Well, I thought you were going to be here, so I brought it for you to sign. You can see that I've made notes and everything. Truly, this is a thrill.
Thank you to the clerk and staff for having Mr. Ziblatt here today.
Since I only have three minutes, I'm going to move into a concept.... I am a big fan of your evaluation of the four key indicators of authoritarian behaviour. Since I will not have enough time with three minutes, if given permission by the clerk, I will submit, in writing, a request for you to do an evaluation of the Canadian government. Recently, we have certainly seen a rejection and weakness of democratic rules of the game, a denial of legitimacy of political opponents, for sure—although more internally—and a readiness to curtail civil liberties. I will be asking, in writing, for you to do an evaluation on Canada.
I want to talk briefly about another concept, which you didn't really touch on in your opening remarks, but which I really appreciated seeing in your book. It is called “forbearance”, which is something else I am seeing significantly here in our Canadian system and our Canadian processes.
For example, we are seeing a significant use of time allocation by the present government to cut down debate. It is using the rules to do this. I'm not sure it would be fair to say that they have been historically abided by in this case.
There is something more disturbing to me. I am the vice-chair of the House procedure committee, and a case came before it that was clearly one of contempt of Parliament. However, the current government did not want to wear that it was contempt of Parliament, and therefore, the final report's wording was softened.
How do we eliminate forbearance?