That's what he's trying to do here. Let's not mince words. Let's not pretend anything else. That's what this is about.
Justin Trudeau talked in the past about admiring the basic dictatorship of China. He's said some wonderful words about his uncle, Fidel. At the end of the day, he wants to be them. He wants to be a dictator in Canada. I know that sounds extreme, but that's what we're seeing here. I may as well just call it what it is, because when you start looking at these changes, that is what he is trying to do. He is trying to take away any ability to be held to account.
Mr. Chair, I shared a Facebook post. It was a news article put out about the committee proceedings earlier today. In a minute, I want to share that. First of all, I went off on a tangent there and I forgot what I was actually getting at when I first talked about having heard from my various colleagues today, on their thoughts and their opinions, which I very much appreciated.
The one who really stuck out for me was my colleague Mr. Reid. When he was here earlier, he spoke for more than a few minutes. I'm not sure, I wasn't keeping track, but it was probably more hours than I can even count to, which isn't saying a lot of hours, but it's a few.
One thing stood out to me. I've sat on committee with Mr. Reid for a number of years now. I've served as a member of Parliament with him for over eight years, and one thing I've known about Mr. Reid is that he's very rational and calm. I would say he takes a very academic approach. It's actually quite atypical for a politician. A lot of politicians are about the show and about putting on a performance to ramp up the rhetoric. That's quite common among politicians, rightly or wrongly. It's something that Mr. Reid is certainly not known for. I saw him legitimately angry over this issue today. He wasn't putting on a show. It's something I've never seen from him before, and I've been through a lot of very stressful situations with him. I've been through a lot of committee hearings on difficult topics, and I've not seen that.
I think that means something. I wouldn't call it an outburst, but we saw that kind of passion and emotion come out of someone who just generally doesn't take that type of approach. He was angry. He used a word that he probably wishes he hadn't used, but it was out of a real, legitimate, and passionate concern for what this government is trying to do as far as the accountability of the government to Canadians goes. It was quite evident in his comments and in how he delivered those comments that this struck him like nothing I've ever seen. I was already well aware of how much of a problem this really was, but I think it really just drove it home for me.
If all Canadians were to see that, they would understand, if they don't already, exactly what the concern is here. I listen to other colleagues, as well, who make very impassioned cases for why it's so important in a democracy—which is what Canada is, or at least it still is at this point—for the opposition to have the ability and some tools to be able to use to hold the government to account.
As Mr. Christopherson rightly pointed out, nearly 100% correctly, the government is going to win the votes 100% of the time. We obviously saw a vote once in this Parliament that was pretty close to not being 100% of the time. At the end of the day, it's a pretty rare circumstance when the government isn't going to win the vote—extremely rare, in fact.
There's merit in that, I suppose. Some people would argue otherwise. That said, it's important the opposition have the ability to draw attention to issues that are of concern and to make the government accountable. One of the biggest reasons it's necessary is that often a government can take that power and use other powers, which they're also trying to change—I'll go through those as I speak tonight, Mr. Chair—and trying to put in place here. They can take something and ram it through, and they can do it in a rushed fashion. They can force things through, force a vote, and the goal would be for the government to try to do this—I think that's what they're trying to do in this case, frankly—before anyone can take notice and anyone can build up opposition to it.
What we're seeing with this motion, the discussion paper, and the timeline that's put in this motion, is an attempt to.... Let's face it, when Canadians hear that Liberal MPs want to take Fridays off, when they hear that the Prime Minister only wants to be accountable one day a week in the House of Commons, their reaction is not very good. I can tell you that the people who are aware out there.... I had a lot of people approach me when I was in my riding last week, saying, whoa, hold on. What is this government? Are they really trying to do this? Are they really trying to work fewer days? Are they really trying to make sure the Prime Minister...? I'll get to some comments directly from people in a minute or two, Mr. Chair.
The point is that when people hear about this stuff, it concerns them. The government is hoping to get this through before people can hear about it, before they can get angry, get amped up, and provide some kind of opposition.
Let's face it. Canadians are busy. They're raising their families, they're trying to run businesses—when the Liberal government isn't trying to tax them out of business, of course—they're trying to hold down their jobs, they're getting their kids around to activities, they're caring for their elderly parents. Whatever it is, they're involved in a lot of things. They have busy lives. I think people are busier now than ever before.
That means they don't have as much time as they might like to follow what goes on in Parliament or in the legislatures in their provinces, and political happenings generally. Sometimes, if the government can do a thing like this quickly enough and slide it under the radar, it can get away with it before anyone can know about it. That, I think, is what the goal is here. That's why the opposition has to tools to try to slow down the process, to allow Canadians to have a look at what's going on and allow parliamentarians to fully go through it and raise concerns on behalf of their constituents—who are Canadians—and bring those concerns out into the public forum so that Canadians can judge whether what's being done is in their best interests before it gets rammed through and not afterwards, when it's too late.
That's what's at the heart of all this, Mr. Chair. As I said just a couple of hours ago, I put the following story up on my Facebook page. It's a story from the other day on this filibuster, whatever you want to call it today—this committee meeting that has been going on for some time.
I hope you'll indulge me, Mr. Chair, because I wouldn't want to be accused of trying to go on for a long time, but I think I should read it to provide context for some of the comments I'm going to make. I won't necessarily read the whole article, but a part of the article that I put up, just to give members some sense of it.
It was actually an article from the National Post, and the headline referred to the comments that Mr. Reid made earlier that I talked about and I think really were atypical for him and showed how disgusting, I'll say, this attempt by the government is.
The heading is:
Tories accuse Liberals of ‘ramming through whatever the f— they want’ to make changes to House procedure
I'm going to click on this article so that I can pull it up, if you'll bear with me a second. I'm going to read in part from this article.
It says:
Opposition parties slammed the Liberal government on Tuesday—
It still is Tuesday, I think, but not for much longer.
—for trying to “ram through” major changes to how the House of Commons does its business.
So, it talks about ramming through major changes. The next paragraph reads:
With little notice—
—which is a key point as well—
—the Liberals moved Tuesday to have the Procedure and House Affairs committee study major changes to standing orders put forward by Liberal House leader Bardish Chagger, giving a tight June deadline and offering no indication that they wouldn’t use a majority to impose changes to House rules without opposition consent.
I'm going to stop quoting there, because I think there are so many important points being made in the first couple of paragraphs of this article. It's talking about the government trying to ram through what the author of the article calls “major changes to how the House of Commons does its business.”
We're not talking about everyday, sort of run-of-the-mill type changes. We're not even talking about changing a significant piece of legislation that the House of Commons would look at. We're talking about changing the actual rules of how the House of Commons does its business and trying to tip the scales far more toward the government.
Then it goes on to talk about little notice being provided. Again that speaks to what I was referring to earlier, the fact that the government would try to sneak something through without it being noticed.
It moved to make major changes to the Standing Orders. The other point in that sentence is that they were put forward by the Liberal House leader. It's not the committee making recommendations to the government, which the government would then consider, as I think it is trying to do—I think that's the efforts the government is trying to make to pretend that might be the case. I'll go into detail later about how in fact what's in this letter doesn't line up at all with what the committee had looked at previously. It doesn't line up with a lot of the things that were heard in the take-note debate even, which is another thing that we're hearing pointed to by the government as the opportunity when everyone got a chance to have a say.
Of course, notwithstanding the fact that another of the failed promises of this government was the electoral reform promise. A number of us who were point men for the opposition on this file travelled with the electoral reform committee. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I have to wonder a little bit as to whether that was done deliberately, especially given what has happened since then. Was it done deliberately so that the people who would maybe have the most invested in these issues and probably pay the most attention to these issues from the opposition caucuses weren't present. If it weren't done deliberately, then it was really quite reckless, at the very least.
Then the article goes on to talk about a tight June deadline and, most importantly, the government's offering no indication that it wouldn't use its majority to impose changes to House rules without the opposition's consent. Obviously, as has been said many times today, the practice has typically been and should be that, when you're talking about changes to the very rules that govern the House of Commons, all parties should have some say in that. As we're debating this motion now, that would not be the case. This amendment would, of course, enable that to be the case. We see no indication whatsoever from the government that they're even open to it and it's quite clear that their intention is not to allow that.
I certainly hope that, with the reaction they're getting, they'll choose to reconsider that. That would be really wise on their part. I think it would be in the best interests of Canadians, it would be in the best interests of Parliament, and it would even be in their own best interests, Mr. Chair.
The article it goes on to talk about some of other things. It says:
The long list of items for study includes: halting House sittings on Fridays; only requiring the Prime Minister to be in question period one day a week—
It also talks about introducing electronic voting and restricting opposition parties' ability to filibuster bills in committee. Those are a number of things it discusses. There are other things, which I'll go through in detail in a few moments.
I think people would be and are quite troubled by the idea of giving Liberal MPs Fridays off and by the idea of the Prime Minister having to be accountable to Canadians only one day a week. Electronic voting is something that could certainly be debated. It was debated by this committee previously with no decision made to proceed with it, but I'll get back to that in a minute.
As for restricting the opposition parties' ability to filibuster bills in committee, I guess I can understand, on a day like today, why the government might see that as something they'd like to see. But again, it is a tool that allows the opposition, on behalf of Canadians, to hold the government accountable and to bring to light some of the issues of the day. Those are the tools the opposition has to provide a contrary, opposing, or potentially complementary view of bills put forward before the Parliament so that Canadians can consider what an alternative, or an additional, approach might be. There is a reason those tools are there. You don't just get rid of them without some kind of agreement among all parties.
The article goes on to give some of Mr. Reid's comments. He said Liberals are trying to “ram through whatever the f... they want”, and it mentions what I pointed out earlier, Mr. Chair, that it was indeed a “rare outburst” for MP Scott Reid. I don't know if I'd call it an outburst—