The Prime Minister's Office. That is the way our system works so we have to accept it.
During the last Parliament one of the promises the Liberals made to the people of Canada in order to get their support, to get their vote which gave them a majority in the House of Commons, was that they were going to change the way Parliament worked. They would make it more inclusive and would involve opposition parties in the day to day operation and would give opposition members as well as backbench Liberal members a say and a feeling they were participating in the affairs of the country. They promised to take the affairs of the government out of the backrooms and put the affairs of the country and government into the House of Commons and into the committee rooms.
Those promises were genuinely made and genuinely felt because the Liberals had just come through eight years in the wilderness. They had spent eight years atoning for the sins they committed while they were in government and in power.
Is it not funny how times change. It did not take very long before the government decided it was going to be absolute in its authority and in its control over all of the happenings here in Parliament. For the first two years in government, the Liberals knew they were facing a referendum in Quebec. The referendum would be on the question of whether Quebec should stay or go.