SoVote

Context: House Hansard - 212 - Jun/13/23

Mr. James Bezan (Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, CPC)

Jun/13/23 6:47:27 p.m.
Watch

Mr. Speaker, I am quite disturbed that we are sitting here having this debate tonight on changing the Standing Orders through a forced vote. I have been around this place for some time, since 2004. Whenever there have been changes to the Standing Orders, they have been done through consensus, not by having one party or its collaborators, this time the NDP, ramming it down the throats of all the other parties. This is a dangerous precedent that the Liberals are trying to set. The member mentioned that we needed to do this during the pandemic. First of all, if she missed the news, the pandemic has officially ended, according to the WHO. Second, we know there was an opportunity during the pandemic, when we were all here, to make the changes that happened to ensure that Parliament can exist through virtual Parliament. Third, the one thing that happens in virtual Parliament that does not happen here is that there is a lack of empathy. We cannot interact with other members on Zoom like we can in the House. We miss out on the sidebar conversations that happen between all members of the House, not just within their own caucuses. That is the way we build personal relationships. Those relationships were destroyed because of the pandemic, especially for those who were elected after 2019. I can tell members that if we want to repair that and make this place a more inclusive, collaborative chamber, then we need to get rid of virtual Parliament and work side by side on dealing with the issues that are important to all Canadians.

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Context: House Hansard - 212 - Jun/13/23

Mr. James Bezan (Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, CPC)

Jun/13/23 7:05:57 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, with all due respect to my colleagues across the way, they might want to see the flexibility that hybrid brings, but in reality, as they just pointed out, it can be abused as well. The sense of honour of being in this chamber has always been to protect the individual member and to ensure that changes to the rules were done through consensus of every member of this House. I have been here for 19 years and I have actually seen, when changes to the Standing Orders were attempted, one member deny that change. We went for unanimous consent, and it was not there. In light of the fact that these changes to the Standing Orders, the way our Parliament functions, have nothing to do with party affiliation, they should be done through consensus and not through this hammer-fisted unilateral move that we are seeing right now from the Liberals and the NDP.

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Context: House Hansard - 212 - Jun/13/23

Mr. Kevin Lamoureux (Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons, Lib.)

Jun/13/23 7:30:55 p.m.
Watch

Mr. Speaker, the member drew an interesting comparison with Pierre Elliott Trudeau passing a standing order change without having the full consensus of the House. It was on time allocation. If we look at that today, it has proven to be very successful. We have had different political parties in government support it. We have even had opposition parties, the Bloc included, support time allocation. Every party of the House, with the possible exception of the Greens, has supported the use of time allocation. At times, when we cannot achieve a consensus, we do need to take advantage of the things that have taken place over the last couple of years. It is called the modernization of Parliament. I would like to think that, years from now, people will look back and try to imagine 338 people coming to the House to vote in person for 400 votes, staying overnight for over 24 hours to vote. They will look back and see this as a positive change. I suspect, if we listen to what the Conservatives have suggested, a sunset clause would enable the Conservatives to support everything. There seems to be a fairly good consensus already.

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Context: House Hansard - 212 - Jun/13/23

Ms. Christine Normandin

Jun/13/23 7:32:27 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, if the member for Winnipeg North had been paying attention to my speech, he would know that I talked about the Trudeau senior government's passage of time allocation in the part of my speech about how things are being done, not the part about the substance of the motion. We can agree on the merits of time allocation. Perhaps discussions with the parties could have resulted in an agreement rather than the use of a closure motion on the decision to create time allocation. That is the thing I have a problem with. There could have been discussions about the creation of a hybrid Parliament with minor amendments that might have garnered the government the support of all the parties, or at least a significant majority. At the very least, we could have arrived at something that looks a lot more like a consensus. Once again, I would like to point out that there is absolutely no urgent need at this time to introduce permanent changes to the way the House of Commons operates by adopting a hybrid system, especially based on the small number of hours that we will get to talk in the House to a government that refuses to listen anyway. It has already made up its mind, with total disregard for a tradition that has been consistently followed, with one exception, that involves finding a consensus with parliamentarians when it comes to changing the rules of procedure of the House.

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Context: House Hansard - 212 - Jun/13/23

Mr. Luc Berthold

Jun/13/23 10:41:54 p.m.
Watch

Madam Speaker, I challenge my colleague to tell me, of all the changes he has just noted, how many of them were imposed through the will of one party. How many of those changes to our rules were made by one party, without consensus from all members of the House?

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