I think that's the normal practice.
The purpose of the amendment is to deal with an issue that I think is.... I'm trying to figure how to put this. I'm not directly addressing the two things. I'm directly addressing one of the two things that I raised. I expressed my concern about de facto closure being imposed; so that's part of it. I'm not directly dealing with the nature of the omnibus measure. What I'm really saying is that once we've said we're only going to pass things that everybody agrees to—which have the support of the NDP, the Liberals, and the Conservatives—we've effectively eliminated anything that anybody believes is too big a chunk to bite off.
As a practical matter, for example, I would make the suggestion that the prorogation element is too large a chunk to bite off, unless it's being done on its own. Even then I'd have doubts about the prorogation item, so there you go. You start taking that omnibus, to use the colourful metaphor, the actual vehicle with all those posters on its side, and you essentially say, let's focus on the Pears soap and not on the Bovril gelatin cubes, because we can get a consensus here.
If I were choosing my druthers, I would be looking, for example.... That long list of items is under three rubrics, or three headings, but as I mentioned, there are many subsidiary topics that are the real substantive topics. I would think that private members' business is a legitimate thing to be discussed. I would love to deal with that. I think we could probably get some consensus. I don't see any evidence from its actions to date that the government is unreasonable in its approach toward private members' business as a whole. That's a positive trend that we've seen developing for some time. The Chrétien government improved over its lifetime and was clearly, by the end, much better than the Mulroney government had been in this regard. The Martin government was too brief to really count; it was a minority Parliament, so it was hard to get private members' bills through. We had another majority under Harper, and again it was an improvement. I think we can see a trend heading generally in a positive direction, and coming back and working on that, making the kinds of changes that are suggested here, might very well prove beneficial. But we have to be careful about it. Anyway, that would be one I would suggest.
On the discussion of management of debate, I think you'd have a hard time getting consensus on that, in that in practice this appears to be about giving government greater control over the agenda, which is the opposite to the direction that opposition parties always want to go. I would say it actually is not truly necessary to achieve a majority government to get a reasonable agenda through. I think you'd have trouble getting consensus, but it doesn't matter, because that's the point. Once you agree that nothing goes through without consensus, everybody agreeing, we simply find that one drops from the agenda.
It reminds me, Mr. Chair, very much of the way in which we dealt with things when I was chairing the international human rights—