The member across the way who is saying rubbish should bite her tongue. She knows full well that the Prime Minister does what he wants. This country is ruled by 12 people. It is not ruled by this House.
Example number one is Mount Logan. The Prime Minister decided to rename Mount Logan, so there it goes. The Prime Minister decided to use HRD as his own little basket of Santa Claus goodies. This is the situation. In spite of the fact that good suggestions have come from all members across party lines, the system is controlled by the Prime Minister's office and a couple of cabinet ministers. Most of cabinet does not have much of a say in what goes on in the country, sadly.
What a tragedy that we do not have a system that allows members to do what the public, their constituents, the people who voted for them want them to do. The central problem in Canada today, despite the importance of health care, EI, pensions and education, is that we do not live in a democracy.
There is one thing we need to do and I hope the public holds all our feet to the fire on it. We need to ensure that the House becomes a democracy again and that individual members of parliament are beholden to the public who elected them and not the leader of their party. We need to ensure that individual members of parliament can vote freely in the House. They should not be subjected to the ruthless and brutal tyranny of leaders in the House who use their power as a carrot and stick approach to reward or punish MPs who do not do their bidding as opposed to the bidding of the public who elected them.
That is the central problem in our country today. If we liberated this House, all other problems could be solved. We would be able to get ideas from the public and bring them to bear on the House in a meaningful fashion. It would involve liberating the committees so that the committee structure would be relevant, so that we could have free votes in the committees, so that parliamentary secretaries could be removed from committees, so that there is input on government bills, be it the EI bill or others.
Bill C-44 should have been sent in a draft form to the relevant committee. Then the committee and the public would have had effective input on the bill. That is what is done in Britain and in other countries.
If we were to liberate committees, hard earned and innovative ideas put forth by the public would be listened to. This could happen if bills came forward from the ministry in draft form and we removed the parliamentary secretaries from those committees, cutting the umbilical cord to the minister.
We need free votes in the House. We need fixed election dates so that the Prime Minister cannot unilaterally decide to call an election, not because it is better for the Canadian public but for his own political gain. That is why the election will be called on Sunday. It will be called for the government's political gain, not because there is an effective plan or reason for calling it. The public is a lot smarter than we are. They are going to wonder why an election has been called. They are going to ask tough questions of all of us so we had better have answers.
In closing, the bill presents a great opportunity to articulate some of the great problems this country has. There is the lack of democracy. We need to be more competitive as an economy. We need to lower taxes. We need to remove useless rules and regulations. We need to increase interprovincial trade and remove the barriers to trade. We need to make our labour laws more flexible. We need to invest in our education system and ensure that we have an effective student loans system so that students across the socioeconomic strata get the education they want. We need to save our health care system not only by investing in it but by restructuring it to address the demographic changes that are going to hit us smack in the face. We need to ensure that the CPP is sustainable because that too is going to be unsustainable given the demographic changes.
There are many challenges, but we are lucky that this country has a great deal of talent. We only need to use it and this place will finally become a place that will work for the people and by the people rather than for the Prime Minister.