Bloc House Leader Luc Thériault wants the party to receive about 83 per cent – or 10 twelfths – of the funding Bloc MPs would have received had they qualified for official party status.CHRIS WATTIE/Reuters
One of the first orders of business this week as MPs return to Ottawa is what to do with the Bloc Québécois.
When the 42nd Parliament met for the first time in December, the Bloc prevented the larger parties from setting up several committees as a form of protest over its current status and funding on the Hill.
Many routine procedural items in the House of Commons regularly pass quickly with the unanimous consent of MPs, but the Bloc has been opposing those types of motions.
The sovereigntist party fell two seats short of the 12 MPs required for official party status. Party status provides benefits like an enhanced research budget, a front-row seat for the party leader, guaranteed questions in Question Period, extra salary for six MPs who hold senior positions and a seat on parliamentary committees.
The Bloc's 10 seats marked an improvement over the four MPs the party elected after the 2011 election, which was the first time the party had failed to qualify for party status since the 1993 election.
Bloc House Leader Luc Thériault has a proposal he hopes to pitch this week to the other House leaders. He wants the party to receive about 83 per cent – or 10 twelfths – of the funding Bloc MPs would have received had they qualified for official party status. They also want a seat on parliamentary committees with the right to ask questions but not to vote. Mr. Thériault said Elizabeth May – the lone Green Party MP and party leader – should receive one twelfth of the benefits.
Mr. Thériault said a research budget and guaranteed questions would allow them to better represent their constituents.
"We weren't elected to be potted plants," he said in an interview. The Bloc has written a letter to the other parties outlining their proposals. The letter says the current rules are arbitrary and lead to "second-class parliamentarians."
The House leaders are scheduled to meet Tuesday but seem cool to the idea.
Liberal House Leader Dominic LeBlanc and his counterparts, Conservative Andrew Scheer and the NDP's Peter Julian, all pointed out that the threshold of 12 seats was brought in at a time when that represented a much higher percentage of the total number of seats in the House of Commons.
With the number of seats having just increased from 308 to 338, they note that the Bloc failed to meet a threshold that has already been lowered in terms of percentage of total seats.
"The threshold of 12 members has been around for an awful long time," said Mr. Sheer, who served as Speaker in the previous Parliament. "Every party has played under those rules for as long as I can remember – that there is a threshold before you get recognition and the type of resources that follow with that. I don't know that it's appropriate to, immediately after an election, say 'Look, one party fell short. Do we do something to accommodate them?' Because where would that end?"