I know that I have one significant flaw in my character; whenever I'm interrupted I forget what I've already said. I may have to go backwards.
Chair, I wonder if you can pass the list down so I'll know what I have covered. Maybe I can refer to it to ensure I've covered it well, because it's important. I think I was on fixed election dates and the honour of this Prime Minister coming forward with legislation that fixed a date in time, rather than being able to pick and choose among all dates as to when an election might be
. So that's where we stand. We stand now at a piece of legislation that this committee spent time on.
Boy, wasn't it good working on legislation? Wasn't it good really accomplishing those pieces of legislation? I always felt good when legislation passed through committee, we got it done, put it back to the House, and it became law in this country. I think that's what we were sent here for. You feel the pride. You feel what is right.
Occasionally you lose too. Occasionally your philosophies and principles are different from those of others, and a piece of legislation gets modified or changed, but you were still part of it. You were still there when it happened. You were still there making it happen and changing this country, hopefully for the better, because democracy works that way sometimes too. It's a bit ugly, but it works. Democracy: that's where everyone has a vote, and at the end of the day the majority works.
Why is the steering committee not that way, Chair? Why is the steering committee missing representation? We talk about democracy and moving forward. We talk about electoral reform and what good this committee does, yet even this committee is scheduled by a steering committee that doesn't follow the same rules that we'd like to see the country have--the same level of care, of listening to all.
It doesn't matter that their opinions are different from mine. We will have philosophical differences. We will have times when Marcel and I may not agree; it just might happen. But we each have a voice. We each have a chance to debate the same pieces of legislation, give our thoughts and concerns, go home, and even collect the thoughts of the members of our constituencies and bring them forward. We always try to do as much of that as we possibly can. Then we bring them back to this committee and discuss them openly. Sometimes we win and sometimes we lose.
But why doesn't the steering committee that schedules this committee have the same democracy? How did we get there? Sometimes you shake your head.
I was saying to a member of the press yesterday that sometimes you get frustrated in this job. Sometimes you say, why in the heck did I come here to do this? Because the frustration sets in.
Here's another case of it. Rules and regulations are written and followed, but sometimes they don't make sense. Sometimes common sense makes more sense than the rules and regulations that are there for us to follow.
Here's another case. We have the case of a scheduling committee. It doesn't sound like much. It doesn't sound like it could do much damage, so we ignore it. Little do we know. Take a look. Here we are thinking that the steering committee didn't mean all that much. When we first established it, what did I care? It's a group of two or three members getting together to talk about what this committee could look at next. How much damage could that do, I asked myself. I didn't really--but I did just now.
How much damage could it really do? Well, look at what happens when you don't mind the Ps and Qs, when you don't cross t's and dot the i's properly. We get to this case; we get to a case where we have a committee that can actually do this.
Chair, look at what they've caused. Here we are. We continue to talk about one issue. Is it important? I guess it could be determined whether it is or isn't. But we continue to talk about that issue because, as a group, on the day we set down the regulations for this committee, we weren't aware the steering committee was not in balance, that it didn't work properly, and that it was dysfunctional.