I am talking about this House, not about the Ontario legislature. The Liberal Party of Canada put forward the most comprehensive and acceptable program that has ever been put forward by a political party in the history of the country and that was the red book.
I am sorry I do not have my copy here today because I know the hon. member who is making all the noise over there and who I urged a few weeks ago to get a copy and put it under his pillow, would not be so vociferous this afternoon if he had spent a little more time studying the red book. I can tell him that the voters of Canada chose the Liberal Party of Canada to be the government because of the promises in the red book.
In other words, the voters chose what they wanted when the election was held. They made their choice on October 25, 1993. They are getting delivered to them what it was they voted for in the red book. Every one of the campaign promises from the red book are being enforced in legislation today. The legislation we will be dealing with next week under time allocation was contained in the red book. The government is living up to the commitment it made to the Canadian electorate in 1993 in the red book.
I notice the Bloc is silent and agreeable on these points because it knows that governments are elected to fulfil certain commitments. Frankly, its members recognize the commitments we made were good and valid ones so they are agreeing with us in this respect. However, the members of the Reform Party like to think of themselves as a government that got elected but in fact, because of their success, having had no one here before except the hon. member for Beaver River, they think they won the election because a whole bunch of them got elected. However, what percentage of the vote did they have? Did they break 10 per cent or was it 15 per cent? Whatever it was it was not a number that inspires confidence in the hearts of Canadians.
While hon. members in the Reform Party can argue that they may have won the confidence of the people in their constituencies, which some of them did, one of them had the lowest percentage anyone had to get elected, I think it was 28 per cent or 29 per cent of the vote. He still managed to get in. It shows how badly split the electors were in that riding. The fact is they did not win the confidence of Canadians with the votes they had. In my constituency the Reform candidate had 12 per cent of the votes. Canadians did not vote for Reform policies. They voted for Liberal policies. They voted for Liberal policies as outlined in the red book. Those are the policies that are contained in the legislation we are debating, and were contained in the list of bills presented by the government House leader during his remarks earlier today when he presented the motion to extend hours.
While I can understand a certain disagreement between the Reform Party members and the members of the government because of ideological points of view or differences in policy-I remember the little blue book had other promises in it-the fact remains our party was elected with a substantial majority of seats in the House, a very substantial portion of the popular vote in the country and we are proceeding to fulfil the promises we outlined to the electorate in 1993.
Instead of asking us to substitute-