Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to stand in support of my colleague's bill today.
I want to say that I am very dismayed that none of the government members opposite has the courage to stand and talk about the concept of recall in this House.
As my colleague from Simcoe Centre has already stated, this is a measure that has very high support among the Canadian electorate. In other words, Canadians want us to be subject to recall. The members of this government will not even talk about it and that is a shame and not in the interests of Canadians.
Really the purpose of a recall mechanism is that Canadian democracy would benefit from the increased accountability of elected officials. Once again this week we have seen how very unaccountable elected representatives really are.
This government talks so loudly about integrity in government and how it was going to put a watchdog in place that would be accountable to Parliament. What has it done to provide for accountability of elected officials? What it has done is appoint a lapdog that is answerable only to the Prime Minister and is now being used as kind of a Delphic oracle when the Prime Minister needs some words of wisdom from a deep source to justify his actions.
Canadians are not satisfied with the level of accountability that their elected officials have. It needs to be corrected.
This idea of holding elected representatives accountable by some recall mechanism is certainly not something that has just been dreamed up by a few strange people in this country. The whole concept originated in ancient Athens which was the birthplace of democracy.