Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Kindersley-Lloydminster has brought forward, as he has many times since coming to Parliament in 1993, a very logical and very well thought out and sensible bill, Bill C-250, which will provide for fixed elections to be held every four years. This is not a new idea. It is a new idea for Canada perhaps but in many other countries they have fixed elections. They work very well. As a matter of fact, one can find little fault with that formula. As a contrast I am going to outline some of the faults that we can find with the current formula what we operate under in Canada with regard to elections.
This bill also provides that byelections must be held within two months of a seat's becoming vacant in Canada. That again is very logical and sensible. Too often we have seen for one reason or another that a seat has become vacant and has been vacant for a considerable length of time before a byelection was held and most often until it was held most conveniently to the government of the day. In that time the people in that constituency have been without
representation in this House. That is not a good practice to have in Canada. After all, we are as MPs duty bound to ensure that our constituents are well represented in Parliament and therefore a seat should not remain vacant for a period of time longer than two months.
The other thing that is important about this bill is that this bill would be the first step to begin the process of shattering the near dictatorial powers which are enjoyed by a cabinet in our parliamentary system. As things now stand, and there is no difference in this Parliament with a Liberal cabinet, the Liberal cabinet sets the legislative agenda. The Liberal cabinet, as we have the case in this Parliament, also tells the Liberal backbenchers how to vote. That same Liberal cabinet, as in this government, also ensures the obedience of backbench members by doling out goodies to those same MPs if they simply do as they are told. These goodies can include committee chairs, trips abroad or parliamentary secretary positions.
While cabinet enjoys these powers, it also enjoys the powers of calling a general election when it chooses. This is very unusual when we stop to think about it. The governing party, the party with the majority in the House with all the power and all the resources, has the ability in this country to call an election when it is most advantageous to it.
Certainly incumbency has some benefits and brings some benefits with it but this is an extreme benefit for a sitting government, to be able to call an election whenever from a political point of view it is most advantageous to it.
Andrew Coyne pointed out in an article in the Ottawa Citizen : ``We would not trust the governing party alone to set electoral boundaries or to count votes. Yet it is fro some reason accepted as normal democratic procedure that the government of the day should time the election for its own purposes''. Those benefits are in every sense extreme and an impediment to true democracy in this country.
I want to touch on some other things because curtailing this power of the government and the cabinet should be only one step in our path to parliamentary reform. Canadians have been asking for greater accountability within their highest political institutions. Certainly the Canadian people are very cynical, very distrustful of politicians. It has been because there has been this profound lack of accountability within the highest level of government in the land.
Bill C-250 would help restore accountability but so would other measures such as freer votes, citizens' initiatives, referendums and recall. As members know, the electorate for the most part feels sort of left out of the democratic process. They feel that democracy occurs for them only once every four or five years as the government pleases. That is when they have a chance to cast their vote for the party that is representing what their greatest concerns are, or the party that they can associate with as having the same type of thinking. That only happens once every four or five years.
It is too often in this country-and we have seen it with this Liberal government-that a party will go out and campaign on certain issues and get the people's confidence. We saw it during the 1993 election in particular on the GST issue when the Liberal candidates went around the country and told people that they would scrap, kill and abolish the GST. The Prime Minister himself on radio talk shows and on television said he would kill the GST, that he hated it. Many of the current cabinet ministers have said the same thing. When they got in the position of government, they refused to fulfil the promises they made to the people of Canada. They said: "We never said that. If you had simply read our red book, you would have seen that we never said that".
Let us remember that Liberal candidates from all across the country talked to hundreds, possibly millions of Canadian voters and told them verbally that they were going to kill the GST. Yet they only printed 100,000 red books so how would the Canadian people know?
My point is that Canadians do not have an opportunity to hold the government accountable between elections. That is why we think referendums, citizens initiatives and recall should be part of parliamentary reform. Instituting some of the reforms I just mentioned would go a long way to restoring accountability in this place. They would allow Canadians to actively participate in the workings of their government, not just once every four years but all the time. As their representatives we should be committed to parliamentary reform in order to restore the confidence that we would like to have from the Canadian people.
Bill C-250 would also return a measure of fairness in our election campaigns. As it now stands, opposition parties must be prepared for an election virtually at any time. The opposition parties of course are at the mercy of the government and the shortening of the writ period to 37 days leaves them in even a more precarious position. Opposition parties have just over a month to get their message out and their campaigns up and running. The government has the advantage of knowing for months before an election is called exactly when the date will be.
Bill C-250, by introducing fixed election dates, would restore fairness to our electoral system by levelling the playing field. All parties would know that an election would be held every four years on the third Monday in October. Not only would Bill C-250 create fairness within our system, it would also produce some tremendous cost savings.
In closing, I ask that all members see the logic in this bill, do the right thing and support it.