We in the opposition respect that the government ran on certain platforms. You get elected. You have the legitimacy, and the moral as well as the legal right to pursue that.
At no point yet has there been any opportunity for the opposition to have some changes that we would like considered to be part of all this, so somewhere in all of this, it's not just the government's total domain of the rules. We have some suggestions too, and there are some serious issues such as some of the ridiculousness of chairs making a really good ruling only to be overruled by the majority of the day, so that what is nonsensical and outside the rules is made legitimate. That should be appealable to the Speaker. You shouldn't be able to use a majority vote to dictate how the chair has to rule, especially when the chair has ruled consistently within the rules, but another rule allows the majority to overrule that. I'd like to talk about that.
Right now you can shorten a bell—and we got nailed on this in minority twice. Under the current rules, if you want to shorten a bell, let's say we have a 30-minute bell but it's one of those times when everybody is around, we're not far away in the House, and everybody is saying we don't need to waste all this time, the way we do that is to march in the two whips. They come in and do their little ceremony and that is the majority agreeing that we're going to shorten the bell.
Shortening the bell is a big deal. You schedule your time. As long as you're there for when you should be to legally vote, you shouldn't have to be fearful that somebody is going to take away the time they just told you you had to get to the House. The mechanism for that is the thing—but here's the thing, at Queen's Park where there are three parties, to shorten the bell, it takes, guess what, all three whips to say all three caucuses agree.
Twice since I've been here in minority Parliaments, a couple back, the Conservatives and Liberals joined together. They were satisfied to shorten the bell. We had no consideration. In one case it was done deliberately because we were seen as the problem child in that case, and the vote was taken before everybody was even in the House because two of the parties had the power to end the bell by doing the little ceremony, but the third, fourth, and if there's a fifth party, just get left out of the loop.
There are very legitimate things that would help improve this place in fairness, which we'd like an opportunity to put forward, but nowhere are we given that chance except on that technical review, which is what the government House leader used as a hook to hang her discussion paper on. The reality is that we did what was minimally necessary to meet the requirements of the law and when that was done we moved on to other issues, and we may or may not get back to those rules.
I want to take a moment to say somewhere in this whole process the elements of fairness suggest that the opposition should at least be given their day in court and have an opportunity to put forward their suggestions to make the House more responsive to the needs of its members.
Thank you, sir.