Mr. Speaker, the motion before us is rather bizarre. As many members have said before me, it is quite surprising that the government is using the excuse of urgency.
The government has imposed closure a record 33 times, as well as restrictions on the time allowed to study bills in committee. With Bill C-60, this same government gave notice of a time allocation motion after only one hour of debate. I did say only one hour of debate. This is the same government that introduced monster omnibus bills because it did not want the committees and parliamentarians to properly study their legislative proposals in good faith.
I am not afraid of hard work. I am a doctor by training and I am used to 12-hour and even 24-hour shifts. It is not pleasant, but you get used to it.
My colleagues and I have not hesitated to stand up to the government and to do our jobs, as was the case with legislation to force Canada Post employees back to work and regarding their working conditions. We stood our ground when necessary.
It is obvious that the Conservatives do not have any respect for democratic institutions. I just mentioned the 33 time allocation motions they have imposed since May 2, 2011. What a sorry record.
The omnibus bills, such as Bills C-38 and C-45, are perfect examples of this. The Conservatives have steamrolled their way through adopting measures that Canadians and parliamentarians did not have the chance to scrutinize.
As everyone knows, the appropriate committees were unable to properly study Bill C-38 because it was not split up. That is disrespectful. With Bill C-45, the Conservatives used a different approach in order to curry favour with the public.
However, I can speak from my experience with the Standing Committee on Health. What a joke. The committee's meeting on Bill C-45 started late because of yet another time allocation motion. We then heard from witnesses and had just one round of questions. It is clear to me that the government did not really want the committees to study the impact of the measures. It just wanted to look better without having to do better. That too shows a lack of respect for our democratic institutions.
I also think that what is happening in committee is not right. Many witnesses take the time to come here to speak to subjects or bills that are important to them. Most of the time, however, their contributions are ignored. It is as though the committees were a waste of time. In any event, the outcome is prepared in advance by the Prime Minister's Office and so are many of the Conservative members' statements.
Yesterday, the House Leader of the Official Opposition said that 99.3% of all amendments proposed by the opposition have been rejected by the government.
This implies that every single one of the bills the government introduces is practically perfect.
In 99.3% of the cases, the government outright rejected all of the testimony from witnesses and experts, all of the comments from the public and all of the amendments proposed during the study of the bill. That is simply impossible.
Based on what we heard from witnesses, and after studying some bills in the Standing Committee on Health, I know that some of these bills could have benefited from the proposed amendments.
The NDP is not afraid of work. The problem is that I am not sure the government wants to extend our hours in order to get more work done. It has not guaranteed that we will be here until the summer recess.
I belong to a party that has the word “democratic” in its name, and I take these issues very seriously. The people of Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert put their trust in me on May 2, 2011, and I am doing my best to represent them.
Canadians sent us here to ask the necessary questions and to implement the best policies and public practices. We think that the government should take action so that we can do our job properly. The Prime Minister is now playing the victim over what happened in the Senate with senators he himself appointed solely to raise money for the Conservative Party of Canada. The Prime Minister is now playing the victim and wondering how this could have happened.
How could his chief of staff give a $90,000 cheque to a senator the Prime Minister himself appointed? How could his chief of staff—who sat right next to him every single day, who knows the government's deepest, darkest secrets and who the Prime Minister put in charge of major trade files and negotiations with other countries—do that?
Of course, the Prime Minister's hands are clean, and he has nothing to say about this. He believes that his hands are so clean that he is not going to answer any questions about it. He is going to South America for trade talks with countries we already have trade deals with.
Parliament should become less irrelevant. We think it is wrong that it ever became irrelevant. When the government is wrong in its treatment and abuse of Canada's Parliament, that affects all Canadians, whatever their political persuasion. We think what the government is doing is fundamentally wrong and that it needs a little adult supervision from time to time to take some of those suggestions and put a little, as we say, water in its wine. The government needs that more than anything.
It has the majority. This is the irony of what the government is doing. In moving more time allocation than any government in history, shutting down debate more than any government in history and relying on the tactics it is using today, it is showing weakness, not strength.
The Conservatives have the numbers to move legislation through if they saw fit, but they do not. They move legislation, they say it is an agenda and they hold up a raft of bills.
