Madam Speaker, I thank my hon. friend for the question. It never ceases to amaze me why, with all the resources we have, with all the intelligent people who sit in the House today, we do not enact these solutions. The power to do this lies with the government. Liberal logic is indeed an oxymoron. Here the Liberals have the opportunity for a solution and they play politics with it and fritter it away. Why? The goal of the House is not to enact solutions, the goal is not to bring forth good solutions to the Canadian public. The goal is the maintenance of power. The problems of the country become secondary to effective solutions to address the problems of the country. The problems become secondary to the acquisition and maintenance of power. That is a huge disservice to the Canadian people.
If the Canadian public only knew what went on in the House and how we are living in a very pyramidal system where the important decisions of the country are made by approximately 12 elected officials and a number of non-elected and unaccountable officials, it would be shocked.
All is not lost, however. If the government would remove itself from its profound and primary desire to maintain power and looked beyond that to build a better House of Commons which gives the ability to individual members of Parliament, across party lines, to represent their constituents effectively and to put forth effective solutions, which gives the power to committees to bring forth solutions and legislative initiatives to the House, there would be a much more democratic situation in the country. By doing so we would build a stronger Canada.
Instead we have a situation in which the frontbenches and the whip structures cower members in the back to do exactly what their leader tells them to do.
That does their constituents a disservice because there are numerous good solutions that the backbenchers have which I have spoken to many times. There is no reason why those solutions cannot be brought forth for the public to digest, debate and for us to debate in the House.
If we accept the current so-called democratic situation we have here today, we should be ashamed of ourselves. The House is far from being a democracy.