Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to take part in this debate on the motion standing before us which reads as follows:
That, in the opinion of this House, the government should permit Members of the House of Commons to fully represent their constituents' views on the government's legislative program and spending plans by adopting the position that the defeat of any government measure, including a spending measure, shall not automatically mean the defeat of the government unless followed by the adoption of a formal motion.
Mr. Speaker, the votable motion of the hon. member for Mission-Coquitlam suggests that members will be called upon to speak on the matter of confidence and thence, on the question of free votes.
Moreover, I already rose to speak on the matter in conjunction with the debate on free votes and in keeping with what I said, I would like to make two observations at the outset. When I read the text, two things caught my attention and left me with some serious doubts as to the relevance of this motion.
The motion starts off by saying that the government should permit Members of the House to fully represent their constituents' views. One has to wonder why a member would not now be representing the interests of his constituents. What the motion is really saying is that a member who does not vote according to the party line is not representing the interests of his constituents.
If we follow this logic, we can only conclude, first, that the election platforms of political parties do not have universal support and, second, that constituent views vary from one riding to the next.
This view of political reality is absurd and purely fictional. Let us not forget that political party platforms are aimed at getting as many voters as possible to embrace the same ideology and to share the same social, economic and political vision of community organization, be it municipal or regional.
It should also be noted that this perception of reality negates regional realities. For example, the electorate who voted for the Bloc Quebecois represents a regional entity that shares a certain geopolitical vision of that part of North America known as Quebec. How can a reality such as this be denied?
The second part of the motion deals with the principle of confidence which underlies our parliamentary system and the concept of responsible government. In accordance with this principle, the party forming the majority in the House of Commons must be able to demonstrate that it enjoys the support of the majority of the members in the House.
In a majority government situation, this is seldom a problem, except when the majority is very slim. In a Parliament with a government in command of a majority, the matter of confidence has really been settled by the electorate. Consider the last election. The province of Ontario enabled the Liberal Party of Canada to capture an overwhelming majority of seats in the House. Which means that the government party is strongly represented in this province.
Why then should the scope of this principle be weakened, as the motion seems to want to do, if in a parliamentary system, the matter of confidence has only a minimal effect on the way in which House business is conducted? In view of these facts, the Bloc Quebecois has some difficulty understanding the relevance of such a motion and supporting it.
Before touching more specifically on the Bloc's position with respect to Motion No. 89, I would like to draw the House's attention to a very timely observation made by the Standing
Committee on House Management which appeared in the committee's April 1993 report on parliamentary reform.
The report stated the following, and I quote: "Each party has to make its own decisions as to whether and when free votes are to be allowed-it is not up to the House, or to other parties. There is no single definition of what constitutes a `free vote': one can see it in terms of a Member's conscience, a Member's role in reflecting majority opinion in his or her riding, whether the Member's party caucus has taken a position or decision on the issue or not".
No, there is no single definition of what a free vote is and we cannot really have such a thing in the House of Commons. The political environment is changing and is never really the same from one election to the next. How could we have such a rule for a Canada which is so divided, where the very existence of a single nation is challenged by at least a fifth of the population? Under these circumstances, again, it is hard for us to support this motion.
We have said many times that the Bloc Quebecois has no mandate at all from its constituents to reform federal institutions; its mandate is to defend Quebec's interests in the House of Commons according to parliamentary rules and traditions. We do not believe that having free votes in the House could be in Quebecers' interest, since we think that it could diminish the opposition's ability to call the government to account.
Nevertheless, members of the Bloc Quebecois are fully aware of the value for democracy of having the citizens' representatives vote freely in the nation's legislative assembly. If anything gives backbenchers their freedom, it is free votes.
Less party discipline is undoubtedly an effective way to increase a backbencher's autonomy. Having members vote freely in the House on a daily basis would necessarily involve a redistribution of political power in Canada and Quebec.
Of course, we consider free votes for members of the House of Commons to be utopian and in the present Canadian context, we have trouble imagining a situation where all members could express their own political vision of their society, without any search for consensus or any reflection of regional reality.
Nevertheless, let me say in closing that the election results of last October 25 are in a way the expression of a free vote by some two million Quebecers who, by electing 54 representatives from the Bloc Quebecois, stated their dissatisfaction with the old parties. We know that these voters have had it with the Canada-wide politics of the Liberal and Conservative parties and gave the Bloc Quebecois a mandate to achieve sovereignty for Quebec.