If five members don't stand for a recorded vote, it would just proceed on division. That's what would effectively happen, which is the state of the committee of the whole, where we just do “on division” on everything and then proceed to the next stage of the bill.
Some bills have passed without a recorded vote. I think M-47 passed by a unanimous agreement of the House. As I mentioned before, the standing order allows people to co-second. I know that Mr. Arnold Viersen, Peace River—Westlock, passed motion 47 as a rookie member with the unanimous consent of the House and with co-seconders from every single political party. It can be done, even by those of us who are rookies.
I don't understand why we can't get agreement on this motion that we could proceed to look at the rules within the confines laid out in Mr. Simms' motion. For the three study areas here, the overarching themes, I think you'll have to sit evenings and maybe into the wee hours of the morning, until 3 a.m. every day, seven days a week, until June 2. Maybe on June 1 you can write the report. I think you have so much material to go on here that there is just not enough time to do this job of reviewing the Standing Orders that this place and Parliament deserve, that parliamentarians deserve, and that future parliamentarians deserve.
I'm almost done. I want to reference just a few more articles.
I'm done with going through congressional procedures. I just wanted to make the point that I think the reference to the House of Representatives is not the right type of reference. We are far more like the Senate.
Any government legislative agenda is constrained, not by the opposition but by the “anticipated opposition” from other parties. The government should anticipate that the opposition will oppose. It should not just table a bill and then expect it to somehow make it through this place without substantive debate. If they were to consult more openly with parliamentarians, I'm sure they could achieve their goal—sometimes they do and sometimes they don't.
There is an article I want to reference. It's “Obstruction in Ontario and the House of Commons” by Chris Charlton. Chris Charlton was a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Toronto. This is from page 21 of the Canadian Parliamentary Review, in the issue of autumn 1997.
She talks about this anticipated obstruction and makes what I believe is a pretty interesting argument that a government should anticipate opposition. That should be part and parcel of the deliberative process of Parliament. It prevents any government from getting too ideological and ensures they respect the role of the opposition. We can differ as to whether there is sufficient or insufficient respect for all parliamentarians, and whether the government is too ideological. They can also go completely the other way and not be ideological enough, not stand for anything, and veer in all types of directions. Many governments lose when they do that.
Thus, the opposition has a significant impact on directing government legislative policy and tactics. The government obviously reacts to how the opposition behaves. I think the 1990s are an excellent example of that. The opposition was an active participant in the proceedings of the House and in the agenda of the government when the Reform Party and the Bloc Québécois were in many ways setting the agenda. Their response was resetting the agenda of the government, such as the 1995 referendum and the drive towards eliminating the deficit as a priority.
I'll mention that the first Reform Party finance critic made the point in his memoirs—I can't remember the name right now, which is terrible—that oftentimes he would have private conversations with Paul Martin, the finance minister at the time, and Mr. Martin would tell him, “I can't have you agreeing with me too often. I can't achieve the goals that I have in mind too often. I need you to go hard.” He would, and that's part of the parliamentary process.
I think the Reform Party did its due diligence and compelled the government to follow through on its promise to balance the budget. Some of it was downloaded to the provinces. There were program cuts and program reviews that the Reform Party was demanding on behalf of the people who voted for them. They wanted to see them through. Vice versa, the Bloc Québécois, which was the official opposition at the time, also had primary goals and objectives that it wanted to reach.
I've read Martine Tremblay's book on the history of the Bloc. It was a very interesting read. They did not feel it was their job to grind this place to a halt, and they could have done so pretty easily. They still wanted to be responsible, as the official opposition. Their goal was to achieve independence, but they were still knowledgeable about the fact that they had to prove they could be a responsible opposition.
I think we're trying to prove to you that we're trying to be a responsible opposition, which is why we haven't walked away from the table. We haven't just walked away from the committee. I haven't gone to pick up the mace in the House. I haven't taken the gavel. I'm still trying to prove to you that I want to be responsible.
I could do those things, but I won't. I don't want to.