I am rising on a point of order with respect to a situation we find ourselves in with the bill that Senator Dalphond was just talking about, Bill S-241, known as the Jane Goodall Act, and Bill S-15, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Wild Animal and Plant Protection and Regulation of International and Interprovincial Trade Act.

As you may recall, Your Honour, in a second reading speech on Bill S-15, the sponsor of the bill, Senator Klyne, said, “. . . Bill S-15 is essentially a piece of Bill S-241 . . . .” This was not news to anybody in this chamber, but the fact that he acknowledged it was appreciated. He went on to say that Bill S-241 “. . . contains the policies in Bill S-15 . . . .” and:

I understand the government is open to some changes —

— to Bill S-15 —

— with the benefit of evidence presented on this bill and Bill S-241. . . .

And then, later in his speech, Senator Klyne said that, “. . . the government is open to potential amendments with the benefit of evidence presented on Bill S-241.”

Your Honour, that places this chamber in an unusual position, where the same senator has introduced two bills of which the second is a piece of the first, and yet he has not withdrawn the original bill. His reasoning is because this will permit committee testimony on Bill S-241 to inform amendments to Bill S-15.

According to rule 10-9, it is not permissible to introduce a new bill in the Senate with the same object as a bill that has already been passed or rejected during the same session. Bill S-15 and Bill S-241 have the same object as noted by the sponsor when he said in his second reading speech that Bill S-15 is essentially a piece of Bill S-241.

Similarly, rule 5-12 deals with texts of motions that are identical and reads:

Except as otherwise provided, a motion shall not be moved if it is the same in substance as any question that has already been adopted or defeated during the same session, unless the decision has been previously rescinded by motion following a notice of five days.

Bill S-241 has been adopted at second reading, while Bill S-15 is still at that stage. I understand it is not clear if rule 10-9 and rule 5-12 refer to the decision at third reading when they mention the term “decision of the Senate.” However, I mention these rules because I firmly believe the underlying principles of both of them demonstrate that the situation we have before us should not be permitted.

Rules 5-12 and 10-9 are designed to prevent redundancy in Senate business, uphold the integrity of the legislative process and ensure the orderly conduct of our deliberations.

Rule 5-12 focuses on motions within the Senate and prevents the Senate from revisiting the same issues repeatedly in a single session, ensuring that the Senate’s time and resources are used efficiently and that its proceedings move forward constructively.

Rule 10-9 prevents a new bill with the same objective as one that has been either passed or defeated from being introduced in the Senate again for the same reason. This would be an inefficient use of the Senate’s time and resources.

Even if you would rule that the duplication we find before this chamber today in Bill S-15 and Bill S-241 does not fall within the specific application of rule 5-12 or rule 10-9, I believe they should be governed by the same principles of preventing redundancy, upholding the integrity of the legislative process and ensuring the orderly conduct of our deliberations.

Allow me to briefly explain. Firstly, the strategy of maintaining a focus on Bill S-241 for the sole purpose of informing amendments to Bill S-15 raises significant concerns regarding procedural efficiency and redundancy. The core of the legislative process in any parliamentary system is to deliberate and advance laws that address the immediate needs and interests of society.

When a bill such as Bill S-241 is kept active without any intent of direct advancement, it not only diverts the attention of senators from more pressing matters, but it also misallocates valuable resources. This inefficiency becomes more pronounced when considering that the Senate’s time and capacity of its committees are finite with each bill requiring a considerable investment of time for discussion, testimony and analysis. Consequently, insisting on using Bill S-241’s committee hearings as a mechanism to indirectly amend Bill S-15 will impact the progress of other bills.

While the purpose behind parliamentary scrutiny of every other bill is to determine whether it should become law, that purpose does not exist with Bill S-241. The sponsor has openly admitted that the bill has been superseded by Bill S-15. This, Your Honour, is like an old car which is only good for used parts. The sponsor wants the committee hearings to see if there is anything we can unbolt from Bill S-241 and attach to Bill S-15. This is not acceptable parliamentary practice.

Committee hearings are crucial for scrutinizing the details of legislation, calling upon experts and hearing stakeholder testimonies to ensure the proposed laws serve the public interest effectively. Since both Bill S-241 and Bill S-15 cover similar ground, holding separate hearings for each will unquestionably result in redundancy. Witnesses will be called to testify twice on the same issues, committee work will be duplicated with members needing to review similar evidence twice and staff will spend additional time preparing for hearings and treading familiar territory.

With respect, this is an absurd way for this chamber to conduct its operations. It not only strains the resources of the Senate but also those of the individuals and organizations involved, potentially detracting from the thorough examination of other legislative matters that require our attention.

My office has already had to field a number of inquiries from stakeholders who are confused about what is going on. They do not know if they should be speaking to Bill S-15 or Bill S-241 or both. They don’t understand why they are going to have to make their case twice and what happens if they only testify to one bill and not the other. They don’t understand, and, Your Honour, I don’t understand. It simply makes no sense.

Secondly, the strategy of keeping Bill S-241 active, even though it has been superseded by Bill S-15, poses significant challenges to the integrity of our legislative proceedings. Clarity and transparency are foundational pillars of democratic governance, ensuring that the legislative agenda is understandable and accessible to both members of the legislative body and the public they serve.

When a bill is publicly acknowledged by its sponsor as having been replaced by another bill but is still studied in committee hearings, it introduces ambiguity into the legislative process. This ambiguity creates confusion about the legislative priorities and the status of various proposals, potentially undermining the confidence in the legislative body’s ability to manage its agenda effectively and transparently. Maintaining an active focus on Bill S-241 for the indirect benefit of Bill S-15 complicates the legislative landscape by blurring the lines between the objectives of distinct bills.

This obscures the direct roots of legislative action, making it more difficult to follow the progress of specific legislative initiatives and understand their potential impacts. It leads to a more convoluted legislative process where the direct line of sight between the legislative intent and the legislative action becomes obscured.

Finally, Your Honour, the decision to use Bill S-241’s committee hearings as a platform for influencing amendments to Bill S-15 sets a potentially problematic precedent for future legislative processes. This approach introduces a mythology where the primary function of a bill can extend beyond its direct legislative intentions to serve as a tool for affecting other legislation. In fact, for Bill S-241, this is the only purpose. There is no parliamentary precedent for this, and I find this troubling, Your Honour.

While this strategy might seem tactically advantageous to Senator Klyne right now, it could lead to long-term implications for the Senate’s operational norms. Future senators might see this as a validated tactic and lead to an increase in bills introduced not solely on their own merits but as strategic instruments for other legislative goals. This will inflate the number of bills in committee, further congesting the legislative agenda and complicating the prioritization of genuinely urgent legislation. The cumulative effect would be a legislative environment where the clarity of legislative intent and the directness of legislative action are diminished, as bills could increasingly serve dual purposes and extend beyond their explicit objectives.

Your Honour, it is well known that I am the critic of both Bill S-15 and Bill S-241. However, I trust that you will understand that my point of order is not motivated by my opposition to these bills — although I readily admit that I oppose these bills. It is motivated by my opposition to bad parliamentary practice and precedent, which has become more and more common.

To be clear, Your Honour, I am also not questioning the sponsor’s right to introduce Bill S-15. In fact, after the Parliamentary Budget Officer confirmed that Bill S-241 was going to require the Department of Environment and Climate Change Canada to undertake activities outside of its existing mandate, which would impose additional costs on the public purse, it was clear — and, I’m sure, to Senator Klyne — that Bill S-241 would, in fact, require a Royal Recommendation. The sponsor needed to do something. So he chose to go the route of convincing the government to introduce a government bill — and good on him. I take no quarrel with this decision.

However, permitting Bill S-241 to simultaneously continue as a lame duck piece of legislation — which has no purpose other than to try to influence another bill before the Senate — is a harmful and dangerous precedent. It should not be permitted, Your Honour. It hinders the orderly conduct of Senate business. It introduces redundancy into our deliberations, and erodes the integrity of the legislative process. This is further compounded by the fact that Bill S-241 was referred to three different committees.

While the Senate has not, to my knowledge, faced a similar situation, the House of Commons had to deal with this issue a few times. I refer you to the Speaker’s decision on May 11, 2022, when he said:

Therefore, the question for the Chair is, should Bill C-250 be allowed to proceed further in the legislative process at this time? In the Chair’s opinion, it should not be allowed. The House should not face a situation where the same question can be cited twice within the same session, unless the House’s intention is to rescind or revoke the decision.

Government and private members’ bills belong to different categories of items and are governed by different sets of rules and precedents. Standing Order 94(1) provides the Speaker with the authority to “make all arrangements necessary to ensure the orderly conduct of Private Members’ Business”.

Applying this authority, I am ordering that the status of Bill C-250 remain pending and that it not be called for its second hour of debate. This leaves open the possibility that Bill C-250 could be reinstated in the next session, pursuant to Standing Order 86.1, should by any chance Bill C-19 fail to be enacted in this session.

In a following decision on September 20, 2022, after Bill C-19 was adopted, the Speaker ordered the similar Bill C-250 to be discharged. I believe that Chapter Two of the Rules of the Senate gives you, Your Honour, the same power and authority to make all arrangements necessary to ensure the orderly conduct of Senate proceedings.

Your Honour, I am, therefore, asking — in order to address this unprecedented situation, and ensure that the Senate can perform its work in a straightforward, efficient and productive manner — that you order that either Bill S-241 be discharged from consideration by the committees and withdrawn, or Bill S-15 be withdrawn. Alternatively, if you rule that you do not have the power and authority to order the withdrawal of a bill, I would ask that you suspend all committee work on Bill S-241 until a final decision — at third reading — is taken by the Senate on Bill S-15, and that, should Bill S-15 be adopted, Bill S-241 be discharged and dropped from the Order Paper.

Thank you, Your Honour.

Thank you, Senator Plett, for raising the point of order. In my respectful view, Your Honour, the two bills are different and, therefore, do not engage either the rules or the principles to which my honourable colleague referred. As has been mentioned on several occasions, Bill S-15 takes a very different legislative approach than Bill S-241 does.

Colleagues, there have been over 80 bills introduced in this chamber that are sponsored by senators since the start of the Forty-fourth Parliament. And there are many good ideas contained in these bills. It would be against our practices to prevent a government bill — that seeks to advance an idea that has been proposed by one of our colleagues — from being properly debated, studied and ultimately voted on in this chamber.

As we know, many senators have introduced bills here with the purpose of encouraging the government to bring forward its own legislation that addresses the important public policy issues that are contained in Senate public bills. For example, Bill C-48, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (bail reform), which received Royal Assent on December 5, 2023, included provisions from Bill S-205, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and to make consequential amendments to another Act (interim release and domestic violence recognizance orders), sponsored by Senator Boisvenu. That has passed the Senate and is now before the House of Commons Standing Committee on the Status of Women.

During the Forty-second Parliament, Bill S-238, sponsored by Senator MacDonald, on the importation and exportation of shark fins, was at the report stage in the other place. The government determined that this merited support, and it was incorporated as part of Bill C-68, which deals with amendments to the Fisheries Act. This amendment essentially copied the exact language from Senator MacDonald’s Bill S-238.

To turn now to the specific procedural question, which is part of what is generally considered the similar question principle, I respectfully submit that Bill S-15 takes a substantially different approach to creating a framework for protecting animals in captivity. Indeed, the government has been working diligently on this for some time now. The Minister of Environment and Climate Change’s mandate letter included a specific commitment to introduce legislation to protect animals in captivity.

As we know, our colleague Senator Plett — in an article published in The Hill Times on October 4, 2023 — expressed his reservations about Bill S-241, and called upon the government to bring forward its own legislation after “. . . proper consultations with zoos, provincial animal welfare authorities, and stakeholders.” I appreciate his comments that he does not take issue with the fact that the government did this.

The Government of Canada closely followed this chamber’s deliberations on Bill S-241. The government has heard some of the concerns that are related to that bill, including from the stakeholder community. As a result, the government responded with a different approach in Bill S-15. Specifically, Bill S-15 addresses the concerns of some senators around the constitutionality of Bill S-241 with respect to the federal government legislating in provincial jurisdiction. Bill S-15 creates a permitting scheme that is delegated to provincial and municipal officials in a manner that reflects the division of powers in our Constitution.

Second, Bill S-15 takes a narrower application of the number of species that are governed under the scheme in order to address the concerns that were addressed by several stakeholders.

This alone, I submit, adequately demonstrates the substantive differences between Bill S-15 as compared to Bill S-241 in terms of the legislative approach that is being taken.

Now, procedurally, the principles to which Senator Plett referred relate to two substantially similar questions being before the chamber at the same time.

A Speaker’s ruling from June 18, 1985, explained that the text of motions must be identical for the same question rule to apply. Referring to rule 5-12, the Speaker ruled that, “Our parliamentary jurisprudence requires that we have in hand identical texts for rule 47 to apply.”

Another Speaker’s ruling from November 19, 1998, further clarified this point when it was decided that the same question rule would be applied because the motion was, “. . . virtually word-for-word identical . . . .”

The precedents clearly shows that a substantially similar question has been defined as accomplishing the same objective in the same manner.

I submit that Bill S-241 and Bill S-15 are not substantially similar, and Bill S-15 should not be found to invoke the rule of anticipation, nor should Bill S-241 be deemed similar — notwithstanding the arguments of Senator Plett — and, indeed, this is a practice that is rarely invoked, as experienced colleagues will know, in the Senate or indeed in the other place. Bill S-15 should clearly be allowed to proceed. A finding otherwise would put a chill on the ability to legislate in this chamber on any matter that is addressed in any of the 80 bills sponsored by senators that are currently before this chamber or in the other place.

As you remind me regularly in Question Period, colleagues, the government does not have a monopoly on all good answers or good ideas. It stands to reason, therefore, that the government should be able to bring forward legislation to address matters sponsored by senators providing that they take a different approach to address the subject matter of a Senate public bill. Any other approach would run counter to our long-standing practice of allowing fulsome debate in this chamber. Therefore, Your Honour, I would submit that Bill S-15 should be allowed to proceed on the Senate Order Paper and that Bill S-241 remain as well. Thank you very much.

In your deliberations on this important issue of what makes a bill identical to another bill, I invite you to read the speech given by the critic of Bill S-241 in June 2023. You’ll see how he describes Bill S-241, how he talks about the accreditation of zoos across the country and how these accreditations will be based on American standards.

None of this can be found in the bill before us. Three quarters of what I just said in this speech would be irrelevant. If the bill is identical, and you allow Bill S-15 to proceed, I’m sure Senator Plett won’t give the same speech, which proves that it’s not the same bill.

I encourage you to read it. It’s getting late, so I won’t quote you long excerpts about zoo accreditation, but none of that applies here. Thank you.

The point of order will be taken under advisement and a ruling will be forthcoming. Thank you.