Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I thank Mr. Richards for that, because it shows there are not only the folks on the list that I mentioned but also a whole lot of others. In fact, a lot of the people who felt betrayed over the government's decision to back away from democratic reform are those in exactly the same demographic and part of the population who are very upset about what's being done here and the way the government is trying to grab power beyond what it is already legitimately entitled to. That just doesn't sit well with Canadians.
Again, that's why the politics of this thing is so crazy, Mr. Chair. You've heard me. I've been perplexed from the beginning as to, one, why the government is doing this, and, two, how on earth it thinks it's going to win. This is Canada. This is a government that ran on a whole platform of doing things differently, of doing the opposite of this sort of thing, of not doing this kind of sandbagging of the opposition members, or using parliamentary trickery, or ambushing people, and keeping them in the dark. All of that was supposed to have been swept away in the last federal election while we had a new dawn of sunshine, light, and transparency. Instead, we get political thuggery that in some ways surpasses what Harper did. That achievement, and then uniting the Conservatives and the NDP around any kind of issue, would be the two grand accomplishments of this government.
I want to come back again to why we're here, how we got here, and why, even though this is Friday, it's only Tuesday. It's because the meeting on Tuesday has still not ended; this is it. The chair has been very careful not to adjourn, which would then require a reconstituting of the committee and all the procedures we go through. The chair just suspends the meeting when we do suspend, but technically this is still Tuesday. The whole idea was that the government was going to force the opposition to die on this political hill. It did it the day before the budget, knowing that everyone was distracted by the budget; and they were. There was very little coverage of the use of this nuclear option by the government in the media, for good reason. It was focusing on the budget. That's why the government brought this in. It's no different from announcing bad news on a Friday afternoon. It starts to get reported on the weekend when many people have shifted their mind to their personal life, their weekend activities, and they don't really tune back in to the serious formal part of the world until Monday morning when they have to. This was the same sort of thing. It hoped that we wouldn't have enough material and that we would be afraid of a public backlash against us for being obstructionist. That's why the messaging of Mr. Simms and others and the House leader all along has been that they just want a discussion, that they just want to improve things, that this is about modernizing, that they have a mandate to modernize, and that that's all that's going on here.
Yet, what they wanted was for us to cave so that we would quickly get to a vote and come back again. That would force us to have that vote on the amendment that we will only make decisions by all-party agreement, and it would lose. That was its game plan, Mr. Chair. This crowd wants everybody to believe that they're so different with sunny ways, transparency, and accountability, and that we are all going to sing Kumbaya, and we are going to pass laws together, and we will do things only.... That was all just talk.
They came in here as ham-fisted and bloody-minded as Harper was on his most determined day, and used his same nuclear option. Poor Mr. Reid was just like me, practically apoplectic that now, suddenly, unexpectedly, that really is how we pass laws, by tricking and scamming one another. Suddenly what Mr. Reid prepared for, and he did an excellent job—if you go back to read that, it was a solid piece of two hours of discussion on that motion. He did his homework. He came and did his job. He had every right to believe that at the end of that discussion, at one o'clock, we would adjourn and he would go off and do the other things he does. In the interim, before he took the floor again on Thursday, he would do his homework again and make sure that he had another two hours of very relevant, germane discussion on the motion that's on the floor. That's what he had every right to expect was going to happen. Instead he got ambushed.
Now, tell me how sunny ways and ambush go together. I'm from Hamilton. I understand ambush; I understand getting along together. I understand transparency and sunny ways. This is not it.
Let me just say parenthetically, Chair, if you notice, most on the opposition benches, even when we get in full dudgeon, have been very careful not to in any way try to personalize and put ownership of this on the members of the committee, including you, Chair. No matter what niceties we have that this is Mr. Simms' motion, and Chair, you're being 100% independent and only have the interest of the committee...as much as we all know that's our narrative we also know why it is that the Standing Orders spell out that certain committees have to be chaired by opposition members. Let me just say that fact.
I'm not going any further on this, Chair. That's why I'm saying we live in this kind of suspended belief animation of what's real and what isn't, and you're in this awkward position where you are a member of the team. You were put there by the government. Mr. Preston was no different. He did the best he could to be as fair-minded and as independent as possible, but at the end of the day he was appointed there by the government. When it was time to do what needed to be done, Mr. Preston did what needed to be done, as did every other chair beforehand. The difference between a good one and a bad one is almost how much relish and delight they take in running over the rights of the opposition. Chairs who are deep in character and true parliamentarians actually will push back on their own government behind the scenes and say, that's not right, I'm not comfortable doing it, and that kind of thing will ensue.
I'm not going to go down that road, Chair. You heard what I said the other day. We both knew that it was all very nice and would fit nicely on a pedestal or on a plaque, but the real world is that you're there as a government appointee. We voted for you, but we all understand.
I'm going to do this once so I can move off, but I need to address it because I did deal with it the other day. When you made the decision last evening that we weren't going to sit next week, I'm just going to say that I understand you made that decision. We'll leave that there, but it's also what the government wanted. If anybody wants to refute that, I'm prepared to have that debate also. But the fact is that's what the government decided.
Therefore, why I opened up with my wonderful singing voice on What a Difference a Day Makes is that the government has blinked. They thought that, worst-case scenario, if the budget ruse didn't provide enough cover to slip and slam this through underneath the radar, at the very least they could hold our feet to the fire and make us go 24-7 over the weekend. Why could they see their winning that one? It just happens—purely coincidentally, I'm sure, total serendipity—that the Liberals are all going to be here this weekend because they're having a caucus retreat. My good friend Harold Albrecht knows very well how much easier it is to get volunteers to sit in on a committee when you don't have to schlep it halfway across the continent to do so, especially when you'd much prefer to be in your riding with your constituents, because during these times we don't get a lot of time there so we value it.
We would be struggling, in the opposition benches, to find volunteers to sit in a committee meeting that for the most part nobody's going to pay any attention to, and to give up time with their families and their constituents. Whereas the government, what's your majority? You have 180 members. You only need four or five. Easy-peasy. If the budget didn't give them the cover...it was very clever in the short term.
It wasn't very good in the long term, I have to tell you, but in the short term, I understand it. If the cover of the budget didn't do it, they'd get us on the weekend. The second we can't put up a speaker and the debate ends, that's when the chair can legitimately say that the debate has now closed and we will have the vote. The government will use its majority to carry it, and we will lose the right to have an equal say in what the rules are in the House of Commons.
But what happened along the way is that this was so outrageous, so egregious, so unfair, and, dare I say, so un-Canadian, that even the Conservatives and the NDP found easy common cause in fighting this evilness—and I use that term generically, not biblically. Actually, it's been quite enjoyable. I have to tell you Liberals that we now have created some networks and, regardless of how long we go forward on this, the next time we need to come together, it's going to be a lot easier. We'll be able to do it a lot more quickly. We had a great experience. There was the fun we had doing the budget thing and bringing the attention here. There was a small group of us from both caucuses meeting through the day. There was a lot of respect, a sharing of resources, and staff working together.
I never would have thought it possible that the Conservatives and the NDP could work that closely together in a respectful way and in common cause. I want to thank the government of the day. You did that, and you should feel proud, because that's not easy. There are good sunny ways in terms of this side.
From there, we were easily able to say, okay, we're in this together, because if the official opposition loses the right to have an equal say, obviously we do too, so we have common cause. We quickly got together and said, okay, let's make sure that between the two caucuses we have the weekend covered, because we know the Liberals can do it easily. Over the last 24 hours and 36 hours, we've been working together to coordinate a roster of members who would be here so that we could staff this committee for the entire 24-7 all next week, and the government could sit there and listen to the response to their abuse of our rules, wall to wall, all week.
I have to tell you, notwithstanding the fact that I want to go home to see my family and I want to be in my riding, that I was kind of relishing the idea of that kind of a pitch, because you know what? In my gut, I knew the government couldn't.... How can you win this? How? They can't. Given what's at stake and given what the government has done.... Remember, they caused this war. Normally we wouldn't be having this discussion until the Tuesday we get back, and it would be at the regularly scheduled time. We're only into this crisis 24-7 because the government wouldn't adjourn the darned committee meeting at the time it was supposed to adjourn. That was part of their ambush.
Then, last night, the government message—I'll put it that way—was, “Oh, we're not going to meet next week at all.” Now, I don't know what happened to make June 2 no longer the end of the earth or the end of the world. I guess maybe they delayed it for weather. I don't know. It certainly puts the lie to the argument that this needs to be done chop-chop. They just sold off a whole week of discussion, because when we come back a week Monday.... Are we going to come back at 10 o'clock, Chair, or at 11 on that Monday?