Here's one of my favourite moments. This is a bit of an aside, but I think members will enjoy it. Michael Chong, who sat beside me in a previous configuration, had these beautifully technical heckles, such as “What about section 52 of the Parliament of Canada Act?” or something like that. Also, when the then Minister of Democratic Institutions at one point said that we need to move forward from an electoral system that was designed in the “19th century”, he said, “Actually, it was designed in the 18th century.” I think it's important to be precise, regardless of the point we are trying to make.
In any event, I think the House leader's language is to move it into the 21st century, not the 20th century. Actually, the point of the distinction is that we are not entirely clear on what either of them means. What would be the difference between moving it into the 20th century or into the 21st century? Why don't we just skip a step and move it into the 22nd century? It's about as clear, right? It's about as meaningful when you say that.
What we know is that the government is wishing to rhetorically associate positive feelings with the changes they want to make. In reality, though, a lot of proposals for modernization, for reform, and for moving into the 21st century can actually move in the opposite direction. What is modernization for one person might be pulling an institution in the opposite direction from what for someone else would be modernization.
This speaks to a more fundamental problem in the way that perhaps some Liberals in general see the world, which is that the future is inevitably better than the past, so when they talk about moving into the future and about modernization, inevitably what we're going to be doing in the future is better than what we were doing in the past, and what we're doing now is better than what we used to do. I think a more constructive notion of reform would say that we look at ideas on their merits, whether they are intellectual products of this century, of the last century, or of an entirely different time and place.
I think the progressive tendency is to always presume that change is good and that the future is better than the past, whereas perhaps the Conservative tendency is to say this: let's recognize the wisdom of the past and make reforms as necessary, but with deference to the institutions as they have existed in the past, and let's make sure that we understand very carefully what we are changing. Maybe a good way of describing this tendency is what someone said to me once. If you buy a new house and you see a wall, and you don't know what the wall is for—you don't know if it's holding up anything more important—your first instinct should not be to knock down that wall. At the very least, you should know what it is there for before you knock it down.