Mr. Chair, I'm not sure that I got really.... It certainly sounded to me like the intention would be to carry on with this and to try to “ram” it through as has been put so well by Mr. Christopherson. I wish I could believe that this was really about trying to get consensus and it was really about trying to bring everybody's viewpoints in.
I know it was noted earlier by Mr. Reid that he wasn't able to be there to provide input for the Standing Orders debate, for example. Of course, a number of us weren't and it was another one of the failed Liberal attempts to fool people with the electoral reform initiative that brought us away from here for that.
I don't think anyone is under any illusion as to what this is about. It's clearly about the idea of giving the Prime Minister one day a week he has to show up here to be accountable to Canadians. It's clearly about giving Liberal MPs another day off. We want to make sure that Canadians have an ability to hold this government accountable. Obviously, there is some significant concern here.
If the intention is to continue to try to ram this through, as it appears to be, and that means that they want to continue with this on Thursday, Mr. Chair, I wonder if it's just a question for you about how you intend to deal with the Elections Canada officials. I hate to put them through this show of coming here and then having to be dismissed and things like that. Obviously, that's an important study and one that we think we should be carrying on with as well. I don't know why suddenly— it seemed like not that long ago that it was such an important thing for the government and we had to really move forward with it. All of a sudden, the Standing Orders changes are trumping it.
I don't know what has happened in the interim, but somehow they've decided they want to be less accountable to Canadians and that takes priority over changing the election rules. I'm really confused as to where we're headed here and if there's something that we need to do with the Elections Canada officials to notify them of this change from the government about this desire to immediately be less accountable to Canadians.