You already know that's not going to happen, so you have to get over it. Listen, I'm still living down the Rae government. You carry what you have to carry too.
That's the difference. It feels as if we're in that time of “I have to think about every political angle, and I have to think out every move the government makes”. You're on the defensive. You have to look at where you can take your shots. That makes Canadians nuts. They like the adversarial system because it does work for us and it's our parliamentary system, but they like it in the Canadian way.
Mr. Chrétien offered up what would seem to be a very Canadian way to deal with this issue. Let's take the deputy speaker, make him or her the chair of the committee, and take the three House leaders and make the government House leader and the official opposition House leader vice-chairs, and they only will pass on the things that they agree on. That was good enough for Mr. Chrétien, and he did pretty well. Three, four.... ? Did he get four? He got three. He could have had four if it weren't for that vicious stuff, but we won't go there. We all have our baggage.
That's what Mr. Chrétien did. I don't know if he ever uttered the words “sunny ways”. He might have, but it's not part of his legacy, especially for that guy in the park.
But Mr. Chrétien's way of doing things is not good enough: the government wants more control than a three-time majority prime minister and former government Liberal believed that he was entitled to by way of controlling the House by the throat. If necessary, that option was always available to Mr. Chrétien, as we know. It was the Shawinigan handshake, yes, from the little guy from Shawinigan. We were once here on a tour when I was on city council, and Terry Cooke and I told the driver, “No matter what, even if everybody else goes back to the hotel, you have to take us to drive by to see where Chrétien lives.” The little guy from Shawinigan was that successful. When you're first starting out and someone like that is in power, you pay attention to it.
I think it says a lot that Mr. Chrétien thought that was a fair process to deal with this, yet Mr. Respect and Sunny Ways feels that's not good enough, that the government should retain the right to ram through the changes. Mr. Chrétien did not see it that way. You have to acknowledge that we have at least a good case, even if you don't want to admit it's the winning case. I feel sad and disappointed that I'm even talking that way in terms of winning and losing, especially when we're talking about the rules. There shouldn't be any losers on the rules; there just shouldn't be. It's that deep sense of commitment to Parliament and a desire to do a lot of this stuff.
I make no bones about it. A lot of the changes the government wants to make in the election laws, I favour. For a lot of the stuff it wants to remove from Bill C-23, I can't get that out of there fast enough. I make no bones about it. I don't want to see this Parliament go by with that stuff not taken out. We have a majority government with, at the very least, a third party—if not the opposition—that is very supportive of doing real modernization and paying real respect to the Chief Electoral Officer's report. Do you realize that when they brought in Bill C-23, they didn't even consult with the Chief Electoral Officer? That's how bad it was.
I want to get off this dime. It's wrecking all my other stuff. I'm missing the public accounts committee.