House affairs committee elects Larry Bagnell chair as MPs set to work

The first House of Commons committee of the 42ndParliament has met and chosen its chair.

Liberal Larry Bagnell was elected during a brief first meeting Tuesday morning of the procedure and House affairs committee.

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The Yukon MP was selected by secret ballot over the other nominated Liberal, Scarborough-Agincourt MP Arnold Chan.

Conservative Blake Richards was elected the first vice-chair, while New Democrat DavidChristopherson will serve as the second vice-chair.

The procedure and House affairs committee mustmeet and elect its chair within 10 sitting days of the opening of a new Parliament. Its responsibilities include sorting out the membership of the other Commons committees.

Now that a chair has been elected, this work can begin. Plans the new Liberal government has for parliamentary reform, including a possible refashioning of question period procedure, could be considered by this group.

In addition to the standing committees formed for every Parliament, the Liberal government has signaledit would like to create at least two special committees:

• One willstudy and make recommendations onthe federal government's response to the Supreme Court ruling on assisted dying.
• Another wouldreview and amendC-51, the anti-terrorism law passed by the previous Conservative government in the last Parliament. Changing the legislation was an election promise during Justin Trudeau's campaign.

Luck of the draw

The new Parliament is expected to hold its lottery for private member's business as early as Thursday.

Every MP who is not serving in cabinet is eligible for the draw, which ranks which private member's bills and motions are debated first in the coming months.

The Commons typically schedules private member's businessin batches, with single hours of debate scattered across a pre-planned calendar as bills and votable motions move through their various stages.

Drawing a lottery slot in the top 20 or30 would give those MPs a reasonable chance of seeing their motion or bill come up for debate in the House as early as this spring.

Bills and motionsproposed by MPs near the bottom ofthe drawmay not come up for debate for years, if at all.

New DemocratFranois Choquettehas tabled the bill he's hoping might get lucky early in the life of this Parliament: legislation previously proposed by NDP stalwart Yvon Godinto add bilingualism as a new condition for the appointment of judges to the Supreme Court.

Godin, who did not run for re-election,proposed his private member's bill three times, without success.

The Liberals, who now hold the majority of seats in the Commons, were supportive of Godin's bill, as is Official Languages CommissionerGraham Fraser, the Quebec Bar, the Fdration des communauts francophones et acadiennes and several experts on linguistic rights, according to a NDP release Wednesday.