They handed off their lead to me. If anybody ever needed to know where the expression “politics makes for strange bedfellows” came from, this would be exactly that scenario. I thank my colleagues in the Conservative caucus for an opportunity to jump ahead in the order of precedence.
Let me begin, first of all, by expressing my personal respect for you, Minister. We're in neighbouring cities, and for a while you were our regional minister and you did an outstanding job in that capacity. I enjoy working with you, and everything I have to say is about your government in your capacity as the minister and not as a person or as an MP, because, on that front, you have an impeccable reputation with me.
Having said that, I have to tell you, if the Conservatives had attempted a move like this, the whole country would be enraged, but somehow, because they are the Liberals, it's not as horrible a thing. I have to tell you, this is a disgraceful expression of lack of democracy, again, on the democratic reform file. Let's remember, too, that there's a context to this. There's a history and a pattern.
This government said that the last election we had would be the last one we would have under first past the post. They broke that promise and set that aside. Then they brought in a whole series of draconian changes to our House Standing Orders, moves that Stephen Harper would never even dream of, and they had to retreat on that because of the backlash.
On Bill C-33, we were in the middle, this committee, of doing a major intensive review of the recommendations from the Chief Electoral Officer. That report was supposed to help advise the government, because they had promised that committees were going to matter from now on. We were going to go back to respecting the independence of committees and allowing committees to do their good parliamentary work. That was trounced on by virtue of Bill C-33, the Liberals' major reform bill to the election laws, which was dumped on the floor of Parliament while we were still in the midst of reviewing that report. That lead to a filibuster by a certain somebody that tied us up for goodness knows how long until we managed to get that mess the government caused unravelled.
Now here we are again on a major issue, and I don't disagree with its importance as underscored by the minister and by my friend Madam May, but the process matters. This is a democracy. We spent a lot of time working hard on that report, and two of the key things, the biggest rubs that we had the greatest difficulty with, were how we decide who the commissioner will be and what the criteria would be for who's in debates.
None of us at the committee level—and I'll include my colleagues in the Liberal caucus for this part of it—felt adequate to make that decision as a committee made up of members from all the parties. Now this government has come along and here's its rationale; here's the thing. I claim the reason they had to do this was that they've mismanaged this file so badly that they didn't leave enough time. In fact, we just barely got the last major bill through, again, because of the government's mismanagement. In their own backgrounder for justification for ignoring this committee and running roughshod over democracy, here was their rationale:
In the interest of time, and as a starting point for the upcoming 2019 debates...
It's as if nobody had talked about it yet, as if nobody was paying any attention, and the government went, “Oh, wait a minute. We should do something, and there's really not enough time to do it, so we'll just make that decision.”
This is so important, and I am so profoundly disappointed that the government has been so undemocratic in their approach here and so unilateral.
My only question, I guess, would be, at this point, where on earth do the Liberals—never mind government—get off believing that they have the almighty power and right to unilaterally appoint the commissioner and unilaterally decide who's in the debates and who isn't in the debates?
Where do the Liberals get off believing they have the right to make that decision when we, collectively, at the committee level, which the government was supposed to respect, have said that we need to put it into a process so that it's fair? How do the Liberals justify saying, no, they know better and they'll just set aside what the committee said?