Mr. Speaker, the government has been very cute in proposing a motion which ties
private members' business to government business in a way that obviously gives the government House leader the opportunity to make the Reform House leader feel uncomfortable.
However, I would like to speak to what I think is the larger point which is the fact that this is in effect, as was argued earlier by my colleague from the Reform Party, something in the nature of an omnibus motion.
Certainly the government House leader will recall, having been here in 1982, when an omnibus piece of legislation, albeit legislation and not a motion, provoked 16 days of bell ringing. It is not just in this House but in many other legislatures and most recently in the Ontario legislature where omnibus bills provoke a particularly strong reaction on the part of elected members. Why is that? It is because it goes against the tradition established by Speaker after Speaker in so many contexts that the House should not be forced to rule on more than one matter at a time. People should not be put in that kind of position.
It is somewhat misleading, although not deliberately so, for the government House leader to suggest that the framework which the motion establishes provides an opportunity for the question to be put on each and every piece of legislation that would be reinstated within this framework. What will happen is that the bill will be reinstated at the particular point at which it was when the last session came to an end. There will be no question put.
The government House leader suggests that there will be individual questions put on whether or not legislation is reinstated. That is the question we are debating here; not the questions that will be put at the various stages of legislation, but whether the legislation itself will be reinstated. That is the question that opposition members want put and those are the questions that will not be put if this framework motion is adopted.
The government House leader suggests that somehow there will be individual questions put with respect to these 30 bills. The point was rightly made that we are talking about 30 bills, not just the five that we found so offensive and which the Liberals found offensive when the Conservatives tried to do a similar thing in May 1991.
Is there no end to the parliamentary hypocrisy, call it what you like, which we see from Parliament to Parliament to Parliament where people get up on the government side and do in spades what they condemned in an even smaller form when they were in opposition? Is there no end?
I have seen this happen on a number of occasions. I have seen Conservatives condemn Liberals and then do it. I have seen Liberals condemn Conservatives and then do it. In this case it is the Liberals who condemn the Conservatives and who now come before us with a motion which does in a much more exaggerated way the very thing that they found so heinous in May 1991. We had a bad decision in May 1991. That motion never should have been deemed acceptable by the Speaker at that time, a Speaker for whom I had a great deal of respect, but I have to say I did not agree with him on that occasion.
We should not let that precedent be magnified now by the advancement of this particular motion. Basically if it is adopted it will create a situation in which the end of session and a throne speech really becomes just a PR opportunity for the government. It is not the end of a session and the beginning of something new. It is not what the end of session and the beginning of a new session used to be. It is basically just a little photo-op for the government because nothing stops. It does not have to take responsibility for the parliamentary timetable. If it cannot score with the goal posts the way they are and get its legislation through, this motion simply says move the goal posts.
It says we can do anything we like with the standing orders any time we like. There is too much of that going on. Too much of it went on under the Conservatives for nine years where they just moved the goal posts. I remember one time they had a motion where they just said they could change any standing order any time in any way they liked.
What we have here is a kind of parliamentary dictatorship when it comes to standing orders. The Liberals saw through it at the time. Yet now they do a very similar thing and it is very distressing. They ought to think twice before they do this. For once somebody should not do in government what they condemned in opposition. Indeed they should say that was wrong and we are not going to do a similar thing when we are in government. Would that not be a refreshing change?