Mr. Speaker, I did not mean to suggest that closure originated with the Conservative Party. Closure in itself goes back in the history of parliament. Certainly I remember that closure was moved during the pipeline debate of the fifties.
I was suggesting that the immediately previous Conservative government brought in the various reforms in 1991, having to do not just with closure but with other ways in which the government could trump various things that the opposition might be able to do. That is the point I was trying to make.
There is a role for time allocation and closure but it should be a very rare thing. The problem is that it is not rare. In previous parliaments it just grew like Topsy. People get used to this kind of thing so it is not a big deal any more. When the opposition tries to make a big deal out of what is appropriate to make a big deal out of, the media are tired of it and the public is tired of it.
What has happened over the course of many years is that the opposition is eventually weakened in its ability to hold up government legislation, not just procedurally but politically, because people regard the whole debate about closure as a big yawn when they should not but they do.
Sometimes it is appropriate to regard it that way because it is a kind of pro forma battle between government and opposition. People kind of twig on to that and they lose interest. What happens is we throw out the baby with the bathwater on that. Sometimes when it really is important people are not paying attention or they cannot see just how important it is.
One of the things that has happened around this place is that the function of delay has been devalued, again because we have a cult of efficiency in our culture now. We think that everything should happen like a corporate boardroom or some kind of production planning and control mechanism for a factory floor. That is not what parliament is. Parliament, by its very nature, is a parliament, a place where people talk. To the extent that the only kind of talk we now regard as valuable are things that happen on talk shows rather than what happens in parliament there is a very funny thing happening here.
At the same time as our whole culture is obsessed with talk on the radio it has no time or appreciation of the talk that goes on in this place between the people elected to talk about what kind of country is wanted. That might be the subject of some kind of thesis for some student. It is more than I can go into at the moment. I think there is an interesting irony there.
What has happened is that the power of the opposition has been systematically reduced so that we cannot put up the kind of resistance we used to put up to a government measure and then take the political consequences. If we are delaying something and there is not a lot of support for delaying it, sooner or later we will stop delaying it.
We need to stop regarding that as a waste of time. That gives people time to mobilize. It gives the Canadian people time to figure out what is going on. It gives the media time to decide that they are going to cover it. If they only have 48 hours between the time the issue comes up and the time it is resolved, there is no time for any of that to happen. There is no time for process. What we have done here is killed the opportunity for that to happen in many respects.
Some issues drag on and there is time for that. I am not making an absolute categorical statement here, but that is part of the problem. It is not just closure in any of its formal forms. It is the self-imposed closure we all do on ourselves by saying it does not matter whether we have anything to say in here because nobody is paying any attention anyway, particularly the government. It is not even willing to go through the motions any more. Over time everybody loses heart. When we lose heart we lose the very thing that is absolutely essential for a democratic culture.