Mr. Speaker, the third protocol was amended by the House two years ago. The government presented amendments which were supposedly innocuous and benign in their effect. Low income seniors got clobbered and hammered by that bill precisely because the opposition and the government members trusted the advice they received that the bill did not contain any deficiencies.
That is why we need to take these bills seriously. That is why we cannot rubber stamp them. That is why we cannot treat the House, as the hon. member from Winnipeg said, as some kind of a board room. Every piece of legislation that comes before the House is coming before the highest chamber of democratic deliberation in the country. These debates must be taken seriously.
I know it may not matter to the members opposite because they, like I, do not have the time to read 138 pieces of legislation. Most of them, when they do get up to speak, read the speaking notes given to them by their departmental officials. But that does not change the fact that this place has a history hundreds of years old based on parliamentary responsibility. It is ultimately here that the buck stops. We cannot shirk that responsibility.
We are not standing up using these tactics out of some whimsy. I do not particularly want to be here at 8.30 p.m. debating technical bills, but I saw a flaw in this one. As I am the critic responsible for it I advised my colleagues that, because it was a major tax increase for the Canadian recipients of social security benefits, we ought to oppose it. We ought to take it to committee eventually and have witnesses appear. We ought not to rush through committee of the whole without the people affected being able to have a voice in it. That is what taxation with representation is all about. That is what the democratic traditions of the House are all about.
I want to invite my colleagues, as I did earlier today, to look seriously at not just this bill but all similar technical tax amendments to see what they really say. Forget the advice you receive from finance department officials. It is our job as members to dig to the bottom of this, to debate these things and to look at the affect they are going to have on Canadians.
I want to correct one thing the members opposite have been saying. They have been suggesting that somehow the official opposition has been trying to stall the payment of retroactive tax payments to low income seniors who will benefit from the retroactive elimination of the huge mistake the Liberals made under the third tax protocol. That is not at all what we are proposing to do.
We would like to approve those retroactive payments as soon as possible, but within the context of a bill that treats all seniors fairly and does not increase taxes to any of them. That is a simple principle on which I was elected by 60% of the voters of my riding to come here and advocate. My colleagues and I have a prerogative. We have a privilege and indeed an obligation to do that.
On behalf of my constituents I want to put the government on notice. If it tries to pull fast ones like it did today we are going to play these games. Our role as opposition is to defend the privileges of this place, the traditions of democratic deliberation which this House represents. No amount of arrogance or abuse of parliamentary power by the government is going to stop us from taking that responsibility very seriously.