Mr. Speaker, I certainly do know about it. I want to say that the member is very fortunate, as are you, Mr. Speaker, to have lived through the last Parliament.
In the last Parliament things did work differently here. I think one of the reasons that the Reform Party has been so successful across this country is that it was a negative response to the way things were done here. One of the reasons the Liberals so successful in the last campaign is that we recognized that the Canadian public no longer would allow Parliament to work basically by fiat, by a small number of individuals and mandarins to make all the decisions, that consultation was not real, that it was phoney, and that bad legislation and special interest legislation got passed.
I think the member opposite and even you and I, Mr. Speaker, have benefited by the past government's excessive partisanship and lack of consultation when it came to legislative process. Some of us did try to make this a better place. I can say that in the last Parliament one of the few committees that did work effectively was the government ops committee led by Mr. Holtmann, who is no longer a member here, and John Rodriguez, a New Democrat who was the NDP critic. We worked together with the groups there to try to come up with better legislation. I think we were a bit of a model in the way we were trying to do things.
The hon. member is right, there may have been some members in the past. We participated in the venue that was drawn for us by the government. We have drawn a different venue. We have put different rules forward. We allow members of this place to have their say.
I would urge the member not to live in the past, to look at the future, to look at reality. He will see that there is plenty of opportunity without falling into old patterns to allow members of all sides to have their say when it comes to formulating legislation.