I want to thank Ms. Nash for her intervention, which also sums up, I think, the way we feel on this.
Of all the provisions in Bill C-4, those that really are most farcical are the amendments to the Supreme Court Act and the process for nomination of Supreme Court judges. I can tell you that at some point in this place, members of Parliament of all parties will be, I believe, compelled to consider the importance of committees, the independence of committees, and the appropriateness of legislation considered by committees. It's a question not only of independence of committees but also of respect for Parliament and respect for the committee process and resources.
At some point, perhaps not in this Parliament but maybe in the next, I think as parliamentarians we're going to have to have a discussion about how we can both strengthen the resources and independence of committees and truly engage them. If you go back to the Mulroney government when Don Blenkarn was chairman of finance committee, that committee regularly attained unanimous reports of the committee. It took on the government of the day and it disagreed with the government.
We ought to see committees actually taking on government policy and approaches at some point. This is serious stuff. We have a responsibility whether we're in government or in opposition as individual members of Parliament to hold government to account. We're not doing that. In the recent byelections when we campaigned, we heard people's concerns about this. It's easy to assume that the public doesn't care and to play to that apathy or to assume that apathy, but I actually believe that in the four byelections it's one of the reasons we saw support for our party go up 17% and support for the Conservatives drop 11%. I don't know why the NDP support dropped. That's another issue.
The point is that at some point maybe we should have informal discussions among us across party lines about how we can strengthen our roles as parliamentarians and strengthen the roles of committee. We should look at what is done in other parliaments and even at the U.K. model where committees are much more independent. Otherwise at some point we're going to look back at our time here. We don't want to look back with regret because we did not take seriously the institution to which we were elected and the institution for which we have a responsibility. I think this is really very serious and at some point not doing more as individual members of Parliament to fight this becomes untenable. It's just fundamentally wrong.
As a committee we do not have the expertise or resources to be dealing with a lot of these issues. It's not a joke. This is very serious. I'm not feigning concern about this. I am genuinely concerned not just as a parliamentarian but as a citizen about what's going on here. I implore members of the governing party to understand that this is a grave situation which they are complicit in and contributing to.
It's going to be awfully hard to explain to active, engaged citizens what we're doing here.