Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the chance to comment on the bill.
I have to say that in large part this is very much like a trip down memory lane for me because I have been here before with a Conservative government in the province of Ontario, and interestingly, who was the chief of staff to Premier Mike Harris who brought in the infamous omnibus bill 26? Guy Giorno, the same chief of staff to the current Prime Minister.
My colleague from Sault Ste. Marie is nodding his head. He remembers what went on when we had that bill. It was the same sort of thing. Bring in a bill that is meant to be one thing and then load it up with everything else that is problematic, that is going to involve a lot of debate, that is controversial and ideological. Just stuff it all in there and refuse to talk beyond the cover page. The government wanted it to go through. It was massive. It led to a major upheaval, which is putting it mildly, of our health care system. It brought in a massive review. It really set the stage for what became the dark years of the Harris regime in Ontario, years of governance which we are still trying to climb out of in terms of the damage that was done.
One of the things that is interesting and is different in this House from what I experienced the better part of 15 years ago was that the opposition actually stood up and fought. There were two opposition parties, the Liberals and the NDP, in that legislature. Not only did they stand up for the best interests of Ontarians and take on that kind of undemocratic governance, and I definitely use the term “governance” loosely, but we united around that fight. That was a majority house, not a minority where the majority vote is actually on this side of the House. We united and took on that government, head on.
In fact we had filibusters that went on for days. It was the focus of the entire provincial media. People were watching it around the clock, going to sleep while catching what as going on and waking up in the morning and plugging back into it. There were rosters that we had for going around the clock, just like picket duty, 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. could be house duty time. We went around the clock for days on end. We had the same kind of fight for the same kind of reasons against the same kind of undemocratic procedures.
What am I looking at here? I see my NDP colleagues standing up one after another going at this tooth and nail. We are doing everything we can to try to stop the bill. If we had the support of the official opposition, whose job it is to oppose the government of the day, we could do something, particularly since our leader, the member for Toronto—Danforth has made it clear that he is prepared to work with the other two parties to leverage the situation we are in right now, which is that there is still a lack of desire for an election. There is certainly a lack of desire on the part of the opposition even to threaten a possible election. Set that aside, but that is not the circumstance right now.
We know the government does not want an election right now. It might in a month, two months, a year but it does not want one now. The G8 and G20 summits are coming. The Prime Minister is over in Europe lining up the agenda.
Fine, if the Conservatives want to play hardball in terms of the bill they are trying to ram through, we ought to be playing hardball too. We should hold them to account and use that leverage. That is the whole idea of being the official opposition, not the official lapdogs of the country. It is infuriating.