Mr. Speaker, one thing would concern me which I know is not a part of the 13th report. There has been significant support expressed for this idea in some quarters of the House. It is the idea that somehow all private members' motions and bills should be made votable, uncritically so, that their very existence should render them votable.
I want to register my own concern about any proposal that would take away from the House's ability to filter what will actually become votable. If we do not have a system at the end, as we do now, for selecting what will become votable then we would have to have some kind of system at the beginning which would recreate what we now have at the end to make sure that the House is not put in a situation where it has to vote on private members' motions and bills, no matter what their content, no matter what the quality of their drafting and so on.
I have a final comment on another matter that has been raised by Reform Party members in the House and on which we have supported them. It is the fact that bills keep originating in the Senate. This is a practice that was questionable in the past but is even more questionable now, given that the Senate does not reflect the five party constitution of the House of Commons. It creates a new tension between the two chambers that I think the government should take into account when it considers whether or not it wants to continue with this practice of originating legislation in the Senate.
With respect to the election of the Speaker, I think it would be appropriate for the standing committee to consider what would be appropriate campaigning and what kind of structures the House might set up for candidates for the speakership to make known to members of parliament their views, their attitudes toward the House and so on. I think this has to be done very carefully.
The initial recommendation of the McGrath committee was that there be no campaigning at all because we did not want to bring the speakership into the disrepute that sometimes is associated with political campaigning. That spirit has to be respected. I hope we might be able to find a way to meet the needs of new members who feel that they do not have enough information about candidates for the speakership and at the same time respect the original spirit of the McGrath committee that we not have that kind of campaign.
My final comment, because I promised not to abuse the generosity of the House, is on the matter of free votes. All votes in the House are already free. This was achieved by the McGrath committee. The dragon to which the Leader of the Official Opposition referred, that is to say the confidence convention, is slain. What is not slain is the desire for uniformity and for obedience which exists within all political parties, including the Reform Party and including my own. That is what has to be slain if we are to have the kind of parliament the Leader of the Opposition called for. That is something that is the responsibility of political parties and not primarily the responsibility of the House of Commons.