My hon. colleagues say we should have at least 50 per cent. Sometimes I would agree with them. The west obviously has a much more sensible attitude to politics than we have seen over on the opposite side of the House. We could certainly do with a greater percentage of the seats.
I am proud that Reform Party members stood against the government's attempts to ram through Bill C-18. They tried to do it in a clandestine fashion on a Friday afternoon when they thought no one would notice. I am proud that my colleagues stood and prevented that from happening.
Canadians are starting to see time and time again that Reformers stand up for democracy while the government continues to practice the old line Victorian style of politics. It punishes any Liberal MP who dares to represent their constituents by voting against a government bill. That method of operation is completely outdated. It is not appropriate to the information age. It may have been perfect in the olden days when the present Prime Minister first came to the House, but it is totally inappropriate for the information age. Shame on this government.
In previous Parliaments the issue of constituency representation in the form of free votes was never an issue because the three worn out, old style, dictatorial, arrogant, old line parties all played the same game of agenda politics. They never did want to and still do not want to govern the country according to the wishes of the majority of Canadians. They simply saw government as an opportunity to enact their own political agenda without regard to the concerns of Canadians.
The pressure for change is here in this House today and it is not going away. At the moment, with the exception of Reform MPs and a few independent minded Liberal MPs, most MPs are nothing more than voting machines; no matter what their constituents say, they follow the orders of the Prime Minister when they come into this House to vote. All of the debates, all of the questions, all of the committee meetings and hearings, all of the witness testimony, all of the travel junkets are nothing more than make work projects to keep MPs busy between votes. Those votes we already know the outcome of because the Prime Minister had already decided before the first word of debate was spoken.
Last year the government introduced approximately 60 bills. We debated them. We questioned them. We commented on them. At the end of the term we had passed 60 bills. We may as well have piled them up on a table 60 high and come here for one hour on one day and voted once. The outcome would have been exactly the same.