Mr. Speaker, I would like to come back to the point of order raised yesterday by the House leader of the official opposition, because it pertained to our presence in committee.

We are not asking for more privileges than the others. We are just asking for the few rights that we do have to be respected. There are 308 MPs in the House, who were all legitimately and democratically elected. The rules of Parliament are supposed to allow all of us, from the Prime Minister right down through the ranks, to do our work as legislators for the benefit of our constituents, whether we are members of recognized parties or not.

Mr. Speaker, we are pleased to see that you want to uphold the principles behind your December 12, 2012, ruling, which reminded members that, in accordance with page 307 of the second edition of House of Commons Procedure and Practice.

It is the responsibility of the Speaker to act as the guardian of the rights and privileges of Members and of the House as an institution.

You then went on to say that:

Accordingly, unless and until new satisfactory ways of considering the motions of all members to amend bills in committee are found, the Chair intends to continue to protect the rights of independent members to propose amendments at report stage.

That is exactly what we expect of you, Mr. Speaker. A new satisfactory way of considering our amendments in committee can only be interpreted as an opportunity not only to table amendments or simply send them by fax, but also to put them forward ourselves in committee, debate them and vote on them, exactly as we do now at report stage. I am sure you will agree that we cannot rely on the goodwill of committee members, our political opponents, to put forward our amendments. Even if they wanted to, it would be impossible for them to debate and explain what amendments proposed by independent members or members of the Bloc Québécois or the Green Party are all about and the reasons behind them.

However, your decision opens the door to testing certain procedural measures in order to allow members of non-recognized parties and independent members to propose amendments to bills in committee. You also said:

..its report stage selection process would adapt to the new reality.

We understood what that meant, and we were not the only ones. The government interpreted it in its own way, as did the opposition parties. We are willing to participate in committee work with the understanding that we are not permanent members of the committees and that a time limit will be imposed on us based on our respective weight in the House. However, we want to have the same right we have at report stage in the House: the right to propose, debate and put to a vote our own amendments. Simply faxing or emailing our amendments to a committee may be an efficient method of having our amendments studied in committee, but I respectfully submit that it would strip us of the fundamental right to represent our constituents, a right that is enjoyed by all other members of the House. Report stage is when we are currently given the opportunity to exercise that right.

I sincerely believe that the scope of your ruling of December 12, 2012, was not intended to deny us our rights and make us second-class members. I believe that your ruling was designed to invite committees to use Standing Order 119, which allows them to give MPs who are not permanent members the right to speak. It was in response to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons, who, on November 28, 2012, asked you to muzzle members of non-recognized parties and independent MPs. That member referred to the changes imposed by Speaker Milliken to minimize the use of motions of a repetitive, frivolous or vexatious nature or of a nature that would serve merely to prolong unnecessarily proceedings. None of the motions moved by the Bloc since the May 2011 election have met that description. We also feel that there is a need to clamp down on abuse, but that this should not be done at the expense of our rights and privileges, as the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons sadly proposed. O'Brien and Bosc fully explains those rights and privileges:

In recommending that report stage be restored, the 1968 Special Committee on Procedure believed that stage to be essential in order to provide all Members of the House, and not merely members of the committee, with an opportunity to express their views on bills under consideration and to propose amendments, where appropriate. For all that, the intent of the Committee was not for this stage to become a repetition of committee stage.

We were recently able to test out this new direction you gave, Mr. Speaker, in response to the comments by the government House leader. Following the vote at second reading stage of Bill C-60, we were invited to propose amendments in committee. According to the committee motion, these amendments were deemed proposed during clause-by-clause study. Technically, we were not allowed to propose our amendments since we are not members of the committee.

Following an email exchange and meetings with the chair of the Standing Committee on Finance, we were able to briefly present our amendments because we did not have many, we were told. The official opposition made sure to remind us that we were not members of the committee under the rules and procedures of the House.

My colleague, the hon. member for Bas-Richelieu—Nicolet—Bécancour, was not allowed to ask the officials present any questions, and the leader of the Green Party was unable to respond to comments on the amendments. Our participation was reduced to an absolute minimum.

In your ruling on December 12, 2012, you said:

The Standing Orders currently in place offer committees wide latitude to deal with bills in an inclusive and thorough manner that would balance the rights of all members. In fact, it is neither inconceivable nor unprecedented for committees to allow members, regardless of party status, permanently or temporarily, to be part of their proceedings, thereby opening the possibility for the restoration of report stage to its original purpose. For inspiration on the possibilities, members need only to remember that there are several precedents where independent members were made members of standing committees. Short of that, there is no doubt that any number of procedural arrangements could be developed that would ensure that the amendments that independent members wish to propose to legislation could be put in committee.

I think that the opportunity to be part of a committee would help us find that balance you are looking for and we are looking for.

At report stage, we can table and propose, debate and vote on amendments, thanks to the notes to Standing Orders 76(5) and 76.1(5) to which you refer in your decision of December 12, 2012, on the selection of report stage amendments:

For greater certainty, the purpose of this Standing Order is, primarily, to provide Members who were not members of the committee, with an opportunity to have the House consider specific amendments they wish to propose.

We participated in good faith in the process recommended by the Standing Committee on Finance, but it is clear that the balance you spoke of in your decision was not achieved.

We, the members of non-recognized parties and independents, are now at the centre of a procedural war between the government and the opposition. We find ourselves in the middle of a ping-pong game where our rights and privileges are in play.

The procedure at report stage that allows us to table, debate and vote on amendments is currently predictable. The new process is clearly not. Not all committees ask us to table amendments. Some invite us to propose amendments but do not give us the opportunity to do it ourselves, and still others, such as the Standing Committee on Finance, allow us to do so, but with every possible restriction.

There are only two options: either we are entitled to propose amendments in committee with all the applicable rights, or we are not and can do so at report stage. What we want are clear rules. We do not want to be tossed around, at the mercy of every arbitrary decision made by each of the committees. We no longer have the resources to cope with the haphazard approach or the whims of the other parties, which would like nothing better than to block us at every turn.

We do not want to have to defend our rights case by case, committee by committee, and make it painfully clear with every bill that we cannot exercise our rights in committee.

In closing, I would like to point out to you that when the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs was instructed to examine the standing orders and procedures of the House and its committees, pursuant to the February 17, 2012 motion, I wrote to the chair of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs on February 27, 2012 and requested that a member of the Bloc Québécois sit on the committee for the duration of its work on this matter.

“The fact that we cannot speak in committee is an aberration that deprives us of some of our parliamentary privileges, and that is what we wish to discuss in committee,” I wrote to the committee chair.

The Bloc Québécois was already showing its willingness to work with the committee to address what we consider to be the denial of our parliamentary rights and privileges. The committee never replied to our letter.

As I pointed out yesterday, there are examples of members of non-recognized parties and independents being given rights on the committees of other legislative assemblies.

It seems to me that the evolution of House practices could allow better predictability of the rights of members of non-recognized parties and independents, as is permitted by Standing Order 122 of the National Assembly of Quebec. It states that any independent member or member of an opposition group other than the official opposition can be appointed to a standing committee, which is the equivalent of the committees here in Ottawa. In that case, the committee consists of 12 rather than 10 members.

Mr. Speaker, my colleagues and I are prepared to advance the practices of the House, but our current rights must be preserved.

As guardian of the rights and privileges of the House of Commons, you have a duty to preserve our rights.

André Bellavance

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