Well, let's see what it says. My friend says, “Say it's not so”. Let's see what The Globe editorial has to say, a national paper of record. They think about these things. This is serious stuff.
If he is, going about it by changing some of the standing orders of the House of Commons is not exactly the sort of fiery revolutionary act one usually associates with these things.
But while we don’t endorse the opposition’s histrionics....
Fair enough. If anybody deserves that word, I deserve it, especially during this filibuster. So fair enough, fair enough, histrionics.
....we do share its cynicism regarding the government’s proposals.
That's a little bit of a smack on the opposition for some of the over-the-top stuff that some of our louder members of caucus tend to do, as we know, and it's self-evident, with lots of Hansard to prove the point. Okay, so we take our hit. I knew when I read this that we weren't going to come off completely politically clean here. How can that be? We're in the middle of a pitched political battle. I don't think history ever shows that one side was really entitled to sainthood and the other one was deemed to be considered evil throughout history. However, I'm willing to read the criticisms because it's fair criticism, but it's drilling down to the real issue. Remember, this is The Globe and Mail.
It says:
But while we don’t endorse the opposition’s histrionics, we do share its cynicism regarding the government’s proposals. Some of them are clearly designed to make life easier for a majority government. And that is unacceptable.
It's almost like.... Well, we'll leave that. We're not going to go down that road.
It continues:
Any majority government like Mr. Trudeau’s controls the House of Commons, which means it holds almost all the parliamentary marbles.
Of course, I would say parenthetically that politically they've lost their marbles because they don't seem to have a plan.
Bear in mind, Chair—and this has been raised before, not by us but by others—that we are already one of the most tightly controlled parliamentary systems in the Commonwealth. Already we're on the tighter side of government control in a parliamentary system, particularly in the face of an overwhelming majority, which, by the way, it managed to get through the unfair first-past-the-post system even though it had less than 40% of the vote. In fact, it got a lower percentage of the popular vote than the previous Harper government had.
By the way, they were the ones who were going to do something about that. What was it again? Oh, yeah, something to the effect that the federal election in 2015 would be the last federal election held in a first-past-the-post system. He got a lot of votes for that. As soon as it started getting tough doing real change, well, then, we're back to what we've seen historically. The Liberals love to run on the left and govern on the right—