I'm fine with that, Chair. I'll do a little research and we can come back.
All the evidence is that the government has no interest in letting anybody have a say for one minute longer than they have to because they want this law.
It's funny, Chair, think about it. Why would they want this law rather than just a good law?
They'll argue, ours is a good law. But how do we know what they were intending with any certainty other than they didn't want anybody involved because they had nobody involved? I would be shocked, absolutely shocked, to hear that at the Conservative government caucus meeting where the minister said, “I'm about to introduce the bill and explain what it is”, the reason that the Conservative backbenchers sent the minister packing was because the bill wasn't democratic enough. I guarantee you that was not the reason it was sent back.
It was not because somebody said, “Wait a minute now, that might be a little bit unfair because it seems to advantage those who have a lot of money and we tend to have most of the political money, and this is not fair so let's send it back”. No! And that bill was also the product of no consultation with the opposition, no consultation with the Chief Electoral Officer, no consultation with the public, but there was consultation with the Conservative caucus and they got a veto. They sent it back because it didn't skew the election rules enough. Or maybe it didn't go after the Chief Electoral Officer enough. Because they've got a personal vendetta going on against this public servant just like they have against every single public servant who dares disagree with them or who they don't particularly like. We can point to all kinds of them starting with the nuclear safety appointment, the PBO, and it goes on and on.
For those of us who are here every day, it really is heartbreaking because there is a process that would have gotten us some good work. That process could have taken many different forms. That's why, Chair, I say to you, that there are different ways whereby we can arrive at what our witness list is and how long we will meet and where we will go. There is an opportunity to do that in a fair way. But the Conservative government using the tyranny of their majority to shut down anything the opposition has to say is not it. That is not fair. It's the rules. I accept that. I don't accept that it's fair. It's not my feelings that are at risk here and how upset we might be. It's Canadians' law. It's Canadians' elections. Yet the only Canadians who get a say are Conservative ones. And even then it's limited to the real insiders.
I suspect that there are a good number of Conservatives, good-minded people, patriotic Canadians, and loyal Conservatives, loyal to their party, and you have to respect that. But I bet there are an awful lot of those Conservatives who are just a little uncomfortable with this because they like to win and they want their party in power, but not winning at any cost, because that's not Canada. That's not the way we do things. They might be expressing some things but they are not going to hurt the government that they support. I get that.
But I think it's fair to assume that there are an awful lot of them who are very uncomfortable with the undemocratic ways of this government. The list is growing. That's why it was necessary, Chair, for us to bring in a motion that attempted to provide that counterbalance to the tyranny of the majority. The only place we can tap into that's a greater power than that is Canadian public opinion. That's why the motion's here and that's why we are holding things up.
We think this bill is so important and that the process the government has followed has been so unfair and so undemocratic as to require us to use all of the—grant you—limited tools available to us to try to bring about positive change. Positive change would be giving Canadians their say.
I did digress a bit because I started talking about the committee's mandate. I want to come back to that, but I couldn't wait to get to the juicy stuff of showing Canadians that it's not just an academic debate about how we could maybe do this.