Madam Speaker, I want to speak directly to Bill C-55. A lot of what I have to say directly involves time allocation.
To me there are too many issues. With this magazine bill the heritage minister is setting Canada up for U.S. trade retaliation. We all know that and the government knows that. With the risk of trade retaliation there is the risk of losing jobs, in particular jobs in the minister's own riding.
One thing that perplexes me is why a government would continue with this knowing full well that there are trade sanctions on the way.
The other thing is that when she bans Canadian advertisers from selling their goods and services in foreign magazines the minister is telling Canadian advertisers that when it comes to freedom of speech they are second class citizens.
That still does not seem to affect this government when it comes to doing what it damn well pleases in the House of Commons, regardless of how it affects people in other jurisdictions. It is really sad.
I want to comment on an issue which my colleague from Prince George—Peace River brought up recently. He stood in the House a few minutes ago looking for unanimous consent from members opposite to move to the Group 2 amendments. Perhaps the folks out there do not understand what that is, but really what he wanted to do was get off the debate on the amendments that were proposed by the Reform Party and on to the debate of an amendment proposed by the minister.
Members opposite declined. Basically what that says is that the minister has an amendment to the bill which will not even be debated. For the life of me, I do not understand why the government would take that approach. What is it about debate in the House of Commons that we are not allowed to have?
For the people who do not understand what time allocation is, it is a way of preventing further debate on an issue because the government wants to put through a bill.
As people will have heard, there have been a lot of bills which have had time allocation placed on them. We must consider those bills and how much time we actually had to speak on them. I want to talk about a couple of them.
Bill C-36 came before the House at report stage. The official opposition had 50 minutes of debate before the government brought in time allocation. What kind of debate is that? In the House of Commons the government says “You have had your 50 minutes. Let us go ahead and do something else. We are going to push this through at this stage”.
I can tell hon. members what is going to happen. The government is at the end of the line on this issue. We have now had 49 bills on which time has been limited and we are about to get number 50. As House leader I am sick and tired of sitting in House leaders' meetings listening to the fact that closure after closure, time allocation after time allocation, is going to occur and we will just damn well have to accept it.
That is not the way it is going to be. It may be time, and I think it is time, for the official opposition to say “Rather than your 50 minutes or your two hours of debate from us, maybe we will just close you down and see how you like that. Maybe we will just stall all of your bills. Maybe it is time for committees that want to travel to get in here and debate the bill because we will not allow that travel”.
I think it is time to talk turkey. Enough is enough. When we want to talk at length about important bills such as Bill C-55, we do not expect to come into the House and have the government say “We do not want you to debate this any more. You have already had on this bill three hours and 35 minutes and that is enough”. That is unacceptable. We will tell this government that it is not enough.
It is time to get ready for some serious turkey talk in the House. There are other bills. Bill C-2 was on the Canada pension plan and we wanted to debate this at length. It turns out that at the time of second reading on Bill C-2 the official opposition had 1 hour and 41 minutes debate on the Canada pension plan before this government decided we had had enough to say about it.
I was looking in the library recently at the debates which took place in the House of Commons in the 1960s under Diefenbaker. They debated it at length. There was no such thing as bringing in closure or time allocation. This was an important issue for all of Canada, so let us debate it and determine where things are going. What happens? We talk about it for 1 hour and 41 minutes and the government says that is enough. That is a disgrace. I wonder if they can understand on the other side how we feel about that. That was second reading.
Then we go to Bill C-2 on report stage and third reading. The government must have given a lot more time on that. It turns out the official opposition had 1 hour and 20 minutes before the government called time allocation.
I think the hon. member will stand up and talk about relevance in a minute on a point of order. About $1 billion in trade is done by Canada and the United States every day. That is relevant to Bill C-55.
What is more relevant to Bill C-55 is this outrageous situation where we have the official opposition reduced to about an hour and a half of debate on bills that we think are important. We just do not understand how this government can bring in useless bills, and I mean lots of useless bills, yet when we get to something important it calls time allocation on it.
The only way the government is getting away with this is because it has a majority government and because people outside the House of Commons do not realize what time allocation and closure really are. It is really a sad day when a government pulls this.
This government has called time allocation and closure on bills so often that we will hit 50 times since the Liberals have formed the government in 1993. That is two years ahead of the Tories. Imagine. They have a worse record than Brian Mulroney on this by two years. I guess absolute power corrupts absolutely.
When we get a majority government like this it feels that it can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants. It is a sad commentary on what we call a democracy. We who came here from the west thought we would go down to Ottawa and speak on behalf of our constituents and talk about the issues that are near and dear to them. We did not realize that when we came here we would be short shifted on these issues.
For those who are listening to these comments, 1 hour and 20 minutes debate is only about three or four people who get to talk about these things. On Bill C-65 which has to do with equalization and about $10 billion, which is coming up and we understand that time allocation again is coming in on that, we have just had 3 hours and 35 minutes debate. That is $10 billion, 3 hours and 35 minutes debate, and that is probably about seven or eight people. We all want to talk about that here, not just some of us.
I hereby give this government notice that I am about up to here with this time allocation business. It can look forward to one heck of a fight in the House of Commons if I see it any more. I understand it is coming in once more this week and if it does, this government may be prepared for a long haul between now and June.