—but we were, because that's what this committee does. That's the kind of work we do. Any approach different from that, in my experience, is not worthy of anyone who has the privilege of taking one of these seats. It wasn't a big discussion. It's not like the opposition wanted a whole lot of thanks for being so open-minded or that we were running.... This was a matter of course. There's a lot of work here. For anybody who's been around for a while, there's more than enough politics. If you want your headline and your clip, you're going to get your chance. Just wait long enough, it'll come. It's like public accounts; you don't need to go searching for stuff. There's enough legitimate work there that you're holding someone to account. That part of it is going to be taken care of. That was not a factor. It was such a different world compared to where we are now.
Again, we said, and it's reflected.... If this report were only the government's, you wouldn't dare say that “it may revisit this”. You wouldn't use that kind of language because it wasn't a co-operative report. It would have been written very much as what the government wanted, with no niceties involved anymore. If the government is using their majority to ram a report through this committee, then it's going to be pretty sterile, and it's probably going to say very starkly exactly what the government means and very clearly what they don't mean. It's going to go boom, boom, boom, and that's it.
Instead, even when we don't agree, even when we've acknowledged that we weren't able to find common cause in the first go-round, we say things like we “may revisit this...in a future study”. It's not a throwaway line meant to make it go away. We meant it. I could be wrong, but I think Mr. Graham shared the same sort of keen interest in this idea of a dual chamber. When you start to stand back, again, some of the things the government wants to achieve are very notable.
One of the things they talk about consistently is giving ordinary members, backbenchers—meaning non-cabinet members—an opportunity to have their say, to be more engaged, to be more meaningful. I'm all for that. How do we go about that, though? There may be something still here in this notion of a parallel debating chamber. Maybe, but we're never going to get to it with this attitude, with government there and opposition over here. It's a good thing we've got the “two swords' length”.