Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
It's interesting, and perhaps some of the members are choosing to ignore the central point, which is the government having unilateral power to ultimately decide what the changes would be. I am asking for the government to let go of that power and to come to a place where all the voices of parliamentarians would be respected, and to assure us that it will not make these decisions unilaterally. If we can have that commitment, I think we can get somewhere.
Members may say, “Don't worry, trust us”, but I'm sorry to say, we have seen this movie played before on electoral reform. People worked really hard to have conversations. MPs had town halls in their own communities. The committee travelled across the country and invited feedback from members of the community. The committee made recommendations and the government unilaterally decided to reject them, rejecting and breaking a major commitment that the Prime Minister himself had made to Canadians on electoral reform.
It's not the path we should go down. It's certainly not what the Prime Minister wants Canadians to believe about his approach, the sunny ways approach of collaboration and bringing together people. That hasn't been demonstrated, and here we are talking about substantive changes to the way in which the House would be run.
To ensure that discussions take place in a way that would yield actual results with the respect of all members of the House, it is really important for the government members to know that the government needs to relinquish its desire to make unilateral decisions on these changes. That's what is needed. It's not a question of dates. It is the most important question of making sure that the opposition members also have buy-in with respect to these changes, and the only way we can achieve that is for the government to let go of its desire to make these decisions unilaterally.