Hon. Joan Fraser:

Honourable senators will recall that when Senator Smith opened the debate on this report from the Rules Committee, he spoke for only a few minutes. He said explicitly that, because he was going to be out of the country travelling with committee, he wished to adjourn the debate for the balance of his time on the understanding that other senators would be able to speak in the meantime and that it would remain standing adjourned in his name when those other senators concluded their remarks. It is on that understanding that I am rising to speak today.

Honourable senators, this is the first report of the Standing Committee on Rules, Procedures and the Rights of Parliament, and it is a great big thick one. It is the culmination of a project that began as many as 12 years ago, at the instigation of our then Speaker, the late and regretted Senator Molgat. I cannot say that the work has gone on non-stop for 12 years, but it has gone on for several years. The object of it has been to render our rules user-friendly.

The honourable senators who consult the current rules are well aware that they are sometimes difficult to understand, are often poorly structured and, above all, poorly written in French. The quality of the French version of our rules too often reflects the fact that they were translated quickly after an English version had been carefully developed. The French version of the rules does not reflect the nature of the French language as it should.

Most recently, this task has been the responsibility of a subcommittee of the Rules Committee that I had the honour to chair, and that subcommittee was preceded by an earlier subcommittee and, if memory serves, by a working group. All senators who have participated in that work have done so diligently and with a tremendous degree of dedication.

The most recent subcommittee has consisted of myself, Senator Stratton and Senator Carignan. For earlier incarnations, the names that come to me off the top of my head include Senator Smith, Senator Oliver, Senator Carstairs, Senator Nolin, Senator Joyal and Senator McCoy. What I would really like to stress, colleagues, is that in all cases the subcommittee, the working group and eventually the full Rules Committee, which did line-by-line reviews of the subcommittee's work, operated on the basis of genuine consensus. I do not know when it has been such a pleasure to work with a group of colleagues in this place. Truly, everyone who worked on this had a single goal, and that was to serve the Senate, to preserve the nature of the Senate, to meet its needs and to make its rules easier to use for senators.

In other words, what we set out to do was to clarify the current rules. Our mandate was not to change the rules in substance, except in those cases where some change on close examination seemed either inevitable or very clearly desirable.

What have we done? We have done quite a lot, actually. If you look at the report that was presented to the chamber, you will see that the physical presentation of the rules is very different. There are now proposed to be 16 chapters instead of the existing 12 parts. We believe that the presentation is more logically ordered, that each chapter is a more logical whole than is the case in the present rules. One interesting innovation, which I have come to find extremely useful, is that all of the rules within each new chapter — Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3 — are numbered first of all with the number of the chapter and then with the number of the rule. Thus, the fifth rule appearing in Chapter 3 is rule 3-5. You always know where to go to find it.

There has been considerable reordering of the rules in order to make them, we hope, easier to follow and to group related provisions together. For example, proposed new rule 10-3, which concerns the introduction and first reading of bills, takes parts of existing rules 23 and 73 and brings them together because it seemed logical to group them together.

Within each chapter there are subheadings to signify what general topic is being addressed by the following rules. The table of contents we hope will be almost as good as an index in its own right because it lists chapters and headings, then the subheadings, and then, for every single rule or subparagraph of a rule, identifies the marginal note, which tells a reader what that is about. The idea is for it to be very easy to find things in the rules.

Another innovation — and I gather this is rather something of an innovation for parliamentary practice in the Westminster system, not only here but elsewhere — we thought it might be helpful to include, after any rule where an exception to that rule exists somewhere else, a specific reference to that exception. Similarly, if one of our rules is based in law — the Constitution or the Parliament of Canada Act or whatever — that legal reference is also given immediately following the rule in question so that senators may understand why a given rule exists.

The new version that we are proposing also includes, as an appendix, a new glossary to explain some of the terms used. We thought it was a good idea to remove the definitions in the current rules and provide, as an appendix, a much more detailed and complete list of definitions than the short one found in the current rules. Also, to help senators get accustomed to the new structure, we provided a concordance table.

This concordance gives you references so that you can look at the number of an old rule and find out where you would find it in the new rules, or vice versa. You can look up the number of a new rule and find what that refers to in the old rules.

I am pleased to be able to assure you that we have paid particular attention to the quality of the French. As I indicated earlier, the quality of the French version of the current rules is often shaky if not downright unsound. This time we really want the French version to be as good as the English. To that end, we even hired an expert in parliamentary French to help us with our work.

We have suggested some changes for the rules — some small, some perhaps not so small, some just seeming to be necessary. The one that strikes me as being most obviously necessary is that under the Constitution of Canada, since 1867, all votes in the Senate are decided by a simple majority, but tucked away in the present rules there is a rule that says that in order to rescind a previous vote you need a two-thirds majority. It sounds like a good idea, except that the Constitution does not provide for that. That is an example of a change where we would propose that if the Senate in its wisdom adopts the new version of the rules, the new version would reflect the Constitution of Canada.

There are a few more significant changes.

We believe that we have made the presentation simpler and that it will be easier to follow the Order Paper and Notice Paper, as inquiries and motions appear in distinct categories. Obviously, the government will retain the possibility of reorganizing its work, Government Business, if it so desires.

We propose also to clarify how to deal with questions of privilege — this is a fairly thorny subject — ensuring that the rules reflect the practice that has developed in recent years, following upon various difficulties in the chamber. We have also addressed the matter of the length of bells.

At present, all bells, except those for deferred votes, are 60 minutes if the two sides cannot agree on a shorter bell. However, if we read into the entrails of the rules, it would appear that quite a number of our bells should only be for 15 minutes, notably bells referring to standing votes on non-debatable items.

Honourable senators will also be aware that there has been much discontent on both sides of the chamber for a long time about 15-minute bells that are too short to allow people to get here from the Victoria Building if they do not know that a vote is going to be scheduled. Therefore, we have proposed 60-minute bells on unscheduled standing votes on debatable items and on a few non-debatable items, notably on a motion to adjourn the Senate; 30-minute bells on unscheduled standing votes on most non-debatable items; and 15-minute bells for scheduled standing votes, basically deferred votes, as is the current situation.

I repeat, honourable senators, these and every other element of this report from the Rules Committee are our best effort to bring forward something that the Senate itself would benefit from using, but it is very important that senators study this work and that senators decide if this is the way they want to go. There are very knowledgeable senators in this place who were not part of the work on this report, and it would be terribly important to have the benefit of their wisdom.

I know many senators think rules are deadly dull and dry. Perhaps if they were to look at what we hope is a clearer version, they might find the rules a little less dull and dry. However, the important thing is that the Senate itself decide; the Senate itself must examine this work and decide whether it wants to adopt all of it, some elements of it or some of it amended.

It is in our hands now, collectively, honourable senators. It is the hope of the Rules Committee and of the subcommittee that colleagues will find at least that we have made a reasonable beginning on this very important work.

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