Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your remarks. The Speaker is always correct in his observations and I respect that. If I have offended anyone, I apologize.
I will continue my remarks by saying that the Senate can never be reformed. The Reform Party members have said that the Senate costs us $60 million and that they want to reform it. They want an elected Senate which will cost Canadians $120 million or more every year to operate. If we put this question to a referendum and asked Canadians if the Senate should be abolished, my sense is that they, in a unanimous way—probably around 80% to 90%—would support the abolition if the alternative, as the Reform has said, will cost twice as much money.
I put the case forward that if we abolish the Senate we would encourage Canadians to petition us in the House of Commons to strike yet one more level of government that would cost all this money. I bet there would not be a lot of people signing a petition to do that.
The reason I say that is because we are already overgoverned in this country. We have municipal governments, urban hamlets, towns and villages, rural municipalities, counties, school boards, hospital boards, provincial governments, the federal House of Commons and the Senate. We have more governments than people want to pay for. They are asking us to downsize the number of politicians not to increase the number of politicians.
What we should be doing instead is undertaking a referendum on the abolition of the Senate. We should be downsizing the number of politicians we have in the House of Commons and eliminate the Senate. We should argue and put the case forward for more democracy for the members of parliament who are elected to represent constituents in this very important Chamber.
We should, for example, have a forced representation system to empower Canadians to elect as many individuals as they see fit. Whether they vote for the NDP, the Bloc, the Reform Party, the Liberal or the Conservative Party, their vote would count. Therefore, on a percentage basis, if the Conservative Party got 20% of the votes it would get 20% of the seats in the House of Commons. The same would go for the NDP, the Bloc, the Reform Party and the Liberal Party. This means that Canadians would have a vote that counted as opposed to the vote they now have where, in many ridings, they cast a ballot for candidates in political parties that do not get elected.
We should also move to more free votes in the House of Commons. This would empower members of parliament. Committees would be a little more worthwhile and a little more important if we gave members of parliament a little more authority in committees. If we made committees more democratic they could actually look at reviewing the thousands of appointments made by the Liberal government every week and month. They could make sure that appointments were reasonable and fair and that the people who were appointed were fairly competent, as opposed to the many cases where they are not.
The final check and balance we need once the Senate is gone is to have less power in the Prime Minister's office. Let us share the power with some of the cabinet members and some of the members of parliament like they do in other countries through the proportional representation system.
I want to tell a story that I think is very important. If we were to have two elected bodies at the federal level, including an elected Senate that the Reform Party is always pushing for to spend more money on government and politics, the result would be gridlock.
I had the honour and the occasion to meet Bob Dole's campaign manager. Bob Dole ran for president of the United States four years ago. His campaign manager told me that he admires the Canadian democratic process because in the House of Commons the government is accountable every day to the opposition which is elected by other Canadians. He said that what they have in the states is total gridlock. He told me that he was withdrawing from the political process because all they have are very wealthy individuals getting elected to congress and the senate, who are looked after in terms of their priorities and their time by the 12,000 registered lobbyists in Washington. He said that only the wealthy had access to their politicians. They are not accountable every day as we are in this House. We may not like the answers we get in question period, we may not like the things the government says from time to time, but the importance is that we have a democratic process in this country that with the House of Commons alone, if it was empowered in terms of more Canadians becoming involved, empowered because we would have more individual influence on committees, on free votes and so on, we have a very democratic process here.
I maintain that another elected Senate would be a gridlock. It would be counterproductive, costly and I do not think Canadians really want it.
With respect to my colleague from Sarnia—Lambton who does support the abolition of the Senate, as I and all other members of the NDP do, I am not sure we will able to support the motion, although individually some might. However, I really believe that spending extra money on the Senate at this time is throwing good money after bad. We should try to husband our resources like they are our resources, as opposed to the ministers' and the Prime Minister's money.
We should husband the resources that are given to us by the taxpayers and make sure they are spent efficiently and more wisely than we actually are spending them right now.