That's it's buzzword. It covers a lot of political sins.
It continues:
But this, too, is bunk. Is the Prime Minister really saying that there is an imbalance in favour of the opposition that is preventing his government from doing its “duty”? That the chips are stacked against him? If so, he's being absurd.
For the record, the government's proposals include one to limit committee members' interventions to 10 minutes—an obvious attempt to reduce the opposition's ability to make a public display of its dissent by filibustering during hearings.
Sound familiar? Because that's exactly where we are right now. Fast-forward, if the government got its way a year from now, and it was doing something else that was denounced just as strongly as The Globe and Mail does here, there would not be the ability to do what we're doing now, which is to hold up the government.
That's it. We're not defeating it. We're not limiting its exercise of power in any other way, other than exercising—and remember, it's the government that made this a 24-7 filibuster instead of just a little mini-buster like what we have at committee, where you meet twice a week. The hours of this committee are 11 o'clock to 1 o'clock. If this had followed the way Mr. Reid and I thought it was going to go, we would still possibly be filibustering if we were still at this same impasse, but it would only be happening on Tuesday and Thursday between 11 o'clock and 1 o'clock, which is the regularly scheduled time of this committee.
That happens all the time on the Hill. There are something like 26 committees here, and I believe—I stand to be corrected—nine committee rooms. There are more meetings going on at any given time, and I guarantee you that during the course of a week there is at least one, if not half a dozen, threats or indications that if the government doesn't start getting a little more reasonable it may find itself in a filibuster situation. That threat or the mere hint that it may happen is often enough to prevent a logjam, and away we go.
Lastly, the ability to speak until you're done is not just about filibustering and doing the histrionics that I'm doing right now.