Also, I'd like to join with Mr. Simms and give a shout-out to very promising young parliamentarians who don't happen to be in either one of our caucuses, which again speaks to how we do try in this place to get beyond just the adversarial aspect of this.
I have even mentioned this in the past when I spoke to Garnett afterwards about a speech he'd made. He reminded me of a young Tony Clement—and I hope this is okay, because I don't know what his politics are—back at Queen's Park, when Tony was a parliamentary secretary. Nobody knew who he was. He would be up in the middle of the night giving speeches that no one was listening to, and I was there responding with speeches that nobody was listening to.
I did say—and it's in their Hansard of that time—that there was absolutely no doubt that this was an honourable parliamentarian and was someone who was going to go on to make a huge difference. I think anybody who knows Tony—I know Tony personally, as he's been a Hamiltonian as part of his life—knows he's an honourable guy. Look at the heights he went to. I see Garnett doing the same thing.
I also have the greatest respect for you, Tom. It's not only what you've said and how you've presented it, but the way you've conducted yourself, both formally in front of the cameras and also behind the scenes. I want to say as a New Democrat to someone who's not a New Democrat that I think you have a lot to contribute to this Parliament, and we are certainly better off having you here.
Having said those things, let me comment first of all on the idea of the adversarial system.
Mr. Simms is absolutely right. It's designed that way. It's deliberate. That's why we have question period every day and congressional systems don't. It's built in. It's the whole notion of the loyal official opposition, where you proclaim your patriotism to Canada and to our Constitution and all that represents, and having said that, you then set it aside and go after the government of the day tooth and nail on the issues.
No matter how withering those attacks may be, that never speaks to whether the government has legitimacy, unless that actually happens to be the issue. It certainly doesn't speak to the notion that you're opposed to our governance, opposed to our system, and inciting revolution. It's all predicated on that respect for an adversarial system. It's meant to give us an opportunity—the whole “two swords' length”—to make sure that we find some means to pass laws in a civilized society other than heading out into the battlefield and killing one another. We all know of and have been to countries where they are literally dying to have that opportunity to have themselves and their country governed by that kind of system.
But I would say to Mr. Simms that, having done a great job of touching on what the adversarial system is, I think he makes the case even more as to why it's important to focus on what we're focusing on here. Mr. Simms went on from his broader view of the adversarial system and started talking about the substance of some of the issues that are in the discussion paper and advising whether he thought they were fair or not and where they were moderate.
That's not where we are right now.
There's also something that most of the world knows in terms of adversarial systems where there's also respect built in, and that's in most organized sports. For the most part in organized sports, you're on one team and you have opponents who are on another team. You're doing your best to defeat them, everything you humanely can to defeat them, but you certainly show respect for the organization you belong to and, most important, for the rules of engagement.
Whether it's an NHL game or a pickup alleyway game of scrub, if you haven't decided what the rules are ahead of time.... I look back now to when I was a kid and I laugh, because I know the truth is that we probably spent more time fighting about what the rules were going to be than we did actually playing the game. That was part of it, but it does point to the fact that even then we knew as kids that to make it work, even for a pickup game in the alleyway, the only way it could work was if we all agreed on what the rules were.
Once we agree on what the rules are, we can then go ahead and engage in that adversarial system. But if we don't agree on the rules, we're not going to get more than two or three seconds or minutes in any kind of play, and we're going to have chaos. That's what happens.
As kids, you'll remember saying, “That's not the rule. You can't do that.” “Well, wait a minute, I said the rule was this.” Then you stand there and have this great debate in the middle of the street for a good 10 or 15 minutes over what the rules are, until somebody yells “car”.
There is a reason for why kids do that. They get it. They get the idea that they can't have a pitched battle and determine who the victorious winner is, who the champions are, and who has the bragging rights of saying they won, if you haven't agreed ahead of time on what the rules are going to be.
With that, of course, you have to have a referee who everyone accepts, and we have that with our chair right now.
I say to the honourable member, the idea that somehow there's an easy, common-sense path to get to the substantive matters.... I have to say that Mr. Simms brought out some arguments that are persuasive and which I'd like to engage in, back and forth, to see whether we could find agreement.
Chair, you know we are currently doing that with the Chief Electoral Office—I can't get into much because we're doing it in camera—and it is known that we have what we call our low-lying fruit process. We're trying to identify those things that we either already agree on, or with some work, respecting each other, on which we can come to an agreement, an all-party agreement, unanimity. Then that goes into the report and we take on the next issue. If it happens that one of the members says, “I have a real problem with this and I'm not going to be able to easily get past it”, we know we're now in for a truncated debate and there is a possibility that no matter how hard we work we may still not find language. When we know it is going to be tough, we set that aside and say we'll come back to that and wrestle it down, and we move on to the next one.
At the end, what we try to do to be productive is to identify enough things on which we do agree, where there is all-party agreement. We put it into a report and send it off to the House for the information of the House, particularly for the government of the day, who, hopefully, if they are living up to their word that they are going to respect what committees say, will take that report and use it to help them inform the legislation that will flow from that.
Right now, we can't get to that point. The government, by virtue of opposing this motion—they haven't said one word to the contrary.... Like Mr. Simms, I haven't been here every minute, but I've certainly been here an awful lot of the time, and I've been out in the House and have listened to the House leader's scrum. I was here late last night when the House leader came by and talked to us. Not once have I heard anybody from the government say that they are prepared to do what was done in the past, which is to only move on items where we have all-party agreement. No one is saying that.
So, Chair, we're left here on the opposition benches with no alternative except to look at the motion and realize that if the government is not supporting it, then the only alternative is that the government feels that with their less than 40% of the popular vote, they have the right, morally and legally, to walk into that House and change the rules of democracy, to change the way that we make laws.
That's where we are right now. I know the government would like to turn the dial, change the channel, and have us talk about whether Fridays are on or not, whether or not the Prime Minister is going to be here on a Wednesday, and the packaging and programming and all that other stuff. They want to eagerly get to that stuff. I would just say to my friends that you may not be so eager to get there once we do, because there will be a lot of substantive debate. But at least we would be engaged in a process of trying to find common ground to make this place better, with everyone of us knowing in our hearts and in the rules that if there isn't full unanimous agreement of the committee, it won't go forward to the House. In this whole debate that we've been having this week—because we're in parliamentary la-la land and this is still Tuesday—the reason we're here is that, like the kids in the alleyway, we can't agree on what the rules are.
All we want to do is to have the rules that have always been in place, that our predecessors used. The government somehow believes that because we are talking about it and not about the “bad people”—how could it be undemocratic if sunny ways and the tribes all decide that this is the right thing for Canada? It is completely missing the fact that the only time there was a systemic review of the Standing Orders, those reports bragged about the fact that they had unanimity.
Mr. Simms, in particular, and others have very much enjoyed holding up the McGrath report and pointing to it as the Holy Grail, the bible. This is where we ought to go here. Look at what they did in here. We need to do work like that. As happens in these kinds of debates, the Speaker was a little bit selective in what he chose to read, and I'm about to do the same thing.