committee chairs cast a tie-breaking vote, then it should talk to the opposition parties, like the Bloc Québécois, to avoid situations where a committee chair would have to break a tie. If a committee chair ever has to do that, well, so be it—that is their job. They earn an extra $10,000 a year to run the committee, and voting in committee is part of their duties as an MP. Is it really the end of the world? In any case, we were unable to have this discussion, because the Liberals decided to go it alone, without consulting the opposition parties, without contacting them to seek their views or suggestions on the various options for forming committees, once again disregarding the established tradition regarding how committees are formed. The Liberals argued that they did not want to contact the opposition because the Conservatives had already made it clear in the media that they disagreed with the idea of overhauling committees. I think it is fairly common knowledge that discussions between the parties in the House do not take place in the media. It would therefore have been entirely justified to continue the discussion with various colleagues to see if we could reach an agreement that would have led to a better understanding. I have another point: When the government decides that a majority is necessary in committee, there are often two reasons. The first is to avoid obstruction and filibustering, a tool available to the opposition parties in cases where they feel disgruntled over x, y or z. Is that a valid argument in light of Parliament’s current situation? The answer is no. Dilatory motions, which are used to slow the work of certain committees, are currently being used in two committees: the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities and the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities. However, that is Liberal obstruction: The Liberals are the ones slowing the committees’ work because members of the opposition want to do their job, in other words, get information. In the case of the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure, and Communities, the opposition has requested documents proving the profitability of the Contrecœur project. The government tells us it is a very good project. That is great, but let it show us the numbers. It must have them, if it can tell us that it is a good project. The opposition is asking for them, but what are the Liberals doing? They are blocking the committee’s work. The other place where we are seeing obstruction right now is the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills Development, Social Development, and the Status of Persons with Disabilities. That is because the opposition is asking for figures on cost overruns related to, among other things, the Cúram software, the Phoenix software and the ArriveCAN app. The opposition wants to know what happened. It wants the government to be accountable, but the government is obstructing the process to avoid accountability. Again, these are the only two committees where obstruction is happening. The other argument we keep hearing for why a majority is absolutely necessary on committees is that committees are the place where bills end up when we have to debate them clause by clause, propose amendments and move the work forward once they have been through the House. According to the Liberals, since they have a majority in the House at second reading and can refer bills to committee, they should have a majority on committees so that bills do not get stalled in committee. However, that argument is also pretty odd, because we took the time to run the numbers. We went over every Parliament and looked at how many bills made it through. I have time; I can pull out a few numbers. In the 41st Parliament from 2011 to 2013, 58% of bills passed the committee stage and made it to third reading or the Senate, for example. From 2013 to 2015, that proportion rose to 74%, which is quite high. From 2015 to 2019, under a Liberal majority government, it was 50%. That is not a great success rate when it comes to passing bills, and yet the Liberals had a majority and therefore could not argue that bills were being stalled in committee. More recently, for our purposes, prior to the 2019‑20 prorogation, the rate was 63%, which is not so bad. After prorogation, in 2020‑21, the rate was 60%. During the last Parliament, the rate was 53%. Then, surprise, surprise, although many bills have been introduced recently and have not been debated in the House yet—and which we included in our analysis among those that have not gotten through yet—we still end up with a rate of 65% of bills that have gone through committee. In short, the argument that committees block legislation is particularly misleading. Since there are no issues with getting bills through committee and since there are no issues with filibustering and obstruction other than the government’s own, the argument that we need to have a Parliament that works rings completely false. It is all the more absurd as a reason for not contacting the opposition parties to discuss what could have be done about committees. Another concern I have about the composition of committees is that this requires a notice of motion from the government: Proposing a new committee composition takes a notice of motion from the government. As I have said before, the government’s majority is shaky. We should not be surprised—not now, since the honeymoon still seems to be going on, but in a few months’ time—if certain members of the Liberal caucus, such as the more progressive or greener members, start getting fed up, feeling that they no longer have a place in this government, and decide to leave. Some are physically closer to the door than others. They might be interested in taking one step more. The member for Laurier—Sainte-Marie and a few others might be slowly inching their way to the door, physically and perhaps mentally as well. If the government were to lose its majority along the way, what would happen to the composition of committees? That is an excellent question, which, incidentally, was put to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons. He told us that the opposition parties could use an opposition day to demand that the committees revert to their previous makeup. We then asked him if he would listen to the opinion of the House if such a request were made. The government is forcing the opposition parties to waste one of their opposition days doing the work it does not want to do itself, all in order to uphold the sacrosanct notion of proportional representation on House committees. It is putting pressure on the opposition parties and, what is more, it is paying lip service to the idea that it might consider the opposition parties’ views. However, the way it has treated our views so far—even just in terms of adopting this motion—speaks volumes about what we can expect from it going forward. I will conclude on this point. As I said in my opening remarks, no one is going to come to blows on buses about what we are discussing here. The composition of the House committees is something that is primarily our concern. I do, however, see this as a warning to the general public: What we are seeing now is the beginning of what could become a period of Liberal arrogance that will continue for years to come—perhaps as much as three years. It is not just the opposition parties that will bear the brunt of this. If I were a lobbying group, or if I were the government of one of the provinces or of Quebec, and I heard in the future that the government wanted to collaborate with me, honestly, I would have serious doubts. Without additional guarantees, I would not dare to hope for anything. I would never allow myself to hope that collaboration with the current Liberal government would materialize, unless Canada and Quebec were two separate countries and were speaking to each other as equals.
