Mr. Speaker, it is interesting that the Liberals seem to be so sensitive about the issue of time allocation.
Let us go back to 1956. Mr. Speaker, you were but a young lad I am sure. The Liberal government of the day decided that a crucial parliamentary debate, a debate such as we had today, on the trans-Canada pipeline had tarried too long. It implemented a powerful but rarely used standing order of the day and invoked closure, shut down debate to force a controversial bill through the House of Commons. The hue and cry from the opposition parties, the media and ordinary Canadians was staggering. In the election that followed the travesty of democracy became a scourge of the Liberal Party and the government of the day slipped into the government of the past.
How times have changed. This week another Liberal government has invoked a form of closure. This is number 49, the 49th time the government has invoked closure. I think it will hit the golden anniversary of 50 some time this week. That will be 50 times that it has invoked time allocation and closure since it has come to power. That is the fastest 50 uses of closure in Canadian history.
Pipeline debates are passé nowadays, but debate on this bill, a very important bill to Canadians as the Liberal member prior to me mentioned, will be shut down. Debate will be silenced and the government will push it through and push it through again at the next stage because it has decided it is the easiest way to manage time in the House.
It is a vitally important bill. It involves not only a social principle. It could involve hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of dollars, worth of trade which could be at risk because of the bill. It is hugely important to Canadians and they want to see it properly debated in the House.
As I mentioned it is all over but the crying. The government has decided that there is very little political price to pay, so for the 49th time it will invoke closure or restriction on debate. We will be forced to vote on it tonight and it will pass into the annals of history as another time when democracy took short shrift.
The closure problem did not happen overnight. I do not want to point fingers at just one political party. The party that was in government before the Liberals also had this problem, although it took it eight years to reach 50 time allocation motions. This government has done it in five.
The political masters across the way have acted so consistently undemocratic over the past several years that in fact I would argue we have become callous to democracy's decline. The use of iron fisted party discipline means that MPs often vote to represent the party before constituents. The lack of electoral reform ensures that a majority government, in this case with only 38% of the national vote, has absolute dictatorial powers in the House of Commons, in the appointment process and in a hundred or a thousand different ways.
Unfortunately successive majority governments over the last number of years also meant that power sharing was no longer necessary, or they felt it was not. As a result Canadians increasingly tune out the democratic process between elections. The Liberals interpret this inattentiveness as a licence to ignore everything, from unanimous all party committee reports that are tabled in this place, to the Auditor General of Canada who says he will not sign off on the books of the government because they routinely transgress standard accounting practices.
Yet government members say “Who cares? We have 100% of the power. We do not have to share it. We do not have to do what is considered routine or ordinary or normal or accepted in any other practice. We will just do as we please”. This is the 49th time they have taken that tact.
I recently attended a briefing on the current democratic reforms occurring in the United Kingdom. Although I do not claim that is the perfect democracy either, I listened to an interesting discussion at the high commission. Members of the mother parliament, as we like to call it, are forging ahead with what they would consider to be radical changes. They are talking about devolution of powers to local governments in Ireland, Wales and Scotland. As they do that strange things happen. Not only are they restoring peace and tranquillity to those regions, but they are also instilling a sense of pride in those regions.
Power sharing under this new proposal through either a coalition government or proportional representation will be routine.
For example, the chairs of the committees will be allocated not on the percentage of who holds absolute power but on the percentage of the seats that are held in the House. Imagine chairs being allocated in a fair manner.
The use of referendum to determine broad public policy and even constitutional matters will be commonplace. Those on the Liberal side say that is a radical proposal, actually giving power to constituents, but in Britain they say that would be okay. In fact they have already done it in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and with miraculous results.
Guess what. When people have a say in the legislation and in the constitution they buy into it. They say “I have been part of the process. I will live with the results”.
Britain is one of the last holdouts for this unelected upper chamber in the world. The only other one in the free world is the Canadian Senate. It is the only other one that is unelected. Over there they are even toying with the idea of electing members. What a radical thought. What has got into those Brits? Have they gone completely over the edge? Imagine all this democracy at one time. How will they stand it? At the very least, the hereditary peers will be gone. It is unstoppable. The move toward democratization in that upper house is now inevitable and just a matter of time.
We are approaching the golden anniversary on time allocation, this black mark on the Liberal record. In the last parliament many high profile Liberals in government, esteemed people with perhaps as much procedural expertise as yourself, Mr. Speaker, were quoted as talking about the dictatorial Tory attitude on closure, about the fact that it was an affront to democracy. Now they seem to think it is routine business.
Within a few days we will see No. 50. Within a few more days we will see No. 51. I look forward to the day when they table the closure motion with the bill in the House of Commons just because it will be much simpler.