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Government Motion 12

April 30, 2008 - Standing Committee Membership

Ms Blakeman: Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker, for the opportunity to rise and speak to Government Motion 12, which, as the Government House Leader has described, is peopling, I think the word is, the policy field committees, which are five this time around instead of the original four and also the very interesting section B, which is clearly about payment.

When I first saw this motion, I thought: “Oh, yes. Well, okay. Yeah, I know what that one is.” We had talked about it briefly in the House leader negotiations. My concern was that the committees not start to meet while we were still in session. We are underresourced in the Official Opposition, and interestingly enough, although the original intention of the policy field committees was to meet at night in place of our night sittings, in fact when I went back and looked, only one of the committees ever met at night, from 6:30 to 7:35, once. So all the rest of the committees met in the morning or across lunch hours or across dinner hours, and I thought: oh, great. So on top of the schedule that we were already all working in the House – and I don’t know what the government caucus does in the morning; I know what we do in the morning – the idea that we’d be now trying to shoehorn in some additional meetings, struck me as inhumane. So that had been part of the concerns that I had ex-pressed around these committees.

I have no issues particularly with the peopling of the committees or even that, once again, rather than this being purely a democratic renewal initiative, it’s clearly following, shadowing if you will, the government standing policy committees because they’ve now become five, and this is now mirroring it exactly and becoming five again. It looks like, according to Motion 8, it’s also picking up the public hearings, public submissions mandate that the standing policy committees had.

My real reaction came when I looked at section B. My first reaction was actually a fairly colourful stream of swear words because I thought: there’s the money that I needed. I was being told the money wasn’t there for the Official Opposition caucus, and there was the money that I needed. I was pretty frustrated because I have been in a small caucus before, trying to serve the best interests of Albertans. Whatever the rest of you think of the Official Opposition, we are here to do a job. We take our job seriously. We want to do the best job we can possibly do.

My second reaction was: I’m not doing this again, which was to try and stumble through with not enough resources to fulfill the parliamentary mandate that we have as Official Opposition. As soon as I was elected, I started seeking additional funding to support the Liberal caucus, the Official Opposition caucus, because I felt that we were in some cases traditionally underresourced and in others specifically underresourced given the job that we now had to do. That’s around some very specific examples. For example, we have a southern Alberta caucus. Well, the Tory caucus here does not pay for their southern Alberta office. That’s paid for out of other places. But we have to pay for our office out of our caucus budget, and it’s costing us double now the allocation of what we’re getting. So we’re having to sacrifice from other things. I’m particularly interested in having enough research support to support what we’re trying to do here. You know, we’re trying to do 23, 24 budget debates here. We’re trying to ask questions in question period around 23 ministries. We’re trying to do that with five and a half researchers.

We won or lost the number of seats that we won. As an MLA I accept that. I accept what happened. What I can’t accept is that we can’t get properly resourced to do that job, and what I can’t accept is that we’re asking five and a half researchers to that amount of work.

So when I looked at this motion, I thought: there’s the money. Clearly, the government is not going to bring forward a motion to refer something to Members’ Services if the money is not there. Obviously, the money is there. So the very money I was looking for is here to be sought and decided upon by the Members’ Services Committee to allocate money to MLAs to sit on this committee. I’m sure my colleagues will disagree with me, but I don’t care about the money for the MLAs. What I care about is finding enough money to resource our caucus to do the job that we need to do.

So I thought: right, I will bring forward a motion and sewer this baby for, basically, taking our money. I thought: well, that’s not very nice of me. But then I started to think about the motion, and I was prepared to bring forward a motion that, basically, opened this up and said: “Okay. Well, if we’re going to send something to Members’ Services, let’s send two things to Members’ Services. Let’s send the request that I had to Members’ Services at the same time.” That would have been interesting. I’ve decided not to do that tonight, mostly because everybody’s looking pretty bleary eyed, and I think they all want to go home.

I did want to put on the record the process that I’ve gone through in looking at whether or not I was going to support this motion. It is much larger than those policy field committees. These policy field committees came into being because we were trying to seek a way to open up and make this Chamber more accessible to the people in Alberta, to give them a venue of being able to speak more directly to us and to be more involved in and participate directly in preparation of bills and of regulations, to be able to conduct public hearings on particular bill ideas that are referred out to these committees. The whole idea was to take this place and open it up to Alberta and to draw Albertans into that process, to make this more relevant to people.

To me, it’s all a part of democratic renewal. The very idea of these policy committees is about democratic renewal. It’s about engaging our citizenry. To me, having an adequately resourced parliamentary system is also about responding to those citizens and is also a part of democratic renewal. I think appropriate resourcing should be available to all of the caucuses. Perhaps the other caucuses also need additional resourcing. I don’t know. I’m not responsible for them; I’m responsible for mine. I’ve tried to explain tonight some of the reasons why we need additional resourcing. It’s mostly about the researchers. Anything that takes money away from them is a problem for us.

In the end I thought: well, are you willing to support this government motion on the face of it? I think, Mr. Speaker, that I am, because as part of my thought process around all of this it is about that democratic renewal. It is about that engagement of the citizenry. In peopling these committees and getting them ready to start working – please don’t make them start working before we’re out of session; that truly would be inhumane – if there’s a need to compensate members of the committee, fine. Whatever. I don’t think that’s why people got onto these committees. If it’s going to keep them happier, fine. A big part of what we did when we first negotiated these committees was proper resourcing of it, and that we understood at that time.

Having gone through that entire thought process, which I’ve now shared with all of you, I am at this point prepared to support Government Motion 12 and to advise my caucus to support Government Motion 12. But I do want that understanding of the other resourcing that I am seeking on behalf of the Official Opposition caucus.

There are other routes for me to go through to secure that, and it does go before Members’ Services, but that’s what I thought was going wrong. When I first looked at that, that’s why I so angry. I thought money was being used to pay MLAs, who are already being paid, frankly, to be here and do a certain amount of work, when I thought that same amount of money should be used to resource the staffing behind the work that the Official Opposition does. But it is different money. It’s the same purpose that we’re trying to achieve with both things here, and at this time I’m willing to support what is behind and in fact appears on the paper for Government Motion 12. Thank you.