If our amendment doesn't pass, the great risk we have here is that parliamentarians and the government caucus will take this as an opportunity to eliminate all the tools we have and the opportunities we have to be heard. We could wind up in a situation where we could not be heard. Then we will have few choices, few avenues, to stand up for our constituents and for our rights as parliamentarians to use the Standing Orders to make a point.
I want to put this into context and read the following from the review:
...41 additional bills would have been introduced, had the government not felt constrained by the opposition’s ability to manipulate available House time. Indirectly, therefore, the opposition did have a significant impact on constraining the government’s legislative agenda, although this fact could not have been gleaned from a simple analysis of the number of bills passed as a percentage of those introduced.
This was a reference to how much legislation had been passed by the government.
I don't think the House Leader has said this directly, but I think it's been an undercurrent of commentary that our legislative process is very slow and we're not getting legislation passed as fast as we would like to. I don't think that's a good enough argument to change the Standing Orders of the House, that the rules we have currently are insufficient because they're not fast. I've mentioned before that efficiency is not the goal of this place.
This article has a table in it, entitled “Table 1: Federal Government Legislation 1974-1993”. I would encourage all members to find this article. It contains a whole list of where bills were after nine hours of debate and with less than two hours of debate, and the percentage of House time spent on second reading of individual bills. It just cumulates them over time.
This type of statistical breakdown stops at the 34th Parliament. It would be interesting to see it broken down along these lines, to then have a comparison, but this is not something you can get done within the 45 days afforded by—