I just want to say, in response to Mr. Waugh, that I think his story about Saskatchewan and the filibuster that occurred when the government undertook to sell PotashCorp, jointly with the story about MTS in Manitoba, just shows the extent to which filibusters are brought on by issues where the stakes are high. Selling off a major crown corporation like that, whether you're for it or against it—I'm sure we wouldn't find consensus around this table on whether to be for or against those decisions—nevertheless is a significant decision in terms of the future of the economy. Whether those assets are held publicly or privately can make a substantial difference for people in the province. I won't get into substantive debate on the virtue of publicly held assets or privately held assets, but I do think it illustrates that it's when the stakes are high that issues tend to trigger those kinds of filibusters. That's why we're here today, because the stakes are high.
Whatever you think about some of the substantive proposals in the government discussion paper, what's at stake and where the stakes are high is the setting of a precedent, where a majority government uses that majority to rewrite the rules of Parliament. That, for me, is really at the bottom of what we're here for. It's why we're happy to talk at length and provide such a detailed analysis of the issue for the benefit of ourselves and other members, and ultimately for the government, because it's a bad precedent. You can have a government made up of the most friendly, well-meaning people. If they go ahead and establish precedents that future governments can use, governments that may be less scrupulous, then they will have done an incredible disservice to the country, whether they intended to or not. It's just a good reminder of how it is....
I think some people look at the kind of detailed conversation we've been having and ask what we are doing and why we are doing that. It's important to know that it gets done when you're on the cusp of making a really significant decision, and one that can potentially have very negative consequences. When that happens, it is perfectly appropriate for legislators to respond by trying to put that decision off, in the hopes that, while doing that, first of all, they'll be able to perhaps persuade the government that they're on the wrong track.
There's a lot of room here, given the strength of the tradition of all-party agreement, for government to change its mind and simply say that it's come to see the value of reaching out to colleagues, if nothing else, because it wants to get something done; and as much as it may think it can go ahead on its own, it realizes it's not going to get it done if it doesn't reach out to other parties.
That's not the government members saying they were wrong. That would be nice to hear from the other side, but I don't think they even have to go there. I think they can say their priority is to get it done, and they had an idea about how they would get it done. Whether they think it's right or not, that strategy's not working. They're pragmatic, and they're going to adopt a strategy that actually gets results. That strategy is going to be one that's more collaborative with the opposition parties. So there's that, convincing government. We're hearing persuasive arguments tonight.
The second point is to give time. This is one thing. I'll try to not conflate that point about procedure, and majority governments unilaterally making changes, with substantive issues. I think one role of Parliament, and one virtuous aspect of some of the dilatory strategies that opposition parties adopt from time to time, is to give civil society the time it needs to digest what government is proposing and to mobilize, either in favour or against.
Maybe civil society has time to digest that, Canadians come to appreciate what it is the government is doing and say, hey, actually, we really like it. They mobilize against the opposition because they think the opposition is making an error. Or they come to know better what the government is doing, and they say, hey, we really don't like this. They're thankful for that time to impress upon government members that they need to change tack.
Part of the problem with making legislative processes so quote-unquote efficient is that legislation passes before Canadians have time to even really know what's going on here. It is a bit of a bubble in Ottawa, and it takes time for things to seep out. The media have to be covering it. MPs need time to put a householder together or line up their ten percenters and get them out to the riding. They need time to get some of that feedback, to see what's going on. Groups in civil society need time to organize meetings, to organize rallies, and to organize letter-writing campaigns. This all takes time.
One of the virtues of the legislators here taking time and stretching out the decision-making process on an important issue is that it's actually the way in for civil society. If we didn't do that here, if within the course of two or three days we just went ahead and made some of those major decisions, we would be shutting Canadians out of the decision-making process.
When a government says that it wants to consult, have discussions, and stuff like that, part of that is not rushing your legislation through. I think Bill C-10 was a very good example, with changes to the Air Canada Public Participation Act. That bill, through time allocation, passed through Parliament very quickly. When I was out talking to people about the consequences of that bill and what it meant, people were shocked, frankly, that the government they thought they had elected was doing that in the first place. As they learned about it, they really didn't like it.
Partly, they just assumed that this government would never do that. It wasn't part of the election platform. It wasn't part of what they had talked about. People didn't feel that allowing good aerospace maintenance jobs to leave the country was part of sticking up for the Canadian middle class, so they were surprised to hear that. Had we been able to extend that process further, Canadians who came to know of that may have been able to change the government's tack and make the government feel that they were in the wrong.
I think that's an important element of legislative processes and an important part of why we're here tonight.