Mr. Speaker, I certainly do not have to ask the hon. member any questions because I know where he stands. That is pretty well for the status quo.
I would like to make a couple of comments that he might want to respond to. He took exception to our member from Calgary when she indicated that she felt the representation has been minuscule. The member's former leader, Mr. Trudeau, made the statement that when backbenchers get 50 feet from the House of Commons they are nobodies.
Perhaps he could take that into consideration and perhaps he could take into consideration what the people think about that kind of representation where a small group of people within a party and within a government decides the direction that the government is going to take on important issues that impact upon individuals so severely.
I have had people say that those who oppose these populace principles of referendum, recall, citizens' initiative, the reform of the Senate, a triple-E senate, are afraid of their own people. They do not trust them. They are saying to them at election time: "Trust us with the authority you will invest in us by way of sending us to Ottawa, but we do not want to have to trust you to hold us accountable for the way that we conduct your affairs on a daily basis".
The hon. member mentioned this whole huge mistake that the former government made with regard to the GST. Look at the damage that was done and has been done and will continue to be done. We are saying that if we had a mechanism in place through which the people could have stopped that damage, that ill-conceived piece of legislation would not have been passed into legislation; and the enormous economic damage that has been done and that has been recognized by the Liberal government would not have been done. This is what we are saying. The people need these checks and balances. This is to what the member for Calgary was alluding.
We are not saying we want to run government by push buttons, as the hon. member stated. We want to place reasonable checks and balances in place whereby when the people are aroused over an issue they have some means of stopping ill-conceived legislation from coming forward that will have such a detrimental impact on their lives and the lives of their children.