Mr. Speaker, I thank the House leader for the official opposition for being brief and giving others a chance to speak to this motion because I am sure he must have been tempted to take up the whole two hours but he did not and this will give others an opportunity to speak.
I will speak against the motion and preface my remarks by saying I very much regret that the House has come to this place in its proceedings. I regret the use of 56(1) whenever it is used and I remember when this particular measure was brought in, I believe in 1991, by the Conservative government at that time. I remember with irony when the House leader of the Conservative Party indicated that he thought this motion was inappropriate at the time. I think this motion is inappropriate at any time.
This motion is what I called it then, sort of the parliamentary ubermenchen clause. This is the clause that means that in the end the government can do anything. I realize it did not succeed in using 56(1) and has now moved to have a much longer process.
A lot of the rules the government has at its disposal are rules it opposed when they were brought in and if we were serious about parliamentary reform we would have a good look at these rules and we would all imagine ourselves some day in opposition. Some of us imagine ourselves in opposition all the time.
Opposition will come to the government as surely as I am standing here, eventually in one form or another. We all have the responsibility to try to imagine what is best for the institution. What is not good for the institution are these motions. But what is also not good for the institution, and I think here is where the Reform Party has done parliament a service by bringing this to a head, is the perpetual absence of government members in the course of debate.
What was common practice in this House for many years is that at least one cabinet minister was present during all debates and perhaps there were two or three ministers and a cadre of government backbenchers. They may not have always liked what opposition members were saying. They may not have always listened carefully and took notes of what opposition members were saying. But they were there. Opposition members had both the perception, some might say the illusion, and the reality of the fact that somebody from time to time was listening.
What I have seen happening in this parliament, and I have raised this with the government House leader on numerous occasions, is that the government has sunk into a form of contempt for parliament. I suppose it comes from a contempt for the opposition, but that is beside the point. That is quite beside the point. We are talking here about a contempt for parliament that is ultimately destructive of this institution and of our democratic values and our democratic way of life. It cannot go on like this.
I know it is not the responsibility of the government House leader technically speaking. It is the responsibility of the whip or in this case the deputy whip because we know that the whip is not able to be on the job these days for medical reasons. But somebody is responsible over there. Overall the government itself is collectively responsible for how it treats parliament. It cannot go on like this.
I think this speaks to a larger problem. It is not just the contempt the government is showing for parliament or for the opposition or for both. It is also a matter of the declining perception of the relevance of the House of Commons to the decision making process in this country. That is something all of us have to deal with and presumably we should try to deal with it in a non-partisan way. To the extent that we deal with it in a partisan way, and I know this is not avoidable at all times but it is certainly more avoidable than is usually the case, to the extent we deal with the powerlessness of parliament and the growing irrelevance of parliament in a partisan way, we simply contribute to its growing irrelevance and powerlessness because we reinforce the stereotype that this is just a place where people fight.
We are all tempted to do that. I think we are all guilty of that each in our own way. So I urge members to try to think their way through the kind of partisanship that sometimes manifests itself on the floor with respect to parliament itself. It is fine to be partisan about issues. There are choices that people have to make between political parties with different perceptions, different policies and different positions. It is all in the course and the nature of democracy that people will be partisan, will be polemical, will be political, will argue with each other. I think that is all fine and dandy in a democratic society but we ought not to be partisan about parliament itself.
I think this is what has happened. It is very regrettable. I hope the Reform Party members see the irony of the fact that they are now, in many respects by virtue of circumstances beyond their control but somewhat within their control, playing exactly the same kind of parliamentary silly games they made a career out of criticizing before they came here. I am sure that must bother them as it bothers me on occasion when I am forced to play these kinds of games.
Sometimes we play them with joy and sometimes we play them with sadness because the government gives us no option. I think the government has created this situation. This morning it had 39 members on the other side—