L054 - Thu 28 Nov 1985 / Jeu 28 nov 1985
STANDING COMMITTEE ON PROCEDURAL AFFAIRS AND AGENCIES, BOARDS AND COMMISSIONS (CONTINUED)
The House resumed at 8 p.m.
REPORT
STANDING COMMITTEE ON PROCEDURAL AFFAIRS AND AGENCIES, BOARDS AND COMMISSIONS (CONTINUED)
Resuming the adjourned debate on the motion for adoption of the recommendations contained in the report of the standing committee on procedural affairs and agencies, boards and commissions on standing orders and procedure (No.4).
Mr. Breaugh: This is a report of major proportions. Even though I mentioned this the other day, I want to reiterate that the staff people who worked with the committee during the summer to put this together did yeoman's work. I think members of the committee appreciate the work of John Eichmanis, who is our researcher, Smirle Forsyth, who is the clerk of the committee, and Todd Decker, who assisted us in putting together -- very quickly, in fact -- what is a rather extensive report.
We relied pretty heavily on previous reports the committee had done. We also had the opportunity to talk to people such as James McGrath's committee in Ottawa, which had looked at the reform of Parliament. We had a chance to compare notes with people from other jurisdictions, which I think is important.
The upshot of this is a report of which I am pretty proud. The people on the committee did an excellent job at compromise. We did not get a unanimous report on each and every item; it is virtually impossible to do that. What we did get was a consensus that major changes are necessary, and we tried to build those changes into a framework that makes some considerable sense to me.
If there is a prime move in the report it is very simply to make this old building hum with life. This Legislature should have an identity among the people of Ontario. It ought to be a working place for the members of the Legislature. It ought to provide each and every member of the Legislature with lots of opportunity here in the assembly, off in committee and in a variety of places, to do the work that the ordinary member thinks is important.
For example, many of the recommendations on committees are to provide opportunities for individual members to take some initiative to identify something they personally think is very important: to go to a committee, to have the resources at that committee and to have the ability to organize their business in a committee so they can carry out those initiatives. We hoped that in the process of so doing there would be a flow, an impact by an ordinary member on the way a government forms policy or presents its funding programs and social programs. The attempt is there to do that.
There will be those who will look at this and suggest there is a heavy influence of the American system of government in there. I would not suggest that for a moment. Many of us have had an opportunity to visit the American Congress and several state legislatures. We know what their system is like. Most of us are not advocates of that kind of system.
If there is an apt way to describe this, it is probably closer to what is happening at Westminster now rather than what we might have thought was happening there from visits several years ago. There and in our Parliament, and in almost every provincial legislature in the country, a renewal of the parliamentary system is under way.
That renewal is based on several factors. First, our parliaments are different now from what they were half a century ago. Parliaments have always enjoyed a considerable measure of success by making sure they adapt to the times, reflect different working and living conditions and provide members with the opportunity to use their individual skills in several different settings.
The Parliament at Westminster these days is not very much like the Parliament that met on the fields of Runnymede; it has a totally different character. We are trying to suggest in this report that we adapt to the times as well, that we change the way we work, the procedures by which we get things accomplished around here, and that we do so in a variety of ways.
I am not suggesting for a moment that this report is something that has to be put to the members and that they must say yes or no. There is room for interpretation and negotiation, and there will have to be all those things. What the committee wants is for the impasse to be broken. We want these changes, and it would be useful to spend a couple of minutes on why.
At the heart of the matter is a feeling that the Legislature itself should develop an identity. It ought to be a place that is more than just a house for political argument. It ought to be more than a place where a government gets attacked every day. It ought to be a working place for members of the Legislature. We have tried to provide members with the tools to do their jobs in this report.
The identity of the Legislature as a body is brought out through this report. It begins with the recommendations around the election of a Speaker and says the Speaker ought to enjoy the confidence of all members of the House. There ought to be a bona fide election and that process should come from the members. I remind the House that in Westminster it is much closer to that than it is in the Canadian experience. There they use ordinary members to do the nomination process. There is very often a real election and subsequent runoff elections. That is very much a part of it.
We want to give to the Speaker a role that is a little different from the role you may enjoy, Mr. Speaker, but one that says this building and all its environs are under your jurisdiction. That is not to take offence with any of the ministries or anybody else. It is just that we need a home and the home has to be ours. It has to be under the control of the assembly as that is represented by the Speaker. It means that when we want to do simple things, such as to televise the proceedings of the chamber, we deal within our own home and do not have to go through another ministry of the government.
That again speaks to the idea that the Legislature must develop an identity of its own. Part of that is that this is our home and it is all under the control of the Speaker. That is an important thing. Whether we are talking about televising the proceedings, about security or whatever, there has to be that relationship.
Even on the matter of security around the building -- and some of us are a bit reluctant to say this publicly, because it is not a pleasant fact of life that there is a need for security -- there is a need to have the security in a parliament building done in a different way from the way it might be done at an airport or shopping centre. This is a place where people are supposed to have access to us. They are supposed to be able to come here and see the province being governed. That means the security services that are provided are provided in a slightly different way from the way they might be provided somewhere else. All that is contingent upon the security arrangements being subject to the decisions made by the Speaker and the Legislature itself. That is also important.
8:10 p.m.
In the recommendations around a parliamentary calendar and timetable, we tried to inject a little bit of normalcy into the lives of members. Most of us do not like to cry about home life and such things, but I want to put on the record that there is no sane reason in the world for me to have an 18-hour working day.
No one I know, no friend of mine, nobody who lives in my neighbourhood sets out of his own free will to work an 18-hour working day except me. I think that is crazy. While we may laugh and joke about stress and strains and choices and all that, the hard reality is many members find the normal working day to be close to 18 hours, and that is wrong.
If we are to make sensible decisions, we cannot be totally exhausted all the time. Unfortunately, that is true of a lot of politicians. At about the time of day when one is physically and mentally ready to sink into the floor, somebody demands that one make a decision. One is not in the best shape to make a decision at that point in the day. No company would put its executive officers through an 18-hour business day and at the end say, "Now make your decision." They know it has to be paced a little differently.
It is not fair to the members' families. There is no reason that our families should go through that stress and strain. At the end of the 18-hour day, it is my wife at home who has to put up with me. I do not always leave this joint in the friendliest frame of mind, and that is not fair to her. Members who come from outside the jurisdiction of Metropolitan Toronto pay a price on top of that in the travel schedule.
My family is the only family on my block that does not know when the old man is going to be through with the fall session. My family is the only family on the block that does not know for sure we are going to have a holiday next summer because we cannot plan a vacation. Almost every member is in the same position.
It is great to say that in the old days we all used to get on a train and go to the Royal York Hotel. The House would be in session for four to six weeks and people would stay up all night. That is how parliament functioned. That is fine, but this is not the old days. This House now functions in some form almost year-round, whether we are formally in session or off in committee.
Our families deserve the same shot as everybody else's family. They need to know with some certainty that we will be home for Christmas this year, and we do not know that yet. They need to be able to plan for a vacation next summer. Our children deserve some of our time too.
Part of what the report says when it organizes the parliamentary calendar and a different timetable is that there is a better way to get ourselves organized to conduct the business of the Legislature. For example, we have set out a timetable that takes the average number of hours we now sit in a week and adjusts them to four consecutive days. That means we would be at Queen's Park for four days and back in our ridings for three days.
Most of us who have been elected and re-elected once or twice can tell everybody else that one does not get elected in Toronto; one gets elected by the people back home, who have very real demands on a member's time. They want to see the member at their functions and at the member's constituency office. They do not take kindly to the notion from an assistant that the member will not be back until some time next week. They do not understand that and, frankly, neither do I.
We made this recommendation. I think it makes good sense from a number of points of view: from the family's point of view, from the member's point of view and, probably most important of all, from the point of view of having people make sensible decisions. The members cannot always be on the border of collapse, and many are.
We are getting to that state in this session. We have seen it in every session I have been here. Parliament cranks up and it takes a little while to get the legislative flow going. We do not sit one night, but we sit another night. Then we do a couple of more committee reports. All of a sudden, as we get to the latter part of the session with about three or four weeks left, there are millions of civil servants, it seems, churning the wheels of government saying: "This bill has to come. You absolutely have to have it next week."
We start out at a nice slow pace; then the pace quickens. As we get closer to what we hope will be the end of a session, all of a sudden the work day becomes very long and the Legislature sits from 10 o'clock in the morning until 10:30 at night. We sit extra evenings and we sit extra days. An air almost of panic sets in, and then all of a sudden it kind of collapses.
We think it is possible to organize our time in a better, more productive way that will let members of the assembly lead what is akin to a normal existence. We are in politics after all; so it will not be quite normal.
Let me run through a couple of other points that are in here, because they are important. We dealt with a number of items around the matter of question period. There are those who think this assembly functions only for about one hour a day when the cameras from the broadcast outlets are up in the gallery and that is it. I am sure there are people who report on the proceedings here who are not terribly sure there are night sittings of the Legislature. Certainly there are not huge groups rolling in here from among the population out there.
Question period is an important part of the day; we do not deny that fur a minute. The question period we have here has been described as rowdy and rambunctious -- several other adjectives could be thrown in -- but one thing most of us have recognized over the years is that it is a tough place for an ordinary member. It is a question period dominated by the political leaders. It is tough for an ordinary MPP on any side of the Legislature to work his way on to the question-period list.
Although we have heard millions of suggestions over the years as to how we might organize or reorganize and do things to the question period, when it came right down to it, we said simple things: the leaders get a question and one supplementary and so does everybody else, and that is it. That is about as good as it gets. The intent is that we provide the occasion for every single member on both sides of the House to ask questions during question period.
It seems that no matter what we do -- and we have tried on a number of occasions -- there is an instinct in us that says that if there is a group from back home up in the gallery, somehow we have to find a way to recognize it. If something happened in my riding, I am going to find a way to tell members about it. The Oshawa Generals won a hockey game; the Oshawa Hawkeyes actually won a football game. These are all events that might not mould Ontario, but they are very important to us in Oshawa, and somehow I am going to do that; so we might as well recognize it.
We said we would take a little portion of the question-period time and let the members make short statements. The onus is then on the member to compress the 20-minute speech he has for the Rotary club back home into a minute and a half, get it on the record and get it out of the way. We thought that was important.
We thought it was important that members of the government, particularly those in the cabinet who make ministerial statements, continue to make those and that members on the opposition side get to respond to them. However, all 125 members do not need to spend time listening to a 10-, 15- or 20-minute ministerial statement. The ministers can go outside and do that. They can have press conferences downstairs. They can go to the Royal York Hotel or the Sutton Place Hotel, organize a huge conference on the matter and give a very lengthy speech. In here they should give it to us in short form; they could provide us with all the background information, but keep it short in here.
We did attempt to compress that to make it go a little bit faster. I know there will continue to be problems with it. It is a difficult time. Other jurisdictions, oddly enough, have question periods in which people really ask questions. That has not been the tradition in our House. I wish it were; I wish we could get to that point. I wish people would recognize that one can ask a 20-second question in here and go out and give a five-minute speech. Why do members not do that?
Maybe we have hopes that go a little bit too high here, but we are going to try. We want that occasion to be shared by all members. In particular, we want ordinary members to feel they have a chance to get the concerns of their constituencies on the record. Their agenda might be quite different from the concerns of their political party, which may have some other great tong war under way and which may not be interested in what happened on Erinlea Avenue in Oshawa last night. However, I am, and the people I represent may well be, so we need some occasions to do that. We tried to present that in here.
Let me go to a couple of other things that some will consider housekeeping but that I think are a little more important than that. When one is asked by people why the bells are ringing and how long they will ring, one has to reach for the standing orders to figure it all out. We thought there was a need to simplify that: five minutes and 15 minutes. At the end of 15 minutes, votes will be taken, unless somebody has a good reason for members to need a little more time to get in here; so one could extend it for 24 hours.
8:20 p.m.
It speaks to an issue that has happened here on more than one occasion, as well as in Parliament and in other provincial legislatures, and that is the wonderful new tactic of how to hang things up in the air by not voting. Those of us who have been participants in this process of not voting, and who perhaps even thought at one time that it was a catchy, novel thing to do, have now come to the conclusion that we were not elected in our constituencies and sent down here not to vote. We were not sent down here to take a hike, to go for a walk in the hall or to stroll along Yonge Street. If there is something happening in here that we do not like, we are here to vote against it, but we are here to vote.
The recommendation is in here that will, under normal circumstances, give us a lot of notice that a vote will happen tonight. We have 15 minutes to do that. If members are in Thunder Bay and have to travel overnight to get down here, we can handle that, but a vote will occur. It is not exactly a revolutionary idea, but one that needs to be dealt with.
Let me pick a couple of other areas that need to be dealt with. We thought the whole matter of committee structures needed to be shuffled around.
First, we have seen places in other jurisdictions where people get a lot of information about a budget, whereas it has been only in the last few years that members here have been able to get much in the way of budget forecasts or information the Treasurer of Ontario might have in preparing his or her budget. It is important that a committee of this House develop some economic expertise in forecasting what might happen to Ontario's economy and in putting together options from which a Treasurer could choose something to put into his budget. We must begin to develop that expertise on financial matters which we do not have now.
In reshuffling the deck in the committee system, we spotted that area as a weakness in our system and we felt it should be beefed up.
We also tried to deal with the matter of estimates, which has been a long and thorny argument around here for some time. We now begin each session with some 420 hours allocated to the estimates of various ministries and many members are unhappy with that amount of time.
As one who often has to be a critic for two or three ministries and who often has to spend 30 to 40 hours in estimates, I know the loneliness when there are two weeks to go before the Christmas break and I have a set of estimates that is going to take another 15 or 20 hours. I am off in an estimates' room with a minister who is kind of imprisoned there with his staff and a couple of opposition critics and a very lonely chairman. There is no one in this world who really cares about what is happening in that room.
Many of us, as an exercise in frustration, are speaking out that this an exercise in futility. We want to do it in different ways now. We want to have reviews of estimates but in a more methodical way. We want to have other opportunities to challenge what the government is doing and we have provided for those. We want to have flexibility in how the committees are structured and what they might do.
We need to have committees that have proper resources. I want to spend a minute on that because I have had some reaction to the idea that there be a committee branch established. This is a good example of where some discussion is going to have to ensue as to precisely how we do that.
One of the things that struck us in other jurisdictions, particularly south of the border, is that one often sees members of state legislatures with rather large staffs and members of the Congress in Washington with huge staffs. Their committees also have that potential.
We are nowhere near that, but we have come a long way in recent years. Individual members now have reasonably good staffing. At least the potential is there for some options in the hiring of staff, looking after constituency work and looking after the legislative side of things. That was not the case when I first arrived here.
Committees should have access to staff. Very few of our committees have permanent staff or hire people on contract, though that can happen. For the most part, we are utilizing services available from the legislative library research department, which are quite good.
We wanted to take it a step past that and say that committees as a matter of right can establish budgets, hire a staff and do projects on their own. When they decide how this administrative package should be put together, someone might say, "We already have an administrative branch that is doing that in the legislative library." It is fine by me if that is how people want to proceed to set up that administration.
I want, however, to caution members here. I want it recognized, and we tried to do it in the report, that what is in argument here is that committees of the Legislature have a right to have the tools to do their job. That means some research capacity.
There are some practical problems. If committees change agendas, and we suspect they would do so a great deal -- they might take a subject such as child abuse in one session and study that and in the next session look at some other area of concern to the committee -- it is pretty difficult to hire someone with expertise in one field and then ask that person to switch over to something where he or she may have no background and no training.
The British system has managed to come up with something quite remarkable. To serve as a researcher for a select committee at Westminster is considered to be a great honour. People all over the country are anxious to provide their services, in some cases at no cost or at least at minimal cost. There is a great deal of status involved in working with and advising select committees. Very often they get the best minds in the country in a particular field being prepared to lend their expertise to a committee. They are not interested in it as a career, but it is looked upon as an honour. I would like to encourage that kind of participation by experts.
We recognized that one problem in having only one administrative body handling research is simply that the research required may be totally different in nature from one session to the next. We may not be in a position to offer a career opportunity, but we can offer opportunities to generalists. That is good and worth while, but there may well be times when a committee of the Legislature needs a particular kind of expertise for a short time. Whether it is done through a committee branch in the office of the Clerk or some other measure, it does not matter to me what it is called; it simply matters that the expertise be made available. That is important.
Let me touch on a couple of other things in the report. There certainly are a lot of them. We reviewed the status of the Board of Internal Economy. I recall when it was first established the first move was to try to re-establish an identity and budgetary function for the Legislature. When it was first touted, there was a strong move to say the board ought to consist of ordinary members. Then there was a move to have cabinet representation as well. We wound up with a board that is not exactly like any other committee around.
The recommendations we have made about the Board of Internal Economy are not meant to be critical of what has evolved, but to say it should be a committee of the Legislature like every other committee, charged with a special function. It will probably have to meet in camera more than other committees because it does deal with personnel matters and it does have financial concerns before it, but so does every executive committee or board of control in every city council in this province. For the most part they manage to do these things in the public eye. We think it is important to establish that here.
One of the recommendations suggests rolling the standing committee on members' services into the Board of Internal Economy. Instead of having the Board of Internal Economy meeting once a week or so over here and the members' services committee meeting in public over there, we blended the two ideas.
We also talked about closure. If a government wants to move closure it has that parliamentary tool at its disposal, but that is what it ought to be called. The standing orders should identify it as closure and that is the motion that should be put; not a time allocation motion or some other motion of that kind, but a closure motion. There should be no embarrassment on the government side. If they think an issue has been dealt with fully and they have enough votes to get by, they can move a closure motion at their pleasure.
No one likes closure motions, I hope. On the government side there should be a reluctance to make them and on the opposition side there should be a real reluctance to have them as an accepted part of the procedure, but that is reality. We tried to recognize it by saying that when the government wants to move closure, it should move closure.
8:30 p.m.
We looked at the matters that are loosely called confidence matters. The recommendations of the McGrath committee in regard to the federal Parliament in Ottawa made some sense to us. There should not be this loose, cannonading, decision-making process around what is a matter of confidence. It should be a clearly defined matter. The fall of a government is not something anyone should take casually. We should carefully identify what is a matter of confidence and put it on the books so that in future, when people want to know what confidence is, we will be able to find an answer to the question and not have to read 100 years of parliamentary tricks, stunts and routines or 1,000 opinions by academics.
There are four or five clearly identifiable things that should be construed as confidence. We have identified them and put them in the report. From this point on, I hope this will be the rule book. On the matter called confidence, this is what it will be. When it falls into this category, it will be a matter of confidence. If it does not, it is not; it is a disagreement. You may lose a bill or have a bad day in parliament, but that will not be a matter of confidence. We have made recommendations in that regard.
I want other members to have a chance to participate. I will conclude by saying this has been a long time coming; for me it has been a decade, and for some members of the Legislature longer than a decade. We have put together a package of parliamentary reform that will allow us to be like normal working people, to have a reasonable calendar and timetable that will allow us to utilize all the intelligence that is here.
One of the things most of us who are fans of the parliamentary system, and I am one, offer as criticism is that there is a tendency to say that all the brains in a parliament reside in the cabinet and that nobody outside of cabinet has a contribution to make. I know that is not true. There are members on all sides of the House in all political parties who have a contribution to make. If we were at the municipal level, they would all get the opportunity to do that. That it is not the tradition to do things that way is too bad.
We can no longer proceed with a system of organizing our business that precludes other people from taking some initiative. That does not mean I am opting for an American congressional system; I am not. I am a fan of the British parliamentary tradition, but the British parliamentary system at Westminster today is vastly different from what it was 100 years ago, and it ought to be. One of the strengths of a parliamentary system is its ability to change, to adapt and to use all the abilities of members on all sides and to use them well. That is the single most important thing in this report.
It does not matter to me whether the wording of one standing order is changed and another is not, whether all the changes recommended to the Legislative Assembly Act happen or whether all the administrative changes happen in quite the way I envisage. I could have written a dissenting opinion to this report because it does not contain everything I ever wanted this parliament to do. However, it does contain the bulk of it, and it offers us the chance to work in a political structure that makes some sense and deals with the realities of life in the 1980s in Ontario.
It offers all members that much opportunity. Whether the members utilize it any better than before will be a good question. We cannot do about that; all we can do is put together the opportunity to do those things.
It may well be that members will still come here and for 10 years never do anything except stand up at the right time. We cannot stop that, but we can say there are people who have experience -- people who came out of municipal politics, the professions or the trade union movement -- who have things to say and have things that need to be done. We have provided a vehicle whereby they can do those things.
That is what this report is all about. I commend it to all members. It is at least worth their time to think about and debate. We will have some political arguments about it. I do not expect for a moment that it will happen overnight; it will not. Even if we pass the motion tonight and say we are all in favour of it, it will not all unfold tomorrow morning.
A lot of work must be done by a lot of people after we go through these considerations, not the least of which is the recommendation that we put it in on a trial basis starting with the spring session and try it for a year to see how it works out. We think we have recommendations that are coherent and make sense and open up a lot of new potential for members to do good work. We may have been wrong; we will not know until we try.
The question I really want to put to members tonight is, do we have the courage to try this? Do we have the intestinal fortitude, the political will, to try something a little different, to expand our horizons? For many of us it will be a challenge. This report does not say that we come in here and hack and whack for an hour a day and try to take political cheap shots at somebody on the other side of the House. The report says we can do that, and there will be an hour a day in question period when I suspect it is not going to be any more friendly, more peaceful or more loving than what we saw today.
It says, in addition, there are lots of other hours during the day when we can go off to committee, to our offices or into the Legislature and get something done. If I have a frustration as someone who has been around here for a little more than a decade now, it is that on very many days I did not feel I had worked very well that day. I might have worked hard and I might have worked long, but I was not very productive, and the report we are debating this evening provides me with opportunities to do things.
On that basis alone, I think it is worth the members' consideration. I hope all members will take a look at it. We will argue about it, we will have a discussion here tonight and then we will begin the process of reforming, of opening up a process that really does cry out for reform. I believe this report in its present form is a working document that will help a lot of us to lead better, more productive lives. In the end, the best part of it all is that it will provide a form of government that is more open, more productive and just plain better.
Mr. Mancini: I am very happy to participate in the debate on the fourth report on standing orders and procedure prepared and presented to the Legislature by the members of the standing committee on procedural affairs and agencies, boards and commissions.
As I looked back over my long years serving on the procedural affairs committee, I really did not see much hope for change, although we have had on the committee many progressive members, some of them even Progressive Conservatives -- members such as the member for Durham East (Mr. Cureatz), whom I have always considered to be very progressive as far as changing the rules of the assembly was concerned. I guess one of the reasons he was so progressive is that he had worked for a while as the Deputy Speaker of the House and had gained first-hand knowledge of how the rules affected members.
I think now there is an opportunity for change, there is an opportunity for the members of the House from all sides to get together, to read the report and to take advantage of some of the recommendations we have made. Our committee works somewhat differently from any other committee of the House. We all sign the reports whether or not we agree with them in their entirety. Every member of the committee always signs the report, knowing full well there are some items he would rather not have in it. Every member may have something different; that is up to the individual member, and he will be free to express his own thoughts at the most appropriate time, such as tonight.
After being on the procedural affairs committee for five or six years, and after not being very pleased with the way our work has been received, I now think there is an opportunity here for change. Believe me, we need change, not only to make our own working conditions better so that we can operate in a more effective manner, but we need change so that the change we implement will have a positive impact on what we do for the people of Ontario.
8:40 p.m.
I want to take a few moments to talk about some of the important things the standing committee on procedural affairs has touched upon. We all work here. Basically, we live here, as the chairman has said, because of the number of hours we spend here. I have never been able to understand the former government's reluctance in handing over the jurisdiction of this building to the Speaker of the House.
The Speaker of the House is supposed to represent each and every member in a nonpartisan manner. Who then is better qualified than the Speaker to be in charge of the operations of the Legislative Building? Not ministers, not deputy ministers, not administrators, not managers, not civil servants. The Speaker of the House is an impartial member of this assembly who has been given the tremendous responsibility of governing the operations of the building and maintaining order in the legislative chamber. I have never been able to figure out why the Speaker has had to share the responsibilities with at least two other ministries in this chamber.
I have said many times that I have always been concerned about the architectural integrity of this building. On many occasions a great deal of structural work has been done on the building without the left hand knowing what the right hand was doing. We are abdicating our responsibility when we allow things of this nature to happen.
First and foremost, I am hoping the new Liberal government will finally give jurisdiction of the parliament building and all the surrounding area to the Speaker. He can then become personally responsible to each and every member of the House. If we have a grievance, we will know whom to talk to and we will know it will be settled in a nonpartisan manner without having to debate it with two or three ministers and X number of civil servants.
That is not being derogatory in any way to the civil servants who work here. We appreciate the work they do, but the job of being responsible for the assembly should be the Speaker's. With the procedural affairs committee making that sound recommendation, I hope the government accepts it very quickly.
Mr. Villeneuve: You are the government.
Mr. Mancini: We are going to do something about it.
There is another subject I want to touch upon. The present Speaker, whom we all know affectionately as Hugh, has the respect of all members in this Legislature, no matter what side of the House they sit on. I am absolutely sure if we held a secret election ballot for the office of Speaker, he would be elected.
This leads me to the next point. The members of this House should elect the Speaker. We should make him directly responsible to us. I have been here for 10 years and I have liked some Speakers better than others. Let me say it that way. What recourse did I have as a member if I deeply believed the Speaker was not being impartial or if I deeply believed he had some failings that were so severe that someone else should be in the chair? What recourse does any member of the House have even now if, from what they have witnessed, they come to this conclusion because of their sincere beliefs? They have no recourse whatsoever.
Any man or woman who sits in that chair should command the respect and have the complete confidence of the 124 members who sit here on the floor, of all 124 if possible. I support entirely the recommendation of the procedural affairs committee that says we should elect a Speaker.
There is one other item I want to mention about the Speaker, which was not touched on in the report. In my view, the Speaker has responsibilities as significant as those of a cabinet minister, and I would surely recommend that the Speaker's salary be equal to that of a cabinet minister. I cannot understand why we would give a person so much responsibility, put him in such a sensitive position and then say, "We are going to pay you what we believe is half of what you are worth." I have just never been able to accept that.
Mr. Villeneuve: Is the member Deputy Premier?
Mr. Mancini: I do a lot of work for the Premier (Mr. Peterson) and I am very busy on behalf of the Premier. I travel the province on behalf of the Premier, I attend many public functions on behalf of the Premier and I do many special projects for the Premier. I fulfil my responsibility as he sees fit. Of course, I am not the Deputy Premier. Do not be silly.
Mr. Villeneuve: The member was introduced that way the other night.
Mr. Mancini: I am the parliamentary assistant to the Premier.
The Acting Speaker (Mr. Morin): Please come back to the topic.
Mr. Mancini: I am being interjected at; I am being provoked. The member for Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry (Mr. Villeneuve) is provoking me.
Mr. Villeneuve: I like to pick on little guys.
Mr. Polsinelli: The member picked the wrong guy.
Mr. Mancini: We have talked a lot as members over the lunch table, in the corridors or while the bells were ringing about how we could get this place to function a little better. Many of us have concluded, and the procedural affairs committee has concluded, that we need a parliamentary calendar. We need to know when the work of the assembly is going to commence and when it is going to end.
Let us take, for example, the predicament we are in right now. We are here in the chamber. The House leaders have been negotiating for the past two or three weeks the exact date on which the House will recess. They have been negotiating when the House will reconvene. They have been negotiating this for weeks. We are three or four weeks away from Christmas and we still do not know when the House will recess. How on earth can we run a place in a businesslike manner when we do not know when we are supposed to be here or when we are supposed to come back?
I heartily endorse the recommendation of the procedural affairs committee that we implement a calendar. Then, if there are special circumstances where the business of the province has not been able to be completed, we as a legislative body can extend our sittings; or if there is an emergency or a crisis, we as a legislative body can respond to it by coming in earlier.
The reason we need a calendar, other than to know in advance when we are going to conduct our business, is so we can structure the work of the very important committees. This place has changed since 1970. It is not the same place any more. The committees are very important. They do a lot of good work. The members on these committees should know exactly what time is available to them in order for the committees to schedule their own work properly.
For example, this morning the procedural affairs committee was trying to decide what work we could schedule during the winter months. We know what we want to accomplish, but we do not know what the legislative calendar is. We do not know when we can have witnesses come before us. We are being delayed in getting our work on the table because we do not know and there is no system in place for us to use as a guide. I endorse the procedural affairs committee recommendation that we must have a calendar.
8:50 p.m.
With regard to hours of work, people say: "What is so important about hours of work? You are a politician and you knew in advance you would be away from home and that you would have to work long hours." That is fine. Everyone accepts that. I accept that gladly or I would not be here.
The reason we want to set numbers of hours and the reason we are interested in changing the hours and the way we sit during the day is not to reduce the work load -- the work load will not be reduced, it will always be there -- but to be able to conduct our work in a businesslike fashion.
There is a reason the assembly starts its work at two o'clock in the afternoon. I am told that in England the reason the House of Commons commenced at two o'clock in the afternoon was so the solicitors and barristers and the learned people in the law could go to court in the morning. They would go to court, have a case heard and bill their clients. That is all fair; I accept that. Some of them would bill more than others, especially if one were a Queen's Counsel and could bill more than the poor person who was not. Anyway, that is why we commence our work at two o'clock in the afternoon.
Those days are gone; at least they are gone here. The barristers and solicitors who sit in this assembly are so dedicated and busy with the work of the assembly that they would never have time to go to court in the morning. They would never have the opportunity. They are so dedicated and the work of the assembly is so onerous they must spend not only their afternoons but also their early morning hours here.
Why start at two o'clock in the afternoon and sit until 10:30 at night? Let us start at one o'clock, as the standing committee on procedural affairs has said. Let us fit the same number of hours we now sit into a new schedule that is more businesslike so we can conduct our business in a more efficient manner.
There are a lot of members of Parliament and there are a lot of members of this Legislature who are very critical of government. The first thing they say --
Mr. Villeneuve: Rightly so.
Mr. Mancini: That is right. They were very critical of the last government.
People say: "Why should government be involved in this? Government cannot run business. Government should not be involved in all these things. Look at all the terrible waste." It is no wonder people say that, because we cannot even conduct our Legislative Assembly session in an effective, businesslike manner. It is no wonder people feel that government cannot operate anything. We do not even know how to structure our own work here in the assembly and we are in charge. I find that surprising.
All of us have many obligations in the evening, whether we are from out of town, from the Metro region of Toronto or from the near vicinity of Toronto. There are many client groups that want a representative of the government to attend their functions or whatever they are doing at a particular time. There is a tremendous amount of pressure on the members to make sure they meet with those client groups, no matter who they are. It is very difficult to do that when we are recalled at eight o'clock in the evening and required to be here until 10:30. The elimination of the evening sittings would not eliminate work for the members, because the members have other work they could be doing in a businesslike fashion.
One thing always bothered me when I was in opposition and still bothers me today. I sincerely hope we can do something about it, but I do not know whether we can. The elimination of the Wednesday sitting is something I cannot fathom. I understand why, but I have never been able to accept why we have to be here on Wednesday and have no Wednesday sitting, and then be required to be here from 10 o'clock Friday morning until one o'clock Friday afternoon. Who are we trying to deceive?
Who are we trying to deceive? Are we sitting on Friday morning for three hours just so we can tell the constituents back home, "I have been in Toronto from Monday to Friday"? Is that the game we are trying to play? If it is a game we are trying to play with the public, should we not be somewhat embarrassed? Are we embarrassed by the number of hours we put in here? Are we embarrassed to make public our schedules and show exactly what we do in any given week?
I have always found it disappointing that the resistance to changing the days of sitting, and particularly sitting on a Wednesday, came from the Metropolitan Toronto members who were able to drive home every night and be with their families or from members who were within a one-hour driving distance of their homes.
We all have families and we all have a good many constituency obligations we must attend to. It is really unfair and very callous of the members from Metro or the regions near Metro to be in opposition to a change in the sitting days of the Legislative Assembly.
We have put forward what I consider to be a very fair schedule. It is fair to the members, fair to the cabinet, fair to the Metro members and fair to such members as the member for Sudbury East (Mr. Martel), the member for Oshawa (Mr. Breaugh) and the member for Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry. Why should he be required to spend all Wednesday afternoon here waiting for Thursday to happen? That is not fair.
Mr. Villeneuve: I am on committees.
Mr. Mancini: Committees can sit Thursday morning, Wednesday morning and Tuesday morning; and if the work is not done, they can sit one of the evenings.
Let us end this charade where we try to convey to the people of the province that we are down here sitting five days a week, when we all know it is not true. We all know we sit four days a week and only three hours on Friday. It is one of the biggest abuses of people's time I have ever seen. It is no wonder people feel government cannot operate in a businesslike fashion.
We have dealt with many other important things. We have dealt with questions of privilege. We have felt for a long time that questions of privilege during question period interrupt the flow of question period. In some cases they are an abuse of the privileges of the members because they take time away from question period.
We are allotted only one hour and it is very difficult for members to get their questions in during the one hour we have. The recommendation not to hear questions of privilege -- we are not talking about points of order -- during the one-hour question period is something I think the members of the assembly should endorse.
We went on to discuss ministerial statements and statements made by ordinary members. I was very reluctant to agree with the committee that individual members should be allowed to make statements, because I have watched the situation in Ottawa and I have concluded the time allotted for statements by members in Ottawa is an abused privilege.
9 p.m.
I agree entirely that members should be able to bring to the attention of the House some very important items that may have occurred in their constituencies. Members may want to acknowledge in some way the work of another member, of an individual or of a community group somewhere in the province. Having watched what they do in Ottawa, however, they spend more of their time making a farce of the whole thing and trying to think up something cute and funny to say to fill up the time allotted to them than actually doing what that privilege set out for them --
Mr. Sterling: It is the rat pack.
Mr. Mancini: The rat pack is following what other people did when the Conservatives were in government. I am not saying what the rat pack does with all its privileges is correct, just as I am sure the member does not agree with everything the Tories did when they were in opposition. There are two sides to every coin.
I would like some perimeters for these statements. I would like some guidelines so this opportunity will not be abused.
Mr. Cousens: What is the difference between a perimeter and a parameter?
Mr. Mancini: A perimeter is around; a parameter is -- got it? Thank you very much. The member did not think I knew that, did he?
Mr. Cousens: The member is full of surprises.
Mr. Mancini: I am not a lawyer but I am a gentleman. The member is right.
Mr. Cousens: And the member speaks English good.
Mr. Mancini: Merci.
Ministerial statements: we want to limit them to 20 minutes. I find a small problem with that.
Mr. Partington: Speaking of 20 minutes.
Mr. Mancini: I am just about finished.
What if there are two or three important statements that have to be made? Are we always going to have to ask the House permission to extend the 20 minutes? I do not find 20 minutes to be quite long enough. Half an hour to cover the --
Mr. Martel: And then we will need 35 minutes.
Mr. Mancini: No. We will stop it at half an hour and then get special permission from the House to extend it over that. We will be asking permission of the House to extend the 20-minute rule two or three times a week. I am willing to go along with the committee to try it. I am willing to try it in one or two sessions to see how it works; however, I perceive that to be a problem.
Questions by the opposition: when we were in opposition I felt at the time, and I feel now after witnessing what happened this afternoon, that leaders can abuse question period and ordinary members can be shunted aside almost on a regular basis.
I agree with the procedural affairs committee's report, which states that the Leader of the Opposition gets one question, a supplementary question, a second question and another supplementary question and then the action moves over to the leader of the third party.
If we do not take steps such as those outlined by the procedural affairs committee, we are going to witness day after day what we saw this afternoon at two o'clock when the first question of the Leader of the Opposition took 12 minutes.
We talked about emergency debates. The procedural affairs committee has recognized the problem with emergency debates. We want to eliminate any potential embarrassment for you, Mr. Speaker, so we want to remove the political decision from your hands. We want you to judge only whether the motion is in order, and then we can make the political decision. We want you to have the neutrality and the respect you deserve.
We talked about bell-ringing. I agree that the business of the House should not be held up during a very lengthy period because of some bell-ringing antics, which were made famous by the Conservative opposition party in Ottawa. I agree that stopping the whole business of the country or of the province for some political motive is wrong.
Mr. Sterling: Did that happen here?
Mr. Treleaven: No, it never happened here.
Mr. Mancini: Yes, it did happen here. Let me explain; I am not finished. It did happen here, I believe, one Friday afternoon a long time ago. The Liberal Party, when it was in opposition, did use a similar technique. The bells rang all weekend and we came back to work on Monday. I am not exactly sure how many business hours of work we lost, since the majority of the bell-ringing occurred during the weekend -- unlike the situation in Ottawa where the work of the country ground to a halt. However, whether we did it and whether we took advantage of the situation for a day or two, it is still wrong.
If the members opposite want to keep that option open for themselves, fine. I do not think it won the opposition in Ottawa many points, and to be frank, I do not think it won us very many points either; so it is up to those members to decide how they want to conduct the business of the House. I agree entirely that the votes should be held up only when members are not able to make it and when they have been instructed by their whips to return to Queen's Park for the votes. Then yes, indeed, the bells should ring.
Before I wind up, I want to speak for a couple of minutes about the Board of Internal Economy. As an ordinary member who has spent a long time in opposition and only a few months in government, I have found the work of the Board of Internal Economy to be something like that of Druid priests. These Druids meet once a week someplace in this building. I honestly do not know where they meet. It is dominated by the government, of course, which makes the whole thing suspicious. It makes decisions on very important matters.
Mr. McClellan: Absolutely no doubt about it.
Mr. Mancini: Absolutely. These Druids meet once a week, and they decide on very important matters.
Interjection.
Mr. Mancini: Whoever they are, they decide all these important matters, and every now and then one of the high priests comes down from on high and tells one caucus or another, "We have decided the following." Then there is a big kerfuffle in the caucus and everyone wonders how anyone could come to these conclusions. It is just like the Pope in Rome. He is infallible, or what he says is infallible or something like that. So is the Board of Internal Economy: what it says is infallible.
We must change this as soon as we can. The board must be dominated by ordinary members of this assembly, because what it does impacts on all members; and to have a select few, particularly from the government, in my view is wrong. If we find we cannot work within such a system, then we must create another vehicle to do much of the work of the Board of Internal Economy. One way or another, we have to remove power from those mullahs who meet once a week somewhere in this building.
There is a great deal more that I wanted to talk about, but time is running along and I know for a fact that the member for Oxford (Mr. Treleaven) has a good deal to say about this report. He is going to make many progressive statements. We are all going to be surprised and we will give him a ringing endorsement.
9:10 p.m.
Mr. Treleaven: Mr. Speaker, you can see that on this side we are so enthusiastic about this report we are fighting to get on next. I am going to deal with only four topics, unlike my friend the member for Essex South (Mr. Mancini). I am not going to deal with many things in my dissenting opinion.
I would like to start by acknowledging the work that has taken place. I was not here in 1979 and 1980 and I cannot speak about the work that was done then, as the member for Oshawa can. However, I can talk about the past two years, 1983 and 1984, as could numerous members of the committee who either are no longer with us in the House or have gone on to their rewards with other committees.
We spent a lot of time on this report. I hope it bears some fruit. I would like to speak on four different matters. The first is members' statements. In my dissenting opinion I stated that I do want members' statements. There is no doubt about that. It is an innovation the federal House has brought about; it seems to be working well and makes the place more relevant. It also cuts down on frivolous or irrelevant points of privilege. However, I disagree with the order.
I believe ministers' statements should be first, because matters may arise in the ministerial statements about which the members may wish to speak in their 90-second spots, referring to them either positively or negatively. I think members' statements should be for 10 minutes following the 20-minute ministerial statements spot.
The second matter is about the division bells. We had a formula in a previous report, and the member for Oshawa likes to refer to it as the Rotenberg rule. In fact, it was the Breaugh formula and it should go down in history known by that name. This sounds like the title of a Robert Ludlum book. The Breaugh formula, while it was ponderous and long-winded -- it could take something like 23 days to wind its way out -- at least was a formula to bring bell-ringing to an end at the end of the formulated time.
I disagree with coming right down on 24 hours at this time. I remember the discussions, perhaps in 1983, when there was an attempt to get an eight-hour bell. The then opposition squealed like stuck pigs about that short eight-hour limit. Now it is 24 hours, but it still seems it depends on whose tail is in the crack as to how we feel about various topics. The 24 hours does not allow an opposition to take a strong position and express its displeasure by stretching out bell-ringing.
There is a chance there will be a penalty to be paid in the public's eyes and the voters may have their vengeance later on. However, an opposition should have a much greater chance to express its displeasure. The Breaugh formula allowed that. It combined several things. It allowed the bells to ring intermittently, but the business of the House could carry on in the interim. There would be a bell-ringing episode, and then there would be three days when the bells could not ring; then the bells could ring again, and the House could resume again.
Although ponderous, some formula such as that had the best of two worlds. It allowed the opposition its right to express its displeasure in a fairly extreme fashion, but it still allowed the business of the House to go ahead. It stopped the House from being permanently hijacked by one relatively small group.
The third thing I would like to speak about is the recommendation in the report for the establishment of a committee branch. This recommendation originally came about in 1979 or 1980, I believe, at which point our legislative research service was not up to speed, it was not up to where it is now.
Right now, it seems to me we have a very efficient research service, and I know in the past we have been able to add people. For example, when our researcher John Eichmanis was bogged down at one point with too many agencies, boards or commissions to research, we obtained someone else to assist him by taking two or three of the agencies, boards or commissions from him to do the initial research on them.
Mr. Speaker, I believe in your previous incarnation you will recall when we did have two researchers working with us. We had that flexibility. I believe the flexibility is there to bring in more than one researcher from the legislative research service when occasion makes it necessary.
There is a certain expense involved in the addition of a new branch, which it has been estimated could get out of hand into the several hundreds of thousands of dollars if a researcher were attached to each committee on a permanent basis. I question this matter and think we should look into it carefully before we commence another branch, not only from an expense point of view but also from a duplication point of view.
The fourth and last thing is the confidence convention. Mr. Speaker, I do not want to attribute motives because you would certainly not allow that. I will just say it is an extreme coincidence, in the light of events that took place in June, that we have now a confidence convention listing six different situations under which items are considered to be a matter of confidence and a government would fall. All other cases are not considered to be matters of confidence and the government would remain.
It seems to me that if this confidence convention is allowed to become part of the standing orders of this House, we will be legitimizing the accord that took place last June. I do not believe that is desirable from several points of view. We have British parliamentary tradition and all kinds of precedents to fall back on as to what is and what is not confidence.
I do not believe we should go to a system that approximates more closely the American congressional system with a set of rules set forth. It is a little too expedient at this point. Perhaps in the future, after a change in government, when the accord is history, I would look at this more favourably in an impartial light; and other members of the House could look at it more impartially at that time as well.
I want to give other people, and particularly the member for Durham East, the chance to take part in this debate. Mr. Speaker, I thank you very much for this opportunity.
9:20 p.m.
Mr. Martel: I am amazed at my friend and what he has just said. Much of what is in this report tonight was in a number of other reports his government refused even to bring forward for debate. I recall, as House leader, attempting for at least three years to have a debate. Now he is telling me: "Wait for a change of government. We might look favourably upon it."
His government did not even look favourably upon bringing the report forward so at least we could debate it for consideration. To expect anything from that government, whenever the day might come, is asking us to believe a lot. My friend knows full well that for three years, then two years and one year, we tried desperately to get those various reports at least debated. We could never even get them to a debate on a Thursday evening let alone start to put committees in place that would put all the nuts and bolts together. So it is hard for me to expect anything different from that side of the House and believe it is sincere. I think they prefer to live in the Dark Ages.
The member who just spoke was one of those who spoke against television in the House. I recall in a debate we had about a year ago, when his party was in power, that same member who said he was going to talk about change opposed a resolution on televising the Legislature and making it possible for the people of Ontario to get a handle on what we do around here.
I remember saying that TVOntario had to carry it live in the middle of the day so that teachers could use the television debate as part of history courses being taught; or it could be part of Man and His World, or Politics in Ontario, trying to give people an appreciation, to be able to tune in and watch what is going on through TVOntario, which goes to about 95 per cent of the province. I remember my friend opposing that. Somebody wrote a speech for him and he came in like Attila the Hun and wanted to keep us back in those dark, dreary days.
Mr. Mackenzie: A number of us have that member's measure.
Mr. Martel: I have a long memory.
There are some things in that report that are absolutely necessary. We can no longer tolerate a Premier's office dictating the policy in this building. Some of my friends are amazed at the rat holes they ended up in. They could not understand how they could be relegated to such dungeons. It was a traumatic experience for some of them as they moved out of their 40-foot by 40-foot offices and into offices opposition members had to live in for years.
There is only one way we are going to prevent that from happening again, and that is when we give the Speaker the responsibility for everything in this building. That can never happen again. This building, through the Speaker's good offices, will be doled out for its various functions not on the basis of who is in power but that members are entitled to the same facilities regardless of party.
The government also blocked television. I sat on a committee that redrafted the rules in 1976. We recommended at that time that this building had to be renovated and brought back to its original state. Look at this crazy room here. I am told it used to have soundproofing material and somebody decided to paint it over. So the cost of television, which is supposed to be $2 million -- and it really is $2 million -- goes to $7 million because somebody from the Ministry of Government Services who could not care less about the members came in here and painted the whole thing over. Now we are going to tear it out and start to renovate it.
Interestingly enough, when Government Services controls this building, in the pecking order the last people who get anything are the members; not if one was a Tory member, but if one was an opposition member. One only had to look at facilities or at a host of other things. I say that day is gone. This government has to make this building come under the Speaker, who will be chosen according to these rules.
I am not quibbling with the present Speaker. I told him the other night I thought he was doing an excellent job. I do not compliment Speakers very often because many of them have thrown me out on occasion. I am pleased with the way he is conducting the business. I do not care what side of the House one is on, there is a sense that he rules with fairness and that is really what most members want. That is the way he would conduct the business of this Legislature and of the members, and that is all I have ever been after: it must be fair for everyone. The system I have lived under for 18 years here was anything but fair. We could not even talk about rule changes.
There are some other things. My friend the member for Essex South spoke on timetabling. We know why timetabling never changed. The Tory cabinet thought we could not look after ourselves at night. We out-of-town members might get in trouble. Is that not wonderful? Thank God, Big Brother was looking after us. We could not look after ourselves.
Monday night and Wednesday night are the boys' nights out.
Ms. Caplan: How about the girls?
Mr. Martel: Those are Tuesdays and Thursdays. The Minister of Government Services (Ms. Caplan) could come down here --
Not the Toronto ministers and not the Toronto members, by the way. If one looks in the Legislature tonight and counts the number of Toronto members, or those who can go home, there are a handful. I venture to say, without even counting, six or eight. That was good. They could go home and we out-of-town members could come down. We were in town anyway, so we might as well be here filling the seats.
Mr. Haggerty: We were responsible for making the Legislature work.
Mr. Martel: Yes, we were crazy. They were at home with their families. The out-of-town members were down here doing the business of the province -- is that not wonderful? -- because we would get in trouble. Can you imagine?
Then there are Wednesdays. Those of us who are away from home much of the time as it is, someone such as myself, resent Wednesday with a passion. The only thing I hate more is Thursday nights. Society does not even know we are here. If most people knew we were here this late at night after coming in at nine this morning they would say we were crazy. As a matter of fact, I think they are right because anybody who had any brains in his head would not try to work from nine in the morning and be as effective and alert at 10 p.m.
Mr. Treleaven: That is an exaggeration.
Mr. Martel: I want to tell my friend who is now barking that it was the last minority government that got rid of the stupidity of sitting around here until two or three or four in the morning. The Tories did not want to change even that. They were forced by a minority government to end this stupidity of sitting here until two or three or four in the morning. They are from the Dark Ages.
I resent Wednesdays when the cabinet meets and I have to sit in Toronto away from my family. If I am not on a committee I just sit around here instead of being at home. Why do we not sit Wednesday and take Friday off and go back and work in our ridings? It would make sense for all of us.
There is a schedule in the book that I spent about three years developing that would have cabinet sit on Wednesdays and private members' day on Wednesdays; because cabinet members do not have to be here to have a meaningful private members' hour. But the Tories managed to kill it because the member for Mississauga East (Mr. Gregory) insisted on vetoing every item that ever came to this Legislature, except when a Tory moved it.
I cannot even wake up the member for Algoma-Manitoulin (Mr. Lane). He is smart; he is sleeping through all of this. The rest of the world does not know we are here and could not care less.
If we had cabinet and private members' hour on Wednesdays, we could spend Thursday doing legislation and we could go home Thursday evening in a sensible way and work in our offices and meet our constituents. If we are from out of town and stay here until Friday we are hung up on Saturday.
Mr. Haggerty: They could stay here.
9:30 p.m.
Mr. Martel: Some people may find it as comfortable here as they do at home. I do not.
We did a study in 1976 on the number of hours most members put in per week and it was interesting. The consultants who did the study said we put in roughly 65 to 70 hours per week per member.
Those of us from out of town could always go to our offices on Saturdays, could we not? Is that not wonderful? If a member is from Toronto he can meet his constituents on Monday morning, Friday afternoon or Wednesday night; but we, from out of town, have Saturdays and Sundays. Is that not wonderful?
We could not talk that boneheaded government into bringing us into the 20th century: No, it preferred it the other way and its back-benchers, as they were wont to do because they thought they might get to the cabinet, would never object. They would gripe down the hall and in a committee room, but they would never say to the government House leader of the day: "This is ridiculous. It is idiotic. It is fine for you fellows from Toronto. Even in cabinet, you have Monday morning, Wednesday night, Monday evening or Friday afternoon."
Oh no; it did not matter. They could sit and we could sit here on Wednesdays. Is it not wonderful to have three committees sitting on Wednesday? When they were cancelled one could stand around to contemplate one's navel. It was those out-of-town members who then went home and worked all weekend.
I am not suggesting members from Toronto do not work on weekends, but they can meet their constituents from Monday to Friday much more easily than out-of-town members. Trying to talk common sense into them, my God, was like trying to run one's head through a cement wall. It was impossible.
Mr. Treleaven: Hey, we agree.
Mr. Martel: Oh, no, the members do not; I just heard their comments.
If these rule changes are brought about one thing they will do is give a meaningful role to private members. The place is dominated by cabinet, even in the government back benches. Outside of putting their hands up and down when they are told to do so what is their real involvement? I hear members say, "We have our say at caucus." That is wonderful. That is two hours a week. What do they do the rest of the week?
Mr. Callahan: Relax.
Mr. Martel: Relax? Why not a role for members? There is a lot of intelligence here. Why are we not putting it to use for the benefit of the people of Ontario, instead of hanging on to an outdated set of rules that we at least brought partially into some semblance of sense in 1976?
When I and my friend the member for Erie (Mr. Haggerty) came here everything was done in the House. There were no committees. That finally broke down one year when it took 13 months to do 12 months of business. They realized they were operating an antiquated system. We still are, because outside of the cabinet the private members --
Mr. Haggerty: We work many mornings.
Mr. Martel: Yes, too many mornings. There is no role. There is lots of intelligence on all sides of the House and we never put it to use. If one is in government one cannot take a suggestion from the opposition, and if one is in opposition one has to be critical. What is a member's positive contribution? The two hours during a caucus meeting, if they let him talk? Is that what we are all about?
It is ludicrous. We should be doing investigations. We should be going out there to find out what is going on in other jurisdictions so that if it is good we can put some of it to use in Ontario on behalf of the people of Ontario through an elaborate committee system. Quebec has a nice item in its system. Current expenditure can be looked at today. If a minister is spending something it does not wait.
We vote on the budget. If members can imagine, the money will be spent by the time we vote on the budget. That makes sense, does it not? Why go through the charade? What are we voting for in December when all the money has been spent, except the interim supply which carries the government from the end of December till the beginning of March?
Everything has been spent and one cannot question it. If the set of estimates has gone by and there is a new expenditure coming up one cannot even get a good look at it. One cannot bring a minister out and say: "Okay, now tell us how this money is being spent. We want to examine it carefully." Quebec is currently doing this.
Suppose we have a problem or think something is wrong monetarily. For example, we have looked at the estimates of the Ministry of Agriculture and Food this session. However, if this were a normal year we would be looking at the Ministry of Agriculture and Food estimates last, and it would be April or May.
For the rest of the year, outside of question period there is no opportunity to look at expenditures. It is crazy. It is meaningless. They just go on blithely spending money and we never have an opportunity to say: "Wait a minute. Hold on. That program is not very good. Let us have a look at how you are spending it." Everybody here should be accountable for the money spent, not just the cabinet.
If we adopt some of these rule changes we will have opportunities to have debates we cannot have now. Look at this debate or any other debate. Unless we go into committee of the whole House, one gets up, gives a little spiel and sits down. There is no second kick at the can and we cannot engage in any dialogue. Once one has given his little spiel he is out of the game. If we happen to go into committee of the whole one can get back in the game.
Look at an emergency debate. The minister sits there and everybody talks. At the end, the minister gets up and responds for 10 minutes and the ball game is over. We might as well not be here because there is no way to engage in any dialogue or debate that makes any sense. It is cut and dried. As one member of the Conservative Party said to me tonight, it is decided in caucus on Tuesday and the rest is charades; it really is. Surely if this is the body that sets the policy the province is going to have to live with there has to be a better way.
I know the frustration cabinet ministers have when they sit and listen to 20 hours of estimates. In our system, that is the only time the opposition can get at a minister to talk to him. It is true that it is boring and monotonous, but it is the only opportunity and the only way. One can move an emergency debate once in a while but there is no vote on it. It is just a waste of time. It is not going to change anything. It is not going to do a thing.
The members have to understand that a lot of changes are being proposed. Nobody is going to be happy with them all. There will be some I will object to and there will be some my friend the member for Erie will object to. Every one of us will find one or two rules we are not going to like. We are not going to say, "Scrap it all because I do not like that one." We cannot do that. When rule changes are done properly there is give and take as one tries to improve the system to make it more responsive to the needs of society.
Society is getting more and more complex, and we think we can operate back in the good old days. When I came here the budget was $2 billion. What is it now? Everybody is going to have to give a little. We are going to have to try it. People in all parties are going to say, "You cannot do that."
We brought in a rule called time allocation. We did not do it through the rules. One of the most offensive things I have found about this place is when the rules can be rewritten by numbers. That is how we got time allocation. It is not in our rule book. It has never been in our rule book. However, the Tories could impose their will by a simple vote in the House. They change the rules of the Legislature and that is wrong, that is dangerous, because then one can change any rule by majority. We have to have something that keeps this very balanced system going even when one does not get one's way.
9:40 p.m.
One of the reasons I never allowed us to ring bells when I was House leader is that I believe that government ultimately has the right to force things. When the Tories were on that side of the House they were great law-and-order men, but on this side of the House, my God, it is a different story.
I have watched them in Manitoba when they would not come in and vote on a bill. I do not care whether one likes it or not. In a democracy the party that has the majority ultimately has the right to end a debate and get a vote. The Tories in Manitoba refused to allow the democratic process to work. They did the same in Ottawa. They refused to come in for 19 days.
Government ultimately has the right to rule. That is why I say closure but not time allocation, because they did not do it in a proper manner. They might want to get it in; I can understand why government wants it. It is nicer, it is easier and it is cleaner. Closure is there for a reason, namely, to let government rule. Government does not use it often because it gets a black eye from it, but it ultimately has the right to use it and should use it.
Time allocation becomes a little gimmick. It has been used in Ottawa three or four times at least during some of the bills on reform and the budget. We did not hear a word about it. It becomes very easy then to close off debate after three days. However, part of our process is that the public has to have an opportunity to respond, through its opposition, through writing letters to ministers; otherwise, the danger of becoming almost dictatorial is there when one has the numbers. It is a real danger in our democratic process the way it operates.
One cannot do things that way simply because one has enough numbers to change the rules and to come in and do it. They do it over and over again and it becomes commonplace. As I say, any rule changes should be by consensus.
I am urging the House to take a long look at that. If people do not understand what the committee is recommending, I would urge those who want to talk about what those rule changes are to take the time, because it is the way the House will operate, it will determine whether we are effective. In the final analysis, what we are really all about from our own perspective is trying to be effective on behalf of the people of this province.
There are too many dangers. Democracy is pretty frail. We have to strengthen it and we have to keep up with the times. As society becomes more complex and as budgets become more expensive, we have to have a better way to examine, to advance ideas and to make everyone in this House have a useful role.
It has been my observation after 18 years that unless one is in cabinet, a leader or a House leader, the role for the rest of the members becomes pretty scanty. To me that is a disaster because, as I say, there is a lot of intelligence that then does not get into the process and into the system.
Although some of us will disagree on some of the rules that have been devised by the committee, I urge members to accept them, set up a committee, put them in place and try them for a year. If they do not work we will modify them and we will make them work to the advantage of everyone.
Mr. Newman: I rise to take part in this debate. It is a very important debate because of the ramifications it imposes on the parliamentary structure.
My first words are of commendation to the chairman of the committee, the member for Oshawa, who did an excellent job in the performance of his duties. He was also ably assisted. He was very impartial. He allowed everyone every opportunity to express his opinion concerning the topic under discussion. He was very fair and his services were greatly appreciated by me.
I would be remiss if I did not make mention of John Eichmanis, Smirle Forsyth, and other assistants whose names elude me, for the contributions they made to the development of the report.
I do not intend to talk on the whole report, but I will pick out nine aspects that are going to cause dramatic changes. By following the recommendations made by the committee, we may come upon a new and a brighter day in the not too distant future. I have been here for a substantial number of years. Those who have come in for the last several parliaments really do not know what it was like in the "good" old days. They may have been good at the time, but it was strictly a one-man operation here.
The first item I wish to bring to the attention of the Legislature concerns the election of the Speaker and how that would operate. If this recommendation were adopted by the House, future Speakers would be elected by a secret ballot by all members of the House. At present, although the House elects the Speaker in a formal sense, in fact the Speaker is chosen by the government.
As a consequence of this, the Speaker is not always perceived to be an impartial interpreter of the standing orders. If the Speaker were elected by all members they would have greater confidence that he would be impartial. This is a reform that would add to the independence and dignity of the Speaker as the representative of all members and would ensure the House was master of its own affairs. At present it does not seem to be so.
The second item is the setting up of a parliamentary calendar. The recommendation proposes that the parliamentary year be divided into two sittings with fixed dates when the House would begin and recess. It is proposed that the spring term would begin on the first Monday in March and end on the fourth Thursday in June. The fall term would begin on the third Monday in September and end on the third Thursday in December.
The adoption of this recommendation would in large measure codify the existing practice and, therefore, would not of itself mark a major change in practice. The advantages of this recommendation are that it would create a more orderly flow of business in the House and members would be better able to plan both their legislative responsibilities and their private lives.
The third item deals with the parliamentary timetable. I have taken out nine recommendations, so at least some of us could familiarize ourselves with some of them if not necessarily all nine. There are more to come. The proposed recommendation would see the parliamentary week running from Monday to Thursday from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m., with no evening sittings and no Friday sittings. The 20 hours of actual sittings of the House would remain the same as they are now. The elimination of Friday morning sittings would permit all members to return to their constituencies to deal with their constituents' concerns.
9:50 p.m.
The present arrangement, whereby there are no House sittings on Wednesdays, favours members from Toronto over those who live some distance from the city. Moreover, with no evening sittings, the House time would be available for committees to do their work, whether hearing witnesses or finalizing their reports. This reform would permit the same amount of work to be done in the House, while allowing members to spend more time with their families and to look after their constituents.
The fourth item concerns members' statements in the House. This recommendation would permit all members to speak on any matter of concern to them prior to the start of the question period. Each member would have 90 seconds to speak and the time period for all speakers would be 10 minutes in total.
The reason the committee considered this recommendation was that it hoped in providing this opportunity to members there would be less likelihood that members would raise their concerns during the question period as phoney points of order or points of privilege. At the same time, members would have the opportunity to raise publicly issues of concern to themselves or their constituents that they might not be able to raise at any other time.
The fifth item deals with changes in the question period. I know some of the comments are repetitive because the speakers before me had the opportunity to single out certain items. I am speaking on the first nine items.
The committee proposed that the Leader of the Opposition and the leader of the third party be limited in the number of supplementaries they can ask. Thus, the Leader of the Opposition would have two questions and two supplementaries and the leader of the New Democratic Party would have the same. There would be no crossover supplementaries.
The committee felt this reduction in supplementaries would free time for more back-bench members to ask questions. As it is now, leaders' questions can take up half the time of question period, leaving little time for back-benchers to ask questions. The committee felt question period should not be monopolized by opposition party leaders.
The sixth item is the division bells. Under the present standing orders, division bells for a recorded vote can ring for unlimited periods and can only be stopped when the three whips indicate the three caucuses are ready to vote. The only exception would be when the three whips indicate that because their members are absent they need a longer time to bring their members to the House.
In that case, the Speaker would permit the bells to ring for 24 hours to allow the absent members to travel to Queen's Park. This rule hopes to eliminate the ringing of bells indefinitely for political purposes, as was the case recently in Ontario, Ottawa and Manitoba. The 24-hour rule is meant to accommodate only one legitimate reason for the extension of the bells to more than 15 minutes, namely, the absence of members of the House.
The seventh item concerns changes to the Board of Internal Economy. The recommendation of the committee was that the composition of the board should change in order that there be more back-bench participation on the board. Thus, instead of three members of cabinet there would be only two ministers and the government caucus would be represented by two ordinary members. The opposition parties would be represented by one representative each.
The committee also recommended that the meetings of the board be open to the public and the board's agenda be posted prior to the board's meetings. In making these proposals, the committee sought to make the board more accountable to all members of the House and to ensure that ordinary members had the opportunity of monitoring the discussions in the board.
The eighth recommendation has to do with changes in the committee system. The committee proposed that the present committee system be restructured to allow for a more efficient distribution of work among committees. Thus, estimates could no longer be referred to the present policy field committees but instead would be referred to a new committee, the standing committee on finance and economic affairs. This committee would select several estimates each year that would receive thorough and comprehensive review and analysis.
The estimates not reviewed by this committee would be deemed to have been concurred in by the House. All estimates would be reviewed over the period of the life of the parliament. As all members know, the present procedure for reviewing estimates has little to do with a review of actual dollars. Rather, discussions centre on policy matters and constituency concerns. The proposed procedure would ensure that estimates receive the full analysis they deserve.
The committee also proposed that legislation, rather than being sent to a policy field committee after second reading, would be reviewed by legislative committees specially created for each bill. These committees would exist only to deal with one bill and would be automatically terminated after the review of the bill. The idea behind this proposal is that such committees would be composed of those members who have a particular interest or expertise in the subject matter of the bill.
Policy field committees would therefore be left with the review of all statutory annual reports and with the conduct of any special studies.
The committee also recommended that the terms of reference of all standing committees be incorporated in the standing orders to ensure the continuity of committees and to enable members and the public to know each committee's terms of reference.
As well, the committee recommended that in the future the chairmanship of committees should be distributed in proportion to the representation of the parties in the House. The committee believes this is both equitable and fair and would make chairmanships more sought after by all members.
The ninth recommendation comes under confidence convention. The committee believed it was time to recognize that the confidence convention has evolved over time and that many members would not be aware of how the convention is now interpreted.
It followed the House of Commons in pointing out what matters should be considered under the confidence convention. These matters would be the defeat of a motion for interim supply, the defeat of a supply bill and the defeat of a budget motion; explicitly worded motions of want of confidence in the government; the defeat of a vote on an item the government has declared in advance of the vote to be a matter of confidence; and the defeat of a motion that the government enjoys the confidence of the House.
10 p.m.
In other words, not every vote in the House would be considered automatically a matter of confidence; in fact, most votes, including lost votes on clause-by-clause review of a bill or a lost vote on any piece of legislation, even tax bills, would not.
An acceptance by the House of this interpretation of the confidence convention would give more flexibility to members when a government comes to the House with legislation or any other matter. They would be permitted the option of voting on an individual basis.
The loss of a particular vote would not in all cases be a matter of confidence, prompting the government to resign. This would ensure greater stability for the government, particularly in minority government situations. Moreover, the threat of snap elections would decrease.
These are just nine of the recommendations of the committee's report. It has been brought to my attention that the matter of simultaneous translation is an extremely important item, as those who are a little more familiar with our second language would have an opportunity to receive that information in the language of their choice.
Those are my comments. I would inform the members that these are what I consider to be the nine most important items.
Mr. Cureatz: Might I say what a pleasure it is for me to participate in this debate this evening.
Before I continue, I want to say on a very personal and extremely serious note how very appreciative I have been during the past couple of weeks in regard to the tragic event that has happened in my family with my father's sudden passing. I want to say how encouraged I have been by the support of all my colleagues from all sides of the House. I was especially appreciative of the attendance of our leader at the funeral and, more particularly, of a personal note from the leader of the third party, especially in the light of what took place in his family four or five months ago.
It is difficult to get up a head of steam and come back, but rest assured I am confident. As the member for York South (Mr. Rae) indicated to me, time heals, and within another few weeks, if not by the beginning of the spring session, we will be in good form again, talking about the ruts in Highway 401.
Continuing on to a more interesting discussion, and more particularly the debate that is before us this evening, I can tell that a lot of members are thinking, "How mundane, how tedious, how ridiculous to talk about the rules of this place." Let me tell the member for Cambridge (Mr. Barlow) how serious a debate this is, because it is going to affect our working days here in this assembly. In my evaluation, it is going to be on a positive note.
I am personally gratified by the work the committee has undertaken, with special thanks to the chairman, my colleague the member for Oshawa. I think of his more learned experience in following the rules of this House much longer than I have, a whole 18 months longer, with his election in 1975 and mine in 1977. The member for Oshawa has made it a particular point to set his focus on the rules of this assembly. At times it can be a little tedious, and I want to congratulate the member for Oshawa for being persistent. It has been a long, tortuous route, but we have finally come to a point at which something is taking place in regard to the rules of this chamber.
Just as an aside, I am pleased to say I have had the opportunity to sit in on the procedural affairs committee from time to time. In more recent times, just before the last provincial election, the committee, of which I was a member, went down to Boston to review the Legislature of the commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Mr. Gregory: Shame; terrible.
Mr. Cureatz: Listen, it is not that far. As a matter of fact, I think from Toronto to Boston is closer than from Toronto to Montreal; so it was not that much of a junket.
Interestingly enough, the Democrats in the state House of Representatives had begun their television coverage within the past two or three years and they invited the committee members to participate, not in the debate on the floor of the House but on a trial basis to see what the cameras do and how we would appear on television. Guess who, fellow colleagues of this assembly, decided it would be a great idea to participate in such an event? It was the Progressive Conservative member for Durham East, showing a little progressivism with respect to what should take place.
The member for Mississauga East and I are going to have a lot of fun for the next three weeks. If the Leader of the Opposition (Mr. Grossman) does not change the honourable member's seating we are going to be at each other's throats before this is over. I am not finished with the member yet.
I was most interested in the comments of the member for Sudbury East with respect to the frustrations he has had over the many more years he has had in this assembly than I.
I can remember only too well attending a most sumptuous dinner in 1978, sponsored by the then Speaker of this assembly, Jack Stokes. Who remembers Jack? Hands up. How soon we forget. A couple remember Jack; terrific. Jack was a socialist, he was a great Speaker, but boy he knew how to throw a party.
We had a great evening with the Speaker in the Speaker's apartment. Who was in attendance? None other than the member for Sudbury East, my humble self as a newly elected member to these sacred chambers and the then government House leader, one Tom Wells.
After some libation of apple juice and getting into dinner, a most heated debate began between the member for Sudbury East and the then government House leader, Tom Wells, over some of the changes that should take place in this Legislature.
I listened. I smiled. I cowered a little. Here were these two great antagonistic foes battling back and forth over dinner, and I thought to myself: "The rules of the assembly? What do I know about the rules of the assembly? I won by a mere 122 votes."
It was more important for me to attend the business in the riding. That is something, as an aside, I say to remind all the back-benchers over on the Liberal side. The Premier is not going to be switching this cabinet around too quickly; so the members had better go back to focusing on their ridings. It is going to be an interesting election in 1987; I predict it will be in the fall.
Notwithstanding that, that was my approach. Little did I know that -- heaven forbid, bite my tongue -- what the member for Sudbury East spoke of was pretty close to the truth. How did I find that out? It was that famous year, 1981, March 19. Right over there on the front bench we are all reminded of the realities of March 19. Shortly after that sacred date, it was decided and I accepted -- I am sorry if I am keeping the member for Eglinton (Mr. McFadden) awake.
An hon. member: What about the realities of May 2?
Mr. Cureatz: We will not talk about the realities of May 2. That is another story.
As I was saying, it was decided that I should take on the interesting position of Deputy Speaker.
Mr. J. M. Johnson: That was a mistake.
Mr. Cureatz: Maybe so. The member for Wellington-Dufferin-Peel indicates it was a mistake. However, for three glorious years, between occupying the Speaker's chair and being Chairman of committees of the whole House, we had a heck of a time. It was very interesting, it was a lot of fun, but it was most frustrating.
Mr. Sargent: You were a mean one.
Mr. Cureatz: Eddie, I can think of a time sitting in this chair on a particular Thursday --
Mr. Speaker: The member for Grey-Bruce.
Mr. Cureatz: This is coming down to the procedural affairs committee's report, Mr. Speaker; do not worry, we are getting there.
10:10 p.m.
I can remember a particular Thursday question period when the then Speaker was up in Peterborough handing out cheques on behalf of the then Minister of Health -- but that is another story we will not get into -- when lo and behold, the week before Christmas, who shows up in the chamber in the middle of question period as the lights were blazing down on me, as they can only blaze in this place; I am glad they are a little softer now, but I want to tell the chairman of the standing committee on procedural affairs they are still a little too bright, Mike, and I do hope --
Mr. Speaker: The member for Oshawa.
Mr. Cureatz: I hope the member for Oshawa takes that into consideration.
In any event, who showed up in these chambers but none other than the member for Hamilton East (Mr. Mackenzie). Well, says Rene, "Big deal." The member for Hamilton East, let me tell the members, showed up in a Santa Claus outfit in the last week on the second to last day before the Christmas recess. Everybody was hot, champing at the bit and trying to make this place relevant during question period.
As Acting Speaker, I suddenly had to make a decision as to whether there was a point of privilege, a point of order or any kind of point that the member for Hamilton East should be ejected from this sacred chamber. We had a grand time and everybody was yelling and screaming right here in this room. Suddenly, in my learned wisdom, I had to make a decision as to what to do with the member for Hamilton East, whose name I think, but I am not sure, is Bob Mackenzie.
In any event, with great trepidation and with knees wobbling, I sat at that microphone, cleared my throat and said, "Colleagues of this assembly, how could I ever explain to my children that I kicked Santa Claus out of the parliament of Ontario?" That met with a great chuckle and round of applause and the day was saved.
However, the then Sergeant-at-Arms reminded me that unfortunately no member of parliament was allowed in parliament if -- are the members ready for this? Why do they think a member of parliament cannot come into these chambers? Does any member have a clue? Does any member have an iota? Not even the esteemed president of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario has any idea.
Mr. Callahan: Shame, shame.
Mr. Cureatz: The reason is that one cannot come in here if one is wearing a hat. Under Erskine May's Parliamentary Practice, which I recommend to the barrister and solicitor, the member for Mississauga. It is a nice little book of about 1,500 pages --
Mr. Callahan: For where?
Mr. Speaker: The member for Brampton.
Mr. Cureatz: Brampton; that is even worse. Brampton; can the members imagine? That was the sacrosanct Progressive Conservative stronghold of Bill Davis, and now it has a Liberal. I cannot believe it, but I have to believe it.
In any event, under May's Parliamentary Practice, which is a book that weighs 13.95 kilograms, one is not allowed to wear a hat in these chambers.
I then had to stand up on the advice of the Sergeant-at-Arms and indicate to the member for Hamilton East -- the members think it is tough dealing with one's spouse at home; they should tangle with the member for Hamilton East on a hot day in these chambers. I again approached the member for Hamilton East and indicated it was inappropriate for him to be wearing his Santa Claus hat in these chambers. Lo and behold, as if for a Christmas gift, the member politely took the hat off and we carried on with question period.
Many members are asking, as is the member for Brant-Oxford-Norfolk (Mr. Nixon) and the member for Bellwoods (Mr. McClellan), what does this have to do with the debate at the moment?
Mr. McClellan: Nothing.
Mr. Cureatz: That is right. The answer is very simple. From that day on and from perusing the long hours as Deputy Speaker sitting in this chamber, it became increasingly obvious to me that something had to be done about the rules of this House. They were archaic.
What to do? As a humble Deputy Speaker, way down in the pecking order of the great Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, goodness knows I tried to implement some -- are the members ready for this? Are the Conservative members ready? For those Conservative members who are not here, I hope copies of the transcript are sent to all the members, including our Conservative colleagues. I know the president is going to take it upon himself to do that. I tried to institute, I say to the member for Mississauga North (Mr. Offer), a little fairness. Who has heard of the word? Fairness. Can the members believe it? Some fairness in these chambers?
If there was ever an end to a political career, it was trying to institute fairness in these chambers. I can remember sitting in that chair, and it turned around two points I am getting to, points of privilege and points of order. Members still do not know what points of privilege or points of order are and they do not care what they are. What they do care about is standing up in their places and trying to get a beef off their chests. More than likely they want to get it in Hansard, and, heaven forbid, some photostat copies of Hansard, and get it back to their presses back home to show how well they are working on behalf of their ridings.
I have no problem with that and I had no problem with it when I was Deputy Speaker. When it came to the fine point of calling a point of privilege or a point of order, what did I do? I could immediately cut off the member at the knees, and usually it was an opposition member, or I could shrug my shoulders and say: "What place of debate do they have other than this chamber? Where else can they go to complain?" This was the place where they had to be heard.
That is how I approached the job. Notwithstanding the problems of points of privilege and points of procedure, I quite often rolled with the punches and allowed the then opposition members to carry on with their points. About a minute and a half later -- and I underline that because it is very interesting in the report -- I would stand up, clear my throat and another 30 seconds would go by. Then I would say to the member, "That is neither a point of privilege nor a point of order and, therefore, you have to sit down." Very kindly, the member would sit down and we would follow the game through to its conclusion.
Meanwhile, friends of the assembly, what was happening to my right? I will tell the members what was happening to my right. I was being badgered and harassed by the infamous front bench, and sometimes one or two people from the second bench, about letting the opposition members carry on for too long a time. They said: "We are the government and this is not allowed in here. We are running the show. You should tell that person to sit down." We had some interesting times in the back lobby when I left the chair. From time to time, certain people would indicate, in terms of my preference, they wondered whether I was a Conservative.
Mr. Breaugh: Name names.
Mr. Cureatz: That is for another time and another place.
I stood fast, however, because in my estimation if I was going to go, I would rather go knowing I was being fair -- at least I thought in terms of fairness -- than kowtowing. After all, the position of Deputy Speaker was supposed to be, and I still strongly feel should be, unbiased. I felt I would rather stand up to that position and hold the position true than succumb to other people's concerns about my party allegiance.
I decided of my own accord that I would do my little bit to try to instigate some thought about redoing the rules of the assembly. What did I do? I did some research. All that research accumulated in something called the Canadian Parliamentary Review. Its editors very kindly published in the summer of 1983 an interesting article entitled Some Thoughts on Parliamentary Debate in Ontario.
That was not the right thing to do either, because I was just the lowly Deputy Speaker. Somehow I trod on other people's toes by going ahead and making some recommendations about what I thought should take place in the rules of the assembly. Some things just had to be done.
If the member for Sudbury East is listening somewhere in this hallowed building, I hope he realizes there were, as humble as we were, one, two, three or four Progressive Conservatives who were concerned about the debates and the manner in which they were taking place in the assembly. The member for Sudbury East, as the member for Oshawa knows only too well, was not the House leader who objected to redoing the rules of this House.
10:20 p.m.
Mr. McClellan: Who was it?
Mr. Cureatz: It was someone I called the God Emperor. That name will be reserved for another time and another debate.
I wrote to all the parliaments in Canada and the territories. I wrote to the British House of Commons and the European Parliament. For a year and a half, I had a great time reviewing what we could do in this assembly with Linda Grayson, who was head of the research staff. I believe Smirle Forsyth had some help, and John Eichmanis was up top watching these proceedings. We put together some interesting points in regard to what should take place.
What did I recommend, in the short eight minutes I have? On page 26, under "Recommendations," we say, "When the rules no longer reflect the realities of the House, it is time to consider changing them." How dramatic, how progressive to change the rules.
"After some discussion with colleagues in all three political parties, the following general consensus emerged. Questions of procedure relating to privilege are technical, and anything that can be done to improve the understanding of problems of privilege is worth considering through the procedural affairs committee," the committee we are discussing this evening.
Further on, without boring all members, there are two points:
"A further improvement of the use of privilege might be made by distinguishing points of traditional privilege, meaning points of privilege so urgent as to require the immediate attention of the House, from (2) points of privilege which could be confined to a specific time slot for consideration by this House."
Lo and behold, we take a look at the synopsis of the report --
Interjection.
Mr. Cureatz: We are getting there. We look at the synopsis of the report, and what do I see? My heart thumped with joy. There, at the bottom of the first page, the first recommendation says: "The committee recommends that all questions of privilege be heard immediately following question period." I recommended before question period, but before or after, what difference does it make? "This would ensure a consistent time each day when members will know the Speaker will hear points of privilege and would ensure an uninterrupted question period."
The second point, which I related back in 1983 -- talk about prescience -- states: "The committee recommends the addition of members' statements to the routine proceedings as a 10-minute period during which members may raise points of concern to them and to their constituents. Such a provision is based on the practice of the House of Commons." Somewhere it goes on in here to say how long one would get. One would get a minute and a half.
How long did I sit in the chair and wait for the opposition members to get through their points of privilege and points of order, which were not either? A minute and a half. I am so pleased the committee has followed through on some of my thoughts in the Canadian Parliamentary Review.
I also want to mention in passing to the chairman of the committee on procedural affairs that there is something practical we should think about. That practical aspect is --
Interjection.
Mr. Cureatz: We have five minutes left in this debate. Hang in there, everybody. It will be most interesting.
We should get a binder, put the rules in the binder and tab the binder so it will be easy for new members. Look at all those fresh new Liberal cherub faces here in these hallowed chambers, not knowing what takes place under our procedures. If we put it down practically in a nice little book, I think it would do well for this assembly.
Somewhere in the basement of my home in a banana box I have a lot of the rules of procedure from the other parliaments across Canada, and members should see the nice job they do in places such as Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and Manitoba. All the other provinces have something they would be proud of in terms of putting their rules in a good binder. This is something practical we should be thinking about.
Mr. Breaugh: We will go and check that out.
Mr. Cureatz: All right.
Here is something good. Back to my recommendations. Are members ready for this?
"Many other aspects of our rules and procedures need to be re-evaluated." This is back in 1983.
Mr. Sterling: We have heard this.
Mr. Cureatz: No, the member has not heard this one; it is a new paragraph: "I might mention in particular the need for a parliamentary calendar and the possibility of eliminating night sittings." If anything did me in, it was the night sittings. We should look at doing away with night sittings. Lo and behold, two and a half years later, in the committee's recommendations, I am exceedingly happy that we are doing away with night sittings.
Mr. Sterling: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker: I should let the member for Durham East know that when he extends his arms on both sides, the television screen is not wide enough to take in both arms. If he is going to gesture, he should do it with one arm.
Mr. Cureatz: That is neither a point of order nor a point of privilege. This is the very problem I have been relating to.
There are two other areas of concern to me. One is the breakout of the manner of procedure of question period where the leader of the official opposition gets a question and a supplementary question, etc. When it finally comes to private members' questions -- it is so nice to see the Minister of Education (Mr. Conway); did he come in the limousine with the yellow lights, pull right up to the door and jump out?
I am a little concerned that there should be some recognition, not of the private members but of the party percentage of members here. I have in my mind that the manner in which this Legislature should run is that the Conservative private members get two questions, then the New Democratic Party, then the Liberal back bench, etc., in rotation. There should be some consideration of us, not only as private members but also as representing the party and the percentage that each party represents in these chambers.
Last but not least, in the waning minutes I have, as the clerks of the assembly gather around reviewing my thoughts and my contribution to the debate, going home tonight, making notes I am sure, and testing themselves tomorrow morning over my thoughts, we should be giving some consideration to how revolutionary -- is someone listening; the member for Oshawa or the member for Oxford? We should have the Speaker, the Chairman of the committees of the whole House -- Minister of Education, this is important -- the Deputy Chairman of the committees of the whole House and we should have another Deputy Chairman of the committees of the whole House. The Speaker should have three other individuals helping him. We have only two at the moment.
When I was Deputy Speaker, the government brought in wage restraint legislation. For those members who were here that went on for almost a solid year. I was Chairman of committees of the whole House. Do members think we got to section 87 of the bill? For one year we did not get past clause 1(a). I sat in that chair, along with my colleague the member for York Centre (Mr. Cousens), and it was tedious.
From time to time members from all sides would help, but it was tough slugging. I make the recommendation that there should be three people under the Speaker to give assistance, especially when we look at the committee's report and it shows we are going to be sitting for eight months. If we want to be running the chamber, doing our constituency work and working in the office, we do not have enough time.
Those are a few of the comments that concern me about this report. I am very pleased to have had the opportunity, and I am looking forward to some of the new, dramatic, interesting and useful changes that will be taking place.
On motion by Mr. Warner, the debate was adjourned.
The House adjourned at 10:30 p.m.