Mr. Speaker, I want to make one brief comment.
The hon. member raised a good point when she talked about the changes made to the way the estimates were dealt with in 1969. It seems to me it is at that point that Parliament and the House of Commons began to lose control if not necessarily over spending, it lost its ability to affect spending, to have a committee actually have an effect on estimates. Therefore we got into the situation in which estimates are deemed to be passed by a certain period of time whether a committee has looked at them or not.
When I first came here there was at least an effort to question the minister and to spend some time on that. However even that atrophied after a while because members came to notice that it did not really matter what they said and these things got to be passed anyway. The minister simply took up the necessary time. When it was over it was over and the estimates were passed. The point is well taken. No amount of parliamentary reform in the last little while has been able to overcome that dilemma.
Just for the record much parliamentary reform happened here in the 1980s by unanimous consent or with the agreement of all parties, although not the reforms in April 1991. However, those particular reforms in 1969 were not the result of all-party agreement; they were brought in by the use of closure at that time by the then Liberal government.