Senator Patterson: Thank you, Senator Woo, for the thoughtful and erudite speech; I have got to remember senatorial libertarianism.

You spoke in praise of the system for assigning committee seats to senators, but this also includes the very important question of selecting chairs and deputy chairs. That’s not an easy task, being a chair or deputy chair. I don’t need to tell anyone. You need to have a rigorous understanding of the parliamentary process and respect for a balanced and respectful approach and order in the committee. Yet we’ve had total rookie senators appointed to important committees with no experience whatsoever in these areas in the parliamentary process.

Senator Woo, would you say that the current selection process and, in particular, the selection of chairs and deputies, is based on merit or is more based on group affiliation and a kind of popularity-contest vote from the groups, regardless of experience or merit, to date?

Hon. Salma Ataullahjan: Honourable senators, following Senator Mobina Jaffer’s example, I think I have a two-and-a-half-minute speech.

Honourable senators, I rise today to speak to Bill S-214, An Act to establish International Mother Language Day. Bill S-214 is a legislative proposal to designate February 21 as international mother language day. I would like to thank Senator Jaffer for reintroducing this and giving me the opportunity to speak again on the importance of proliferating mother languages.

As a country with multilingualism at its core, we need to recognize and understand the importance of preserving all mother languages. Professor Wade Davis put it more eloquently than I could when he said in the Canadian Geographic:

A language, of course, is not just a set of grammatical rules or a vocabulary; it’s a flash of the human spirit, the vehicle by which the soul of a particular culture comes into the material world. Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, an ecosystem of social, spiritual and psychological possibilities. Each is a window into a universe, a monument to the specific culture that gave it birth and whose spirit it expresses.

I know first-hand the correlation between my mother tongue and my identity. Speaking Pukhto, or Pashto, is more than a means to communicate; it connects me to my ancestors; it allows me to understand the literature, art and poetry of my homeland.

It was for those reasons that I made it a priority to teach my mother language to my two daughters, Anushka and Shaanzeh. By doing so, I was able to share a part of my identity, history and culture with them. My daughters’ lives and my life have been positively impacted in numerous ways because of our ability to communicate in our mother tongue. That is worth celebrating every year on February 21.

Of course, we cannot speak about the importance of preserving mother languages in Canada without considering our Indigenous population, many of whom were forcibly stripped of their mother tongues. Honourable senators, the importance of mother tongues cannot be undervalued because we know that once a language dies, the knowledge and heritage it contains dies with it, forever diminishing our society as a whole.

As parliamentarians, we must encourage Canadians to celebrate and preserve our linguistic diversity. Bill S-214 fulfills these aspirations by raising awareness and promoting education of mother languages.

In closing, I would ask, honourable senators, that we consider the questions posed by Professor Wade Davis:

. . . But what of the poetry, songs and knowledge encoded in the other voices, those cultures that are the guardians and custodians of 98.8 per cent of the world’s linguistic diversity? Is the wisdom of an elder any less important simply because he or she communicates to an audience of one? . . .

Senator Jaffer, thank you for your tireless work on this bill or, as we say in my mother tongue, manana. Thank you, honourable senators.

Hon. Diane Bellemare: Senator Woo’s speech was very convincing. He has a way with words, but I would like to ask him a question about the following problem. It would seem that the entire issue stems from the fact there is excess demand for certain committee seats, so when a senator leaves a group, they breach the privilege of another one of their colleagues by taking the seat with them when they go.

In economics, the problem of excess demand is usually resolved by addressing supply. Supply is increased. The problem that we are having with excess demand has nothing to do with the solution proposed by Senator Woo, which is to restrict senators’ mobility to resolve the problem of excess demand.

Would you agree with me, Senator Woo, that another rule does exist for a committee or group that feels aggrieved by the departure of a senator? Rule 12-2(4) stipulates that it is the Senate that allocates committee seats and can take a seat away from a senator. Rule 12-2(5), which you cited, seeks to change the composition of committees when the senators in the group all agree. When a senator must be absent for a day, he or she must have a replacement. That rule is purely administrative. Why not use rule 12-2(4) when there is an issue related to movement, that is, if a senator leaves a group and there are any concerns about the group being harmed?

[English]

Hon. Yuen Pau Woo: Honourable senators, let me start my speech and continue after the break.

Honourable senators, last week we adopted the Selection Committee report that results in the formation of Senate standing committees. The first report of SELE named senators to the various standing committees according to the proportions that each group constitutes in the Senate.

The ISG received roughly 48% of the seats on each committee, the CPC received about 20%, the PSG 17% and the CSG 14%. Non-affiliated senators who wanted to be on committees were offered seats from the allocations that were assigned to the various groups.

Every senator who wanted to sit on a committee was offered one or more seats. No one was excluded. But how did a senator get the particular seat on the committee that he or she was assigned? Did that senator have a special claim to the seat?

Does any senator have a special right to a seat on a given committee? The answer is obviously no. We know this because all of us went through a process in the last two weeks of selecting committees that we wanted to sit on, and working through the inevitable conflicts that arise when there are more senators wanting to be on a committee than there are seats available on that committee.

Different groups use different protocols for allocating seats to their members. But I am sure every group had to deal with some overlapping interests among members, with the result that most senators did not get all the committees they wanted to be on. That is certainly true of the ISG.

While every ISG member got their first choice of committee, few also got their second and third choices.

Which brings us to the subject of the second Selection report that we are currently debating.

Let’s be clear, firstly, that this is a report of the Selection Committee, duly adopted by a majority of the members on that committee, consisting of members from all groups including nonaffiliated senators.

The reason Selection issued a standalone report on this issue as opposed to incorporating the issue into the first SELE report is because the PSG insisted on separating the issue of portability from the issue of committee formation.

The leaders of the other three groups — the Conservatives, the CSG, and the ISG — agreed with nonportability of seats, as they had for sessional orders in the previous parliament.

Listening to the polemics on Tuesday night, you might have come away with the impression that the suspension of portability is an ISG plot, masterminded by power-hungry facilitators at the helm of this group. In fact, three of the four groups in the Senate have supported some version of this report in previous sessions, and the Senate has voted in favour of non-portability each and every time it has come up in this chamber.

Honourable senators, the committee seat you obtained last week came through a negotiated process within your group that very likely deprived another member of the same group from having that seat. To put it in reverse, the seat you really wanted but did not get is because of the selection process your group established and that you willingly participated in. As they say, “You win some; you lose some.” However, that was the process you agreed to. It therefore follows, I believe, that if you choose to leave the group, you should, as a matter of fairness, return the seat to the group so that, if needed, the seat can be allocated to a member who is waiting in the queue.

This is why, honourable senators, the issue we are debating today is not about the independence of the Senate or the equality of senators. It is about the much more mundane — but foundational — concept of fair play and procedural integrity. Every time we have to reconstitute committees, as we are doing at the start of the Forty-fourth Parliament, we have to solve the problem of scarcity — scarcity of committee seats in the face of excess demand from senators. You can tell I’m an economist.

As it turns out, we have decided to solve this problem by allocating the seats by proportionality to recognized groups in the Senate and then leaving the groups to work out how they divvy up the seats they were assigned. This is about boring math, not some high-minded principle as the dissenters to the Selection Committee report have asserted.

On the subject of math, let me offer a rebuttal to Senators Mercer, Cordy and Bellemare who have made claims based on math without actually doing the math. They state correctly that any movement of senators from one group to another will change the proportionality of groups in the Senate, and they use that as a point to argue for portability. If you actually do the math, however, you will find that the movement of one or two senators does very little to change the actual allocation of seats on our committees. I have done the math, and I can confirm that the Independent Senators Group, or ISG, would have exactly the same number of members on committees of 9, 12 and 15 if one or even two members were to leave our group. This is akin to the retirement or passing of a senator, which does not precipitate an immediate change in the distribution of seats on a committee.

If a large number of senators were to leave a group, the proportionality numbers would be materially impacted and a change in seat distribution would be warranted. However, this is not unlike the appointment of new senators, which also affects proportionality calculations.

The point is that we don’t recalculate proportionality every time there is a shift in numbers — not even, I would say, when the shifts are quite large as was the case during the last Parliament when the ISG grew by nearly 20% even as our allocation of seats on committees remained static.

So much for math. Let me now return to the high-minded arguments that my honourable colleagues made on Tuesday night about the independence and equality of senators.

We heard from Senator Mercer that “a senator is a senator is a senator.” As tautologies go, this is especially seductive, but what does it mean? More to the point, how is it relevant to the debate at hand?

Senator Mercer would presumably argue that a senator deprived of his or her particular committee seat is less equal compared to other senators. But from what dispensation did the senator derive the right to have that committee seat in the first place? Did the Governor General grant it to him? Is it written in her summons? Do we have a rule that makes that claim? Of course not. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, I don’t believe there is even a rule that says senators must sit on committees.

To be clear, I believe that all senators have a right to sit on committees, but I do not believe that any senator has a right to sit on a particular committee.

We heard again on Tuesday night the mistaken assertion that this report deprives senators of the right to sit on a committee. It does not. All senators have the right to sit on a committee, including senators who are not part of a group or caucus if they want to sit on a committee. There is no violation of the equality principle.

The dissenters would have you believe that equality extends to a senator’s right to a particular committee seat. However, why should that be the case? More importantly, how can that possibly be the case when there are more senators desirous of committee membership than there are seats on that committee?

The underlying point here, colleagues, is that while senators may have a right to sit on committees, they do not have an entitlement to any particular committee seat. Seats on particular committees can only be assigned through what is essentially a process of negotiation. For a senator to then assert his or her unalienable right to that seat is a contravention of the negotiated agreement, a fallacy of logic and an abuse of procedural fairness.

I would go even further to say that this conception of portability actually violates the equality principle and undermines Senator Mercer’s mantra that “a senator is a senator is a senator.”

The dissenters also argue that this report is about the independence of senators. This is another red herring. Insofar as I am concerned, senators lose their committee seats when they leave a group not because of their views, but because of the agreement they signed up for when they joined a group. To put it differently, the seat is retrieved from a senator because it wasn’t theirs to start with.

This is not to say that seats will be taken away each time a senator leaves a group. If there is no pent-up demand for the seat from within the group, there is no need to retrieve the seat. The departing senator can continue to serve on it. Retrieving seats is not about vengeance or punishment. It is about respecting a process and working on a case-by-case basis.

I would add that the same applies when a senator joins a group after committee seats have already been assigned as will be the case when the new appointments to the Senate — which we are likely to see in the weeks ahead — take place.

If any of the new members join the ISG, I know the new leadership will make all efforts to find seats for them that correspond to their interests. That, too, is a process of internal negotiation that requires an equal measure of a clearly defined process and senatorial collegiality.

You will recall from Tuesday night’s debate that a number of senators dispute my view that we get our seats through our groups by way of a negotiation process. They claim that committee seats don’t come from groups; rather, they come from the Senate. Ergo, there is no need to return the seat to the group if a senator should choose to leave that group. I expect that some of our newer colleagues are puzzled by this argument, so I will explain it. However, that may have to wait until after the dinner break because I’m looking for the Speaker to now rise and invite us to see the clock.