That's good. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
As much as I have been looking forward to the opportunity, I'm also disappointed that Mr. Nater isn't here. I thought he was providing us with a lot of great points. It has been a little while since I've had a chance at this. I think it was actually March 21 or whenever when I last had a chance to come up on the speakers list. I've had a chance to intervene and say a few words here and there, but this is the first chance I've had to take the floor.
This is great. I have some things I've been waiting to share with the committee in regard to some of the stuff that we've been hearing from Canadians in particular. I'd like to start by recapping a bit of the history of where we are and why we're here.
I think that's important to remember at this point, Mr. Chair. We've been through a number of iterations of this meeting, and I feel that we're stuck in the same place. I guess it's important for people to understand why that is.
When we started this meeting.... Was it March 21? Is that the right date? Yes? It was March 21. It was to be a two-hour meeting, right? It was at 11 a.m., and when we came in, we had the Elections Canada officials sitting at the end of the table, because we had been studying the Canada Elections Act and some of the changes that the CEO of Elections Canada proposed.
We were looking at those changes, trying to determine whether those were appropriate, and having what I would say was a good conversation and a good discussion about those changes. I think we were being quite productive and were working in a consensual fashion, where we were all coming to agreement on something and then moving forward. If we couldn't agree on something, we understood that maybe we'd set that aside. It seemed to work pretty well. It also seems to have been the practice that we've followed in this committee.
I've been here for I think coming up on four years now. It has been three or four years, for sure, and that's the way we've done things. I've been speaking to the members who have been on the committee a lot longer than I have. Mr. Reid has been here for some time, and so has Mr. Christopherson. Mr. Lukiwski, obviously, was a member from this side for some time. I sat with him on this committee. He has been here for some of this debate as well, and I think has contributed to it in an exemplary fashion and offered some great points and advice. In speaking to them, they've told me that for as long as they can remember as well, which is far longer than I can, that it has been that way, and it always seems to have worked.
When we came into this meeting on March 21, there had been this discussion paper while we were on our constituency week that had come out from the government House leader, which was seeking to make some of the changes that they had failed to make a couple of times before, with some other new ideas that no one had really seen.
As I outlined when I spoke earlier in this committee, I think I spoke for a couple of hours at that time..... That's not normally considered brief, but in terms of this meeting it might be the briefest intervention, or one of the briefest. What I outlined at that time in looking at the standing order changes that had been discussed and suggested during the take-note debate in the House of Commons on the Standing Orders—I believe it was a take-note debate—there was very little correlation between that document compiled by our clerk about what was suggested there and what was in this so-called discussion paper from the government House leader.
We've still never had a real explanation of what the basis for that is. We were told that it was election promises, somehow. I didn't see very many of those things in their election promises either. It just came out of thin air.
We went into the meeting to discuss Elections Canada. We had the officials sitting here for some time. I finally asked Mr. Chair if we felt we could maybe allow them to go and get on with their day if we were just going to be discussing something that had no relation to them.
Obviously, the government had an intention of raising this at that meeting but didn't see fit to inform anybody prior to the meeting. As soon as we came into the meeting, within seconds, this motion that Mr. Simms had been asked to put forward by the government was put on the table, to just sort of ram this through in a very expeditious fashion without having to have the consent of the opposition parties, without really having to.... Although they claim they want to have a conversation. I've heard that over and over. When I say “they”, I mean the government. I'm not talking about the members on the other side of the table per se.
We keep hearing about this conversation or discussion, and we want to have this. I think the members on the other side of the table are sincere about that, but I don't know that I can believe the same of some of the other people who are saying it. The government House leader, in particular, is one who comes to mind. You can talk about wanting to have a discussion, but there's actually an ability to have one, so let's do that. I'll get back to that in a second.
The point I was making is that if there really were a desire to have a discussion, and that was supposed to be the starting point, one would have thought that they'd have said, “Okay, look, this is what we want to do, and we're going to raise this at the meeting.” Instead, it was, “Here it is: we have a motion and we're going to ram this through.” Then we in the opposition were left sitting there and asking what's going on.
You can imagine that right off the bat there would be some suspicion about what the agenda is. When words don't match actions, it is always something that sets off alarm bells. That was the case. The words weren't matching the actions.
This is fairly typical of Prime Minister Trudeau. That seems to be the way he operates. That's his modus operandi. He says a lot of words that sound wonderful on the surface if you don't really think about them.