Mr. Speaker, first I would like to advise you that I will share my time with the hon. member for Berthier-Montcalm, who will speak a little later.
Bloc members do not often support Reform Party motions. This proposal is a minimum since, as the hon. member for Berthier-Montcalm said earlier, we are in favour of abolishing the Senate.
The Reform member who moved the motion is saying that spending must be submitted to the scrutiny of this House, so that these expenditures can be made known to the public as much as possible. This seems to be a minimum, given the large number of recommendations made by the auditor general following a review of this issue. There are 27 recommendations, and all of them make a lot of sense.
In the context of expenditure reduction expected by all Canadians right now, and since the public debt continues to grow and will soon reach $600 billion, cuts must be made somewhere.
The Senate is not subject to any of the rules that usually apply to departments. This makes its activities somewhat less credible in the public eye. The auditor general's proposals made a lot of sense, and he did submit a whole series of recommendations. What the Reform Party member is proposing, that a report be tabled in this House, so that it can be scrutinized, is also a good idea.
However, we must look at the issue from another angle. Why have a Senate at all? I recently asked some of my constituents what the Senate meant to them. They did not really have an answer.
They also asked who the senator was who represented their area here. I was asked that some time ago and I now know who it is because I made some inquiries. I do not wish to dump on those who do this job, that not being the purpose of the question, but my constituents did not know the name of the senator who represented them here in Parliament.
At one point I was visiting a school class and I asked them what the Senate meant to them. "Oh sure we know the Senators. We see them a lot." I was a bit taken aback by that, so I asked them to name some names. They then started to give me the names of hockey players. Does that ring a bell for you, Mr. Speaker? Children, even young people in secondary school and Cegep, told me "The Senators are the Ottawa hockey team. They are not that
good yet, but they are up and coming. They will be a good team eventually". Young people know absolutely nothing about the regular activities of the senators here in the other place.
After having the fun of asking that question for some time, and finding so many people giving me the same answer, I asked myself what the purpose of the Senate was. I wondered about its mandate.
Moreover, the first recommendation the auditor general made in his report was the following: the mandates of the Senate and its committees needed tightening up, as they were too vague. So then I became more interested in the question: What is the use of the Senate?
Finally, we became aware that the function of the Senate, although this is not how it is written down, was to block bills, to prevent their being passed. In actual fact, it is to examine bills that have been passed by the House of Commons, but in certain cases they are blocked because that is the only means at the disposal of the Senate. For example, it might be of some use if it were to block Bill C-12 on unemployment insurance reform. The Senate has made use of that means in certain cases.
Why does this occur? Because the senators are appointed by the government, no longer for life, as the age limit now is 75 years, but there are still a certain number of senators over the age of 75, because of their vested rights which date back to the late sixties.
When a new government is elected, the Senate contains a majority from the time of the old government, and it is in the interests of the former government to block the work of the present government. It has become what I see as a pointless game of leapfrog, paralyzing, sterile. We in the Bloc Quebecois, as you well know, find the federal system sterile, so imagine another system on top of that one, slowing the legislative process down even more.
Quebec abolished its legislative council in the late 1960s, perhaps 1968. Since then, there have been no complaints in Quebec that the legislation has been less good, less well examined, less well worded. It is, however, less expensive. The figure given is $42 million, but when you include the expenses of all of the other departments concerned, the cost is $54 million, and by far the majority of Canadians do not know what that money is used for.
Of course, some of them are hard-working. This is nothing personal, but the fact remains that, when there are a mere 42 or 45 sitting days in some years, when the Senate normally sits three afternoons a week, as compared to our five days in this House, that can hardly be called going flat out.
So, the basic question is: what is the use of the Senate? I submit that, when the public does not even know who the senators are and mistake them for the hockey team, we must ask ourselves very serious questions. The whole issue has to be reconsidered, especially since the Senate is so expensive to run.
In that sense, the motion put forward by the Reform Party is most interesting and appropriate because, if nothing else, appropriations would at least be scrutinized, which is one step in the right direction. The next step would consist in plainly and simply abolishing the Senate in order to save money, which could contribute to the public debt reduction effort.
I will conclude on this to give the hon. member for Berthier-Montcalm a chance to speak.