House Rules: How Parliament Governs Itself

The Standing Orders of the House of Commons Is The Law of the Lawmaker

The form and function of the House of Commons and its committees has, as its foundational document, the Standing Orders of the House of Commons. It is a letter-sized green book issued to every MP, and subject to revision by vote of the House of Commons. Since its original version with the creation of Parliament, it has gone through numerous small changes resulting in an evolutionary descendant with only passing resemblance to its earliest versions. While the current Standing Orders opens with interpretation rules and automatic derogation for the accommodation of individuals with disabilities, the original 1867 version contains hilariously anachronistic phrases such as the original Standing Order 107:

The Sergeant-at-Arms attending this House shall be responsible for the safe-keeping of the Mace, Furniture, and fittings thereof, and for the conduct of the Messengers and inferior Servants of the House.

Interpretation of the Standing Orders is left up to the Speaker of the House of Commons, per Standing Order 1:

In all cases not provided for hereinafter, or by other order of the House, procedural questions shall be decided by the Speaker or Chair of Committees of the Whole, whose decisions shall be based on the usages, forms, customs and precedents of the House of Commons of Canada and on parliamentary tradition in Canada and other jurisdictions, so far as they may be applicable to the House.

The aggregate traditions and decisions feed into House of Commons Procedure and Practice, a heavy book that is also issued to every MP and can be purchased through the Parliamentary Boutique. It is generally referred to by its authors, most recently then-acting Clerk Marc Bosc and deputy Clerk André Gagnon, or simply Bosc & Gagnon, and serves as the comprehensive rule book for the function of the Commons side of Parliament.

The best-known of the current standing orders is SO31, statements by members:

A member may be recognized, under the provisions of Standing Order 30(5), to make a statement for not more than one minute. The Speaker may order a member to resume his or her seat if, in the opinion of the Speaker, improper use is made of this standing order.

The Standing Orders being a living document, standing order 51 provides for a debate on the standing orders themselves early in any new Parliament:

(1) Between the 60th and 90th sitting days of a Parliament on a day designated by a minister of the Crown or on the 90th sitting day if no day has been designated, an order of the day for the consideration of a motion “That this House take note of the Standing Orders and procedure of the House and its committees” shall be deemed to be proposed and have precedence over all other business.

In the 42nd Parliament, this debate took place on October 6th, 2016. As the procedure wonk I am, I rose 11 times that day, and offered the following speech around 4pm:

Mr. Speaker, the curiously introspective S. O. 51 requires us to contemplate the Standing Orders here today. With apologies to interpretation services, I have a lot to say about them.

As a member of PROC, and as a perennial procedure geek who started watching CPAC when I started high school, I am following this debate with even more interest than my normal enthusiastic self.

I want to go over some of the changes that were already proposed by PROC in our recently tabled interim report on moving toward a modern, efficient, inclusive, and family-friendly Parliament and then discuss some other ideas.

A good deal of what we discussed in our report does not affect the Standing Orders directly. I encourage anyone interested in the workings of this place and the impact on their families and personal lives to take the time to read through the report and perhaps provide guidance to their friendly local PROC member on what direction that study should take going forward.

In PROC's 11th report, we made a number of recommendations and had a number of discussion points. Three of those recommendations and three of those discussion points are directly relevant to the Standing Orders. The first two recommendations are related to the standardisation of vote times to ensure predictability and efficiency. They state:

That House Leaders continue, whenever possible, the informal practice of holding deferred recorded divisions immediately following Question Period.

That House Leaders, whenever possible, refrain from holding recorded divisions any later on Thursdays than immediately following Question Period.

The third recommendation states:

That the Speaker table the House calendar each year prior to the House's summer adjournment.

That is not always easy, but it is an aspirational goal worth pursuing.

As a committee, we also felt that it was important to look at ways of limiting the number of consecutive sitting weeks. We all know from our pleasant experiences this spring that four-plus sitting weeks in a row really sours the mood around here, especially when we are here until midnight every night. However, there is a lot of work to be done, and we are a remarkable Parliament for our inefficiency in getting through legislation. Those are not the kind of accolades I believe we are looking for on the world stage.

To get there, one of the key items we discussed at length, but did not really get anywhere with, is the concept used in other Westminster parliaments of a parallel chamber, that is, a voteless chamber where items can be pre-debated. Our upcoming move to West Block and our subsequent move back to Centre Block certainly creates an interesting opportunity to retain two fully functional chambers.

The fate of Friday sittings is also a contentious debate, and one I would like to see my colleagues soul-search on as to how we make this place more efficient so that we may spend more time in our constituencies.

The last item, of course, is decorum. While we did not come to any conclusions, I personally find the new tone of question period, with the government side, at least, generally keeping calm and constructive, to be positive, and I would invite the opposition members to follow suit, at least experimentally for a while, to see if it improves the overall tone here. I cannot be the only parliamentary enthusiast who always found question period the least, not most, enjoyable part of the day's proceedings, regardless of who was in power. Decorum is a cultural, not a regulatory, issue that is up to us to fix.

There are few of us who have ever actually read the Standing Orders from cover to cover. I have, on more than one occasion, and I find them fascinating. I may not fully grok them, but I am certainly trying to.

Standing Order 4 does not have a mechanism to deal with the acclamation of a Speaker, for example. When Bill Blaikie was dean of the House, he presided over the unprecedented acclamation of Peter Milliken. I remember watching it on television. He observed that there was no process to deal with this but that the House could do many things with unanimous consent. However, what would have happened if a disgruntled member had denied that consent? For that matter, there are several instances when unanimous consent is required for absolutely routine things that should not need to go to a question.

Standing Order 7(1.1) has some curious wording on the assumed election, but not really, of the Deputy Speaker. Standing Order 7(2) has contorted wording designed to ensure that the Speaker and the Deputy Speaker, between them, speak the two official languages, and 7(3) requires a Deputy Speaker to be elected to replace one who leaves during his or her term but is inconsistent with how that person got there in the first place.

Standing Order 11 permits you, Mr. Speaker, to punt someone from this room. I would encourage you to be unshy to use that power or to become blind to disruptive members, as Speaker Milliken did, regardless of party. Those powers should perhaps be expanded on. What value is there in kicking someone out of this room into a press scrum? What more tangible recourse could perhaps be available?

Standing Order 17 requires us to speak only from our own seats. I would personally like to see, for purely practical reasons, the members of the House leadership team of each recognized party be permitted to be recognized from any seat allocated to their party during regular debate.

Standing Order 23 declares bribery a high crime to be dealt with with the utmost severity, without providing for any type of process to do so.

Standing Order 28(1) says we cannot sit on Dominion Day. Dominion Day was replaced with Canada Day back in 1982, when I was one year old.

Standing Order 37(1) permits a Speaker to punt a question deemed not urgent to the Order Paper. However, in all of my years of watching, I have never seen that actually happen.

Chapter VI of the Standing Orders deals with the process of debate. I think it is worth considering changing the structure of 10- and 20-minute speaking slots, with questions and comments, to 15- or 30-minute speaking slots. Up to 10 or 20 minutes would be used for speaking, and the totality of the unused portion would be left for questions and comments.

For example, if I only speak six minutes out of my 10, which for me happens more often than not, I would have up to nine minutes of questions rather than only five. This will lead to shorter and more candid speeches and better debate afterward.

Standing Order 68(3) has an ironic quirk of old English. It states that bills may not be tabled in “imperfect” form, in English, but that they may not be tabled in “incomplete” form, in French.

Standing Order 71 also has a typo, in English, stating that every bill shall receive “three several readings”, rather than “three separate readings”, or just “three readings”, as it says in French.

Standing Order 87 deals with private members' bills. When a member of Parliament has been here for several elections and has never had a chance to bring a PMB forward, and another member comes and has a PMB on the Order Paper before figuring out where the washrooms in Centre Block are, the system may be somewhat broken.

I propose for discussion that the PMB lottery be rethought to become fairer. At the start of every Parliament, all re-elected MPs should retain their place on the order of precedence. Those returning MPs not on the list because of being ministers, parliamentary secretaries, or Speaker would come next. New MPs would then be added to the order of precedence in the current manner. MPs from the previous Parliament who had had an opportunity to take their bills through the process would be added to the end of the list, again, in the same process.

Finally, all MPs should be able to trade with all other MPs anywhere on that list. All MPs, then, would have an equal chance to propose a private member's bill, without the peculiar bias against people who just cannot seem to win a lottery and without throwing a new MP into a situation of having to write and table a bill before learning how this place works.

I would also like to revisit the issue of royal recommendations at some point.

Standing Order 128 allows the House to be called back at 1 p.m. on a Wednesday to deal with a report from the Standing Joint Committee on Regulations, to which I say, really?

Standing Orders 129 to 147 deal with private bills. That used to be how to get a divorce in this country. While the Senate still uses them, on the Commons side there has not been a private bill for many Parliaments. Could we not drop this altogether?

Finally, Standing Order 158 permits the Sergeant-at-Arms to detain strangers for their behaviour in the chamber or gallery and may not release them without an order from the House. I do not know if this building contains a jail, but this is certainly an interesting legacy item. What is the real world impact of this?

Getting off Standing Orders, per se, why must bills die in the Senate when the House is dissolved? Could the Senate not continue dealing with bills already before it and simply send the version it has passed back to the new Parliament for concurrence? Private members' bills, especially, would be far less prone to an untimely death.

On other topics, I believe it should be inappropriate for any member to refer to the official language spoken by another member in the House of Commons, in the same way it is inappropriate for a member to refer to the presence or absence of another in this House.

Chapter XIII already guarantees that all members can speak in either official language, but I would go further and make it against the rules to refer to the language another member actually chose.

There are quirks in procedure and practice that are not necessarily in the Standing Orders, such as the entertaining, “When shall this bill be read a second time? At the next sitting of the House”, amid catcalls of, “Now” and “Never”. This is an artefact from a change more than 20 years ago, and there are no doubt several of these bugs where not all consequential changes were properly made.

I suspect the need for the agreement of the House for Order Paper questions to be allowed to stand is another such artefact, and there are surely more.

I would also like to see the clock in this chamber replaced with synchronised digital clocks that can be controlled by the table and that reflect the apparent time in the House as well as the actual time so that when we “see the clock”, the clock agrees.

In fact, until we have integrated information systems in our desks, which is another long-term point we should at least discuss, I might go so far as to suggest four clocks be visible to all members in the chamber. They would show the time, the perceived time, the remaining speaking time for the current speaker, and the actual time the House is expected to rise today.

While we are at it, why do some events prolong the day and others do not? Is there any rhyme or reason to it? Could we perhaps revisit what does and does not make the day end at, say, 6:48 p.m.?

Of course, I would like to see seats in the chamber that do not tear our pockets, which happened to me again last night.

Let me also take this opportunity, as a former staffer, to call for the return of the one-stop shop, which provided for a different kind of Standing Order.

Yesterday a group of around 20 people visited me from their retirement residence in Mont-Laurier. At 3 p.m., security kicked them out of the group visitors gallery above you.

As a fundamental principle, I do not believe that behaving members of the public should ever be asked to leave the gallery during a sitting. If anything, the public should be encouraged to watch our debates, rather than question period, to participate more meaningfully in our legislative process.

Standing Order 51 provides us this wonderful opportunity to get into the weeds on the Standing Orders and to remove relics, artefacts, and cruft that no longer need to be there.

I look forward to continuing to hear the thoughts of my colleagues and to discussing them back at PROC.

The only take-away from the media from this intervention was that MPs’ pants get torn by the pointy edges of the rather pretty but uncomfortable and impractical House of Commons chairs, one of which I declined to purchase at the end of my term when learning of its $3500 price tag. CBC Radio’s As It Happens interviewed me on the question of torn pants later that week and several other media outlets did stories on the topic. It’s impolitic to bring up such trivialities in public, but opening the door had MPs from all parties calling me over to show me their latest ripped pockets for weeks afterward.

In the Chamber, the Debate continued, with a couple of fairly partisan questions directed my way followed by gentle Conservative MP Kevin Waugh trying, perhaps, to prove that conservatism simply means to conserve whatever it is you have:

Mr. Speaker, this is one of the iconic places in this country. I would not like to see digital clocks put in here. When we walk in here, it is a place of history. I love the way it is situated here today. I think we can all see the clock and know what time it is.

My comment to my colleague is that he is right about the private member's bills. I was a first-time MP in October, and I won the lottery, and then all of a sudden, I had to do the work. Therefore, I agree about private member's bills. When one is here for the first time and gets an early slot, it is a little onerous.

To which I replied:

Mr. Speaker, I will try not to note too much irony in the member's comments while he is wearing an electronic earpiece, with an LED on his desk and a microphone. I should also note that this is televised, which is a technology that did not exist when this building burned down and was rebuilt.

Technology moves forward. I do not think that advancing to 1960s technology for clocks is too much to ask.

At the end of a long day of nerding out over the finer points of the Standing Orders, the matter was referred to the Procedure and House Affairs Committee, PROC, for dissection. Andre Barnes, an analyst assigned by the Library of Parliament to our committee, boiled the debate down to about a hundred ideas and PROC attempted, fitfully, to address them over the rest of the 42nd Parliament.

It was not until the end of the Parliamentary sitting more than two and a half years later that the committee made any significant recommendations to modify the standing orders, with this debate being a vague contributing factor. 

The discussion on PMBs also led to me propose motion M-162 to fix the order of precedence for the proposing of bills in early 2018, in the manner described in my speech.

Two elections later, the order of precedence remains unchanged, and the problem of veteran MPs being unable to propose legislation continues. 

Change here, as with everything else in the apparatus of government, is slow.