Mr. Speaker, I have just related the story. I was there, the member was not. I was there and that is exactly what happened, and there were other people who heard it.
Mr. Speaker, I will not listen to the heckling member on the other side who does not want to listen to facts. I want to talk about the issue that we have before us.
It is on issues like this on which democracy is trampled by a majority government. I say this as kindly as I can to Liberal members. They have an obligation, as do you, Mr. Speaker, to preserve the democratic process. When there are decisions made which run roughshod over the opinions and the ideas of other members, the frustration level grows.
In the instance that we have before us, I would say that it is not only because the member for Lakeland is in the riding adjacent to mine that I stand in his defence, but because of his proximity I frequently run across little things that he does in the riding. Sometimes people come to me and say “We have such and such a problem” and I ask “Where do you live?” and find out that the person lives in the other member's riding. So we have some dealings back and forth.
When the hon. member stands in the House and says “When I did what I did I thought I was doing what was correct because we had voted in committee that this was to be a totally public process”, my inclination is to accept that what the member is saying is in fact how he interpreted it at the time.
There is the other argument, which I will let other members make, that even though the committee voted that this was to be totally public, in fact the final report was not to be released before it was tabled in the House. That argument could be made and I will let others make it. It has validity.
However, I have a very serious question to pose. Every committee that I have been on since I was first elected in 1993 has issued a number of reports and I cannot think of very many which actually remained secret until they were tabled in the House.
There were a number of times when I was quite convinced that indeed Liberal members were talking to the press about specific issues which were in finance committee reports. There were some things which were in the reports that were leaked to the press before they even came to the committee in the wording that was quoted in the press. No other member even knew about it, except for the chairman of the committee.
That is almost impossible to prove and I can understand why the Speaker has been in a dilemma on numerous occasions when we have pointed it out. Not being able to prove which individual leaked it, as there is no paper path, it is very difficult to follow it through. The Speaker has, on every instance, until this one, ruled that that is the way it is. This time that is not the way it is.
This time we are told the member for Lakeland must stand in front of a tribunal to defend his actions. In his own words, the only difference between what he did and what the Liberal members have done over and over again is that he did it openly, in front of cameras, at a press conference, whereas they did it surreptitiously. That is the only difference.
The last budget is a perfect example. How many reports were in the press in the weeks leading up to the budget? It used to be that ministers of finance would resign if the budget was leaked, and that was not very long ago. But in this particular round of government, with the Liberal finance minister that we have, all of these ideas are floated out there and then in the end we are amazed to find that the budget speech given on Monday was fairly accurately reported in the press the Saturday before.
There are no repercussions any more. It seems to me that the true lack of respect for this democratic process has come from the government on the other side because it enjoys a majority. Government members won the election. They will not win the next one if I can help it, but they won the last election and they won the one before that, so they have more members than we do.
I appeal to them that in order to gain and to keep the respect of the Canadian citizens for this boardroom we must respect each other. As I must respect government members, I appeal to them to respect those of us on this side and stop routinely defeating every amendment that we put forward.
There were a lot of people who wondered about the long Nisga'a vote. I have had conversations with people. They asked me if that was the best we could do in parliament, to stand up and sit down for four days. In my more jovial moods I said that maybe somebody recognized that I needed the exercise.
However, there is a deeper answer. Yes, we did vote on many amendments to Nisga'a, not only because of members of our party, but because of the people we represent and in fact thoughtful Canadians right across the country who were very opposed to that bill in the form in which it was presented.
We had a few substantial amendments which would have ameliorated the concerns, but the Liberal government, with its majority, would have none of those. We said that the issue was so important that one way or another we would spend at least a week of the time of parliament on the issue, not one hour or two hours.
The government has the habit of using time allocation. I have a list here. There are several bills which have been before the House on which the Reform Party has only had maybe 30 minutes of debate before the government has invoked time allocation. There is no respect for it. So I said to some people that when we have—