There you go. Mr. Simms is saying he still has a bit of a grudge with Mr. Diefenbaker for some of the things he did. It is hard to get over those things. They don't all go by you easily.
Anyway, I make light of something that really is important, because in effect what they are saying is, look, there are some things that we would like to have agreed on. We know we need a change. We agree there should be a change, but we couldn't come to agreement on the language.
At that point they did not say they would give up and let the government use their majority to ram through whatever language they preferred. That wasn't the answer then and it wasn't the answer for us when we did our report, the eleventh report that we just dealt with in the House the other day.
The government has often said, well, you know, we may not get agreement on many things if it has to be by all-party agreement. Possibly, but we did pretty good in dealing with these things. However, when it came to the Friday, we couldn't come to an agreement. The government was keen that they wanted to change the sittings of the House and eliminate sittings on Friday, but the official opposition and we in the NDP disagreed. We disagreed so strongly that it was clear that we weren't going to come to a consensus; we were just that far apart.
It was not unlike our colleagues in 2003, who went through the same thing. Did they say that because they couldn't come to an agreement on things that they all agreed needed to be changed, or on what that exact change should be, that one of the three, four, or five parties should be the one that carried the day and ultimately decided on the language they wanted, and the direction they wanted, and the rest would just have to eat it?
No. They didn't do that in 2003. If it bothers you because it's not today, know that it's not what we did in this committee the very last time the government asked us to address some of these issues. Our colleagues in the past didn't feel that they had failed, even though I'm sure it felt like it, especially if they did agree that they had to make a change. It must have been really frustrating to agree that something had to change, but no matter how hard they worked at it, no matter how much the excellence of the analysts, who came up with incredibly creative language that would have let them try to address it, they just couldn't do it.
It seems to me that we were about the same way on the Friday. There was a lot of emotion in that discussion. The government felt strongly about it. The opposition benches felt strongly too, and in the end we couldn't find agreement.
The government's approach now, unlike what it was a year ago, is that if you can't agree on it, then we obviously have the de facto residual right to make that decision.
No. That's not what our predecessors told us. In fact, our predecessors went out of their way to say to us in that situation that even where you agree you should make a change but you can't agree on the language or the detail of that change, it ought not to happen, and that it is in the best interest of the Parliament we serve.
How come that's not good enough now? It was good enough for the Parliament of 2003. It was good enough for this very committee in this Parliament, the 42nd Parliament, my fifth Parliament here—I did three at Queen's Park—but now we're going to do it differently, and differently from what we just did a year ago.
What it speaks to, Chair, is that in this report they were prepared to do what we had done in the past. The report that we collectively agreed on and sent to the House is just like the report in 2003. It had all their agreement. Therefore, it meant that those changes were solid changes and that no one needed to worry that someone wasn't in agreement. Everybody bought in. We had found consensus.
Our predecessors were telling us that we are better to leave Parliament with rules that everyone agrees on, even if they are inadequate to the task, rather than to find a solution that is only acceptable to the government. That's what the Parliament in 2003 was telling us in the future.
The Liberal government can't accept that. They can't accept that they don't get Fridays the way they want them to be.
I hear one of my colleagues saying “constituency day”. I suppose, if that's the only thing that mattered, why don't we just video-conference Parliament and never leave our ridings? The honourable member throws out a quip, and it's meant to be either helpful or hurtful. It doesn't do either. It's mostly just noise, but he's entitled to make that noise if he wants and I'm entitled to respond to it, if I want. We'll just leave that and see what happens.
I am sure there were government members who....
Tyler, would you just do me a favour and check to see what parliament number it was in June of 2003? Thanks.
I'm sure those members felt just as strongly about the things they couldn't agree on, and I'll bet you a good number of the changes were probably led by the government.