Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to address this motion today.
We have heard a lot of talk from the government side about the need to address the democratic deficit in this place. What we are seeing today I think is just gross hypocrisy. We have a situation where the government is proposing to bring in time allocation, which of course is very, very anti-democratic, on an omnibus bill which is democratically suspect, at a time when the government is also enjoying the fruits of a throne speech and all the wonderful media hype that goes with it but at the same time undermining the tradition which says that the slate is supposed to be wiped clean when a throne speech is brought in. The government is trying to reverse all of that, and that is a democratic safeguard.
The government is doing it in particular on two bills that have enjoyed tremendous scrutiny by the public and which the public is very concerned about: Bills C-5 and C-15B. My question is this: How can the government say it is concerned about democracy when it is employing all these anti-democratic weapons to undermine democracy itself?