The fifteen minutes prior to Question Period are reserved for members’ statements. A time-honoured tradition, Standing Order 31 allows private members, members who are not part of the executive council, to speak on any topic for up to sixty seconds. Traditionally, the period has been used for members to congratulate a local sports champion, honour a milestone birthday of a local volunteer, or eulogize a local philanthropist.
However, in the last few years, all parties have decided to politicize the members’ statements (colloquially referred to as an SO 31). Generally, up to a third of these SO 31s will be used to attack an opposition member, or policy, or make a self-serving, free-standing political announcement. Countless CPC members’ statements refer to the supposed NDP $21 billion Carbon Tax. The Opposition is no better, with the leadership encouraging its members to use their infrequent members’ statements to chastise the government for its alleged complicity in the Senate Expenses Scandal.
Again, diverting members’ statements away from their intended purpose is an attack on the few rights that private members maintain. Sadly, members anxious to gain favour with their party leadership are only too happy to participate in this political manipulation of Standing Order 31. But it is the government and opposition party leaders’ vetting and approval of members’ statements, prepared by the members themselves, that is truly compromising members’ rights and establishing them as subservient to their leadership.
However, in the spring of 2013, there was a well-publicized and rare display of an MP standing up for himself. The MP for Langley raised a point of privilege, arguing that his rights as a Member of Parliament had been infringed upon in that he was denied his apportioned slot for an SO 31 member’s statement because the “topic had not been approved.” Without naming specifically who did not approve his member’s statement, Mark Warawa correctly stated that it is only the Speaker who can reject an SO 31. Standing Order 31 states: “A Member may be recognized, under the provisions of Standing Order 30 (5), to make a statement of not more than one minute,” and that “the Speaker may order a Member to resume his or her seat if in the Opinion of the Speaker improper use is made of this Standing Order.”
The practice of members submitting their proposed members’ statements to the House Leader’s Office for vetting has developed lately, and, strangely, it has for the most part gone unchallenged, at least on the government side. Why private members would require the approval of the executive is a mystery, but it is further evidence of party leadership micromanaging MPs and converting them from watchdogs into cheerleaders.
According to the rules, only the Speaker can determine if the contents of a proposed SO 31 are inappropriate or if the statement exceeds the allotted one minute. The rules are there to protect the integrity of the House and the rights and responsibilities of its members. Neither private members’ motions nor bills nor SO 31s are the prerogative of the whips or the House leaders; they are the prerogative of private members. The government controls so much of the parliamentary procedures and calendar, it is imperative that private members stand firm on defending the few rights and opportunities we maintain to raise matters of importance to our constituents.
Sadly, it is through blind ambition that MPs have, for the most part, allowed themselves to become puppets of their party leadership rather than using the rare opportunity to ask a question during Question Period or give an unvetted member’s statement, holding the government to account and representing their constituents, respectively.
The final topic to be canvassed regarding a change in Commons’ procedure that has allowed the government to compromise the House’s ability to force accountability is the government’s increasing reliance on omnibus bills and, more recently, omnibus motions.
The House of Commons is supposed to vet, scrutinize, and, theoretically, improve government legislation. That becomes impossible when the government submits omnibus bills (lengthy bills containing changes to legislation in disparate areas). Time allocations, implicit in the standing orders or imposed by motion, provide inadequate time for MPs to scrutinize complex and lengthy pieces of legislation. The government understands this and submits such bills deliberately.
The most egregious recent example of an omnibus budget bill was the Budget Implementation Act of 2012,[3] which came in at over 1,100 pages. The bill had many non-budgetary items attached to it such as changes to the environmental assessment process.
Invariably, an omnibus budget bill will contain multiple wedge issues, which make it difficult for the opposition parties to vote against the legislation without also voting against a part of the bill that they otherwise would have supported. This kind of packaging allows the cabinet to gleefully point out in Question Period every time the opposition votes against a specific line item in the omnibus budget.
For example, if a question arises concerning the care and treatment of injured war veterans, the minister will take great delight in pointing out that the last budget bill contained a $x increase to the Department of Veterans Affairs, but the honourable member asking the question voted against it. Although that might be true, the MP only did so because he or she was wedged; he or she was not voting against the increase to the department or program under consideration but was voting “no” to the government’s spending plans in their entirety.
In order to properly hold the government to account, it is necessary to break omnibus bills up into logical, bite-sized pieces. Doing so allows them to be properly vetted and then voted on individually rather than as part of an unmanageable package
More recently, we are beginning to see omnibus government motions also. In the first week back following prorogation in the fall of 2013, the government House leader introduced a single motion combining such completely unrelated concepts as: the reformation of parts of the MP expense regime, the restoration of the Special Parliamentary Committee on Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women, and, notably, the restoration in its entirety the government’s legislative agenda to the stage that it was at prior to the government’s decision to prorogue. So, in order to vote for the continuation of a critical special committee engaged in an important study, the members were wedged into allowing the restoration of the government’s legislative agenda, notwithstanding the longstanding rule that government bills die when the government opts for prorogation.
The government should not be allowed to package such unrelated concepts. In fact, in at least one instance the Speaker actually ruled in favour of an NDP request for partial severance. However, the growing reliance on long, disparate omnibus bills and motions is clearly a deliberate and calculated attempt by the government to prevent the House of Commons from holding it to account.
2. Parliamentary Committees
Committees of the House of Commons have traditionally played an important role in the vetting and improving of the legislation referred to them. Many committees of the House have worked together to improve and tweak legislation passed in principle by the entire House of Commons at Second Reading.
However, currently, the House committees have become so politicized that they have become completely useless at vetting or improving legislative initiatives. The committee process has been completely commandeered by the executive, most notably by the Prime Minister’s Office.
Perhaps the clearest example of this is the above-referenced case of interference by the PMO and the minister of justice with the Access and Privacy Committee regarding PMB C-461, the private member’s bill I introduced dealing with public sector salary disclosure. The government decided it