Hon. Raymonde Saint-Germain: Senator Tannas, would you take another question?

[English]

Senator Tannas: Yes.

[Translation]

Hon. Diane Bellemare: Would Senator Tannas take a question?

Senator Tannas: Yes.

Hon. Donald Neil Plett (Leader of the Opposition): I’m wondering whether Senator Tannas would take a question.

Senator Tannas: Yes.

Senator Plett: I accept that is your intent, Senator Tannas. Of course, as I said, when debate collapses here, I’ll move adjournment because I want to study that. I don’t think what you just said would, in fact, happen the way I read this.

I’m not a Philadelphia lawyer, but to me, this reads as Senator Gold can decide and tell us this is an urgent matter, and he could say, “Now, I don’t care what paragraph 1 says. I say it’s an urgent matter.” To me, this looks like our incompetent government — and I don’t want to say our incompetent government leader. It’s our incompetent government, who Senator Gold has to represent unfortunately — is still allowed to do what I said.

We might want to find a way of amending that. I’m not sure, but we will certainly want to look at that for a while and see whether or not — if you want to reply to that, certainly, please do. It was a comment more than a question, but please.

Senator Tannas: Again, we are looking to find whatever rule possible to legitimately recognize real emergencies, debate and decide that it is an emergency, and move, rather than by deciding through side negotiations and pressure that will certainly always come from the government: phoning people, telling people we’ve got to get this done, et cetera. According to them, it’s vital. It’s always vital, always an emergency.

We have got to take those discussions out of the hallways and into the chamber and allow senators to decide whether or not — and how they want — to waive their constitutional rights and obligations in the consideration of legislation. We are wide open to any amendments you think will help solve the problem. Thank you.

Hon. Scott Tannas, pursuant to notice of December 14, 2021, moved:

That, notwithstanding any provision of the Rules, previous order or usual practice:

1.except as provided in this order, the question not be put on the motion for third reading of a government bill unless the orders for resuming debate at second and third reading have, together, been called at least three times, in addition to the sittings at which the motions for second and third readings were moved;

2.when a government bill has been read a first time, and before a motion is moved to set the date for second reading, the Leader of the Government in the Senate or the Deputy Leader of the Government in the Senate may, without notice, move that the bill be deemed an urgent matter, and that the provisions of paragraph 1 of this order not apply to proceedings on the bill;

3.when a motion has been moved pursuant to paragraph 2 of this order, the following provisions apply:

(a)the debate shall only deal with whether the bill should be deemed an urgent matter or not;

(b)the debate shall not be adjourned;

(c)the debate shall last a maximum of 20 minutes;

(d)no senator shall speak for more than 5 minutes;

(e)no senators shall speak more than once;

(f)the debate shall not be interrupted for any purpose, except for the reading of a message from the Crown or an event announced in such a message;

(g)the debate may continue beyond the ordinary time of adjournment, if necessary, until the conclusion of the debate and consequential business;

(h)the time taken in debate and for any vote shall not count as part of Routine Proceedings;

(i)no amendment or other motion shall be received, except a motion that a certain senator be now heard or do now speak;

(j)when debate concludes or the time for debate expires, the Speaker shall put the question; and

(k)any standing vote requested shall not be deferred, and the bells shall ring for only 15 minutes.

He said: Honourable senators, you will recall my speech and the subsequent discussion we had during the final days of our December sittings when we reluctantly waived our rights and obligations to thoroughly consider legislation that, in some cases, had only just arrived in our chamber hours before the scheduled adjournment for the holidays.

In fact, there were a number of bills that were passed in December by us through a process that involved us waiving some or all of our Rules regarding our processes long established for sober second thought.

Some of the bills were urgent. They were financially urgent. They were needed by Canadians. They were in response to the COVID crisis. Frankly, some of the bills were politically urgent and with less clear rationale for such swift passage without consideration in accordance with our Rules. We passed them all.

Many of us on that final day expressed regret and frustration at being forced, influenced and encouraged to compromise our duty to sober second thought. There was a consensus over the course of that discussion to examine this issue and to take action to prevent us from falling into the same situation again.

I think when you look to solve a problem, you have to make sure you understand what the problem is, and so let me pause with what I think the problem is. I think there are two things we should focus on.

First, the House of Commons does not appear to accept that the Senate needs time to fulfill its constitutional duty to apply sober second thought to legislation. I think that’s clear by their actions, particularly last December and last June. I would say those were exceptional situations, but I have been here for nine years. It seems that this has happened over and over again, but none more obvious than last December. I would say that’s problem number one.

Problem number two, I think, is that over many years and many governments of different political stripes, the Senate has enabled and reinforced the government’s expectation that the Senate will waive its rules and/or truncate its processes when receiving bills in the final days of the session. We have, through our own actions, shown that we will be a willing partner in throwing over what our job is in the final days of the session.

With those two problems on the table, how do we consider solutions, and what are they? We have had discussions about this before. We have good rules. We choose to waive them. So the first and foremost suggested solution to this problem involves a change of behaviour by us. We have to stop granting leave all over the place; leave to break our own rules on legislation, particularly. That is an easy first step.

In aid of that, I’m pleased to announce that after discussions, the CSG senators will not grant leave to facilitate or waive our rules on the passage of any legislation anymore. That’s not going to be there. We can rely on our rules. We can debate changing our rules. We can hear explanations about changing our rules. But in situations where we are asked to grant unanimous consent, we will not provide it. I hope all senators from all corners will consider adding their negative voices if and when we are asked in the future.

I think we also need to be a bit more critical of emergencies. There was a statement I made once before, something to the effect that your bad planning is not my emergency. Bad planning is not an emergency. Political expediency is not an emergency. Even if we want to see the legislation passed, if we support it with our hearts, we still should do the job we are here to do. In business, no matter how good the deal or how important, there is an issue of due diligence that must be undertaken, and we need to do our job in providing due diligence.

Those are a couple of ideas around behaviour change that we need to consider and look to ourselves on as we look to solve this problem. I think we have to have better communication and more candid communication. Committees need to, I think, get in front of bills, understand and communicate what they see as a work plan, maybe earlier in the process. It’s something to consider, to communicate with the government leader and the chamber how much time they believe they will need if they are assigned the job of reviewing legislation.

I think we have some communications efforts to educate members of Parliament and the public as to what work we actually do on a bill and why it takes as long as it does. I think we should also show that, in most cases, we deal with a bill faster than the House of Commons does, even when we are applying our normal rules and discipline, so that we get the real facts out about the job we do, how long it takes in comparison to the other place and make sure that everybody understands the value of that. I think we still have lots of work to do in that area.

The third action I think we need to take is to make some adjustment to our rules. I think we have to make an adjustment that recognizes that there are going to be emergencies when we will need to move faster than our current rules allow. If anything has highlighted that, it is COVID-19. But we should have some clear rules around how we are going to do that. If we do, I think that will allow better transparency, it will allow debate and it will make it clear that we have considered, thoughtfully, on purpose and in a public way, and waived our rights and obligations to full sober second thought.

That is what Motion No. 30 attempts to capture. There is a process by which we would have a procedure within our own rules to deal with genuine emergencies in a transparent and orderly way, through a brief debate, triggered by the government leader, and then a standing vote. In that way, we can publicly and thoughtfully decide whether or not — whatever the bill is — it is an emergency worth having us suspend our rights and obligations under the Constitution. Maybe all three of these things — a change in our behaviour, better communication and changes to our rules — will allow us to avoid the Christmas crunch and the June jam-up that we have suffered so many times.

I know others have ideas on how to deal with this; others may say there is nothing we can do. But we look forward to debate and discussion on this motion. There is no pride of authorship. We are wide open to amendments, additions, deletions — whatever senators want. I undertook, on behalf of a number of people who asked, to put something forward, and after consideration I think Motion No. 30 is helpful. It is one of the things that needs to be done and I look forward to continued discussion. Thank you, senators.

Hon. Yuen Pau Woo: Senator Tannas, would you take a question? Thank you for raising this important issue and for getting us all to think about the importance of our constitutional responsibilities.

First, if some senators, including members of your caucus and other senators in this chamber, have determined that they will no longer give leave of the sort that you’re describing — that we indulged ourselves in before the Christmas break — why would this motion still be necessary? If senators don’t give leave, we would never be in a situation where we would have to rush a bill through.

Second, while I have the floor, if we retain the power to not give leave at all stages of debate, and retain the power to adjourn debates, we are in fact exercising our rights and therefore would not be in a situation where bills would be rushed.

In that scenario, where we are exercising the normal rules we have, we would be in a situation where the government can make the case for the urgency of a bill through the second-reading speech, which is much more substantial than a brief intervention during the 20-minute debate you have proposed. I’m asking if the current Rules already give us the ability to avoid the sorts of problems you have rightly raised with all of us.

Senator Tannas: The issue for a number of us is that the current rules don’t really allow for a shortened period of time. We have “two days hence.” We have all of the things that drag out the move to committee, all of the steps that drag out the procedures in the House over a number of days at a minimum.

We might not be prepared to give leave, because for many of us, leave is difficult. It is a gun to your head. If you are an individual senator and your group has negotiated leave, or you’re under group influence to provide leave — not to say anything, in other words — and the negotiation has taken place somewhere else, behind closed doors, it looks odd to members of the public to have everybody sitting silently while a bill goes through the stages.

If we’re not going to give leave and we think that leave is part of the problem of enabling legislation, then we must have something to at least replace leave that’s transparent, debatable and subject to vote in a reasonable amount of time to set us on a different track but to do it publicly.

[Translation]

Senator Bellemare: Senator Tannas, you propose to use a motion that would seek to avoid the situations we encountered in the past, where we wound up facing measures that prevented us from studying the bill.

If a management committee were tasked with standardizing our approach to government bills, as we have already done for other bills, don’t you think that it would give us more weight than the House of Commons, and that it would allow us to plan for such emergencies? Wouldn’t such a committee, which would actually be a standing committee, also allow us to deal with these emergencies? Have you thought of that?

[English]

Senator Tannas: Where we have had managed debates on bills, a time frame hasn’t been the issue. We haven’t been up against June or up against Christmas when we have typically done it.

It has been on issues that are large, complex and extremely important. I think that is the place for which we should save managed bills: those instances when we may or may not agree on what the outcome ought to be, but we agree they are large, complex and important. That is where the role of either management agreements or a management committee could be.

I am instinctively nervous about a committee that would start managing all of our business here. It could easily lead to abuse, particularly in majority situations. I’m not saying we have that now, but, in the Senate’s history, we will. I’m not keen on the idea that every bill goes through a management committee permanently. I know there are others who are, and that’s a debate for another day.

What I’m interested in is trying to find a solution to the issue that seems to keep coming up where the House of Commons drops bills in our lap on their way out the door to go on their break. That forecloses any potential for us to make amendments or improvements and forces us into a situation where we are going to essentially rubber-stamp something. That is the issue I want to discuss today. It’s around Christmas and June. Thank you.

Hon. Jane Cordy: Thank you, Senator Tannas. This is an extremely important issue. I think we were both interviewed by the same newspaper last week, and we both expressed frustration about how to solve the problem. I had quite a lengthy discussion with the reporter, and you throw out one idea and, “Well, what about this?” “What about that?”

Senator Carstairs, when she was leader, was very good about saying that if bills didn’t arrive by a specific date in June and December, because those months seemed to be the trouble spots, then they wouldn’t be dealt with. The challenge is that works if it’s a majority government on the other side. It doesn’t necessarily work if it’s a minority government, because it would be very easy to delay passage of bills on the other side, so that deadline would not be reached.

I am pleased that you brought it up for discussion, because I think we really need a thorough dialogue on this.

This is sort of a silly question, because delays are used anyway, but how do we ensure that the Rules are used not to expedite legislation, but not to delay it either? How do we work together to make sure that the process is fair to all sides? There may be 5 or 10 sides to an issue, but for simplicity’s sake, how do we ensure that all sides get a hearing in a fair period of time — so that there is no dragging it out, that we pass the date of December 5 and it’s no longer going to be dealt with — but, on the other hand, that we not rush through, skip over and not allow for healthy debate on a bill, a piece of legislation? You spoke a lot about tools. How do we use our tools effectively to ensure that it’s a fair debate?

Senator Tannas: You raise a couple of good points. Number one, on the behaviour side, is communication with the other side. If we know what the committee will need in terms of time and we have a reasonable sense of a bill and what it will take in order for it to be thoroughly debated, we could communicate that to the House and say, “If you want this done before we rise, we need this amount of time.” We can say, “Well, you know, then the folks on the other side, whoever the opposition is, have an easy point to which they can delay it.”

However, that doesn’t all hang together, because at some point they negotiated to drop it on our laps on the last day. If they negotiated to drop it on our laps on the last day, before they all left, they could negotiate to drop it in our laps two weeks before the last day, if they know that is well and truly the last day.

I think something can be done vis-à-vis the behaviour and expectations on the other side, because there has to be help from the other side as well. It comes back to this issue of whether they really appreciate or think about the amount of time that the other chamber needs.

I think we should work on solving our problem and let them work on solving their side of the problem as well. Hopefully, through good communication, we can at least make a start on that.