That's great. Thank you very much, Chair. I appreciate that.
I want to say how much I've enjoyed the last few hours, and I say that only partly tongue in cheek. I do enjoy hearing from Mr. Reid. It's always interesting. He knows his history, and I like history. I'm no expert, but I enjoy it. I'm pleased to pick up where he left off and to continue to point out why what's going on is so unacceptable.
Maybe to warm to the subject, I would start on a positive note; that is, I want to say to the government that this is not where we want to be. I can't speak for others, but the proof for my own motivation is the leadership role that I played in helping us get back to the Chief Electoral Officer's report, even though I was the one who blew it up the first time. The fact was that once we had dealt with that, the minister came in, and we got as much out of the minister as it appeared to me that we were going to get, and it was sufficient—barely—to allow us....
Then, colleagues on the government side, in camera and in public, you know that I was one of the leading voices for getting us back to work, and we did so. Very quickly, we managed to set everything aside. We were working, but now we're back into it again, for the same kind of problem, which is the government just dropping something out of nowhere in the middle of the floor and causing all this kerfuffle.
I said that I was going to try to start out by being positive, so what I want to do is just to reaffirm this. I like negotiating. I'm an old negotiator—and now I am old—from way back. I love negotiating. I love the give-and-take. It's like a poker game and I love playing poker. I don't win much but I love playing the game.
I want to say to the government that if there is any way at all that they are interested in the House leaders getting together—or whips, or members of this committee, or a combination thereof for any group at all that the government would like to identify—we in the NDP certainly are quite prepared to sit down, and I suspect my colleagues are, but I'll leave it to them to speak for themselves, and to try to find a reasonable compromise that recognizes the government's right to set an agenda but also respects the right of opposition in our role. I think we could find that if we came together in goodwill.
I want to say—and I say this much more in sorrow than in anger—that I wish that approach had been taken in the beginning. I have a sneaking suspicion that we wouldn't be here like this. As bad as we are, this is the worst I've seen it. This is worse than Bill C-33. It's worse because we're going around the clock, and the government knows.... They were with us in opposition and they know what we do. They know that we already have rotations, we already have schedules going, we have people who are going to be coming in through the night, and we're working on schedules for next week. We see where we are.
This is serious. Also, it's not very productive. It's not going to get us anywhere, other than two forces staring at each other. That's where we are right now, unnecessarily so. That's what is upsetting. I's that it didn't need to be this way. If the government wants to review these things....
Again, when the minister came in and said that she'd like us to try to get our work on the chief electoral report done by—what was it?—May, I think it was, our heads exploded, and we asked how we were going to do that. We didn't suddenly say, “No way—nothing.” I offered that we would do what we could. I said that to her privately. I can't say anything more than that as it was a private discussion, but I did offer privately and reaffirmed publicly that if we could find a way where this committee, if the government worked with us to identify areas where they wanted to bring in legislation.... I'm supportive of a lot of things the governments wants to do, not all of it but a lot of it, especially the removal of some of the ugly Bill C-23 stuff.
If we could have sat down and worked on an approach that would let us get through this and deal with it in a fair-minded way.... I was saying that I offered to the minister—and I think the official opposition was onside—that if we could, we would accommodate the minister's schedule, even though we don't have to do that. We're masters of our own destiny, but hey, we offered to do that, and we said that if they wanted to identify to us areas where they wanted to bring in legislation and would like the benefit of the thinking of this committee, then we would take that. If it was out of sequence with how we were going to do it, we were open to that.
I still remain open to the idea of moving our work so that we get at that in a timely fashion, which helps the government in terms of informing them of our thinking, so they can then introduce legislation. We get away from this Bill C-33, dropping a bill in the House before you've even heard from the committee, and then out the other side of your mouth telling us how important the committee work is. That just doesn't wash.
It's not like there's no evidence that we could work together, or there's no evidence that there's desire on the part of the opposition to be co-operative. Part of our mandate is to review the Standing Orders anyway. I would have been open to having that discussion, but I have to tell you, the ham-fisted way that this has been dealt with really feels like the last government. This feels a lot like Bill C-23, which really should inflict horror in the government members to find themselves sitting right where Harper's MPs sat. They're doing much the same as what Harper did on Bill C-23, only this time, instead of the election laws, it's how we run our House. It's the same attitude, that same bully approach.
I never thought I'd see anything like that, especially with the new government. I have to tell you, I'm not understanding any of this. I don't understand how the government thinks they're going to win on this, or how they think that ramming through changes to our Standing Orders is going to make the House work any better. There comes a point, Chair, where no matter how much we might want peace, if the government absolutely refuses to extend the olive branch of peace, then what I worry about—and, Chair, I say this to you as someone who is as non-partisan as our system allows—is that I'm not sure this committee can continue to function if we keep having things like Bill C-33 and this motion happening at this committee. I would be a fool, as one member, to continue to be co-operative with the government when all they seem to do is kick us in the arse. Why would I do that?
That's not my preferred way. I've been doing this for over 30 years. Having fights with the government, or fights with the opposition if I'm the government, is not new or exciting. I'm tired of all that. I have to tell you. I don't get a lot out of it.
What really turns my crank is when we get together with disparate political beliefs, different experiences, but come together in goodwill. Then we collectively try to find—like when we're doing reports—language that accommodates your concern and my concern. That I find stimulating because it goes against the grain. That's not easy to do in an adversarial system. Therefore, for me personally, after all these decades, that becomes a far greater challenge than just standing on some soapbox screaming and hollering. I've done that for decades, everybody's heard it, and we're all getting a bit tired of it, I suspect.