Mr. Speaker, with reference to your comment, I would quite happily change that to courage. I apologize to all members of the House.
The member is quite right. It gets down to the amount of influence we can have. It does not seem to matter whether we are in committee, in the House of Commons or wherever we are. I have been on committees and have spent countless hours with some members who are now ministers. The former chairman of the fisheries committee is now the Minister of Veterans Affairs.
Those committee reports sit on shelves and collect dust. I doubt if they are ever looked at unless the Prime Minister somehow gets his recommendations planted in those reports. He does not want to be seen as the mouthpiece pushing them. He wants someone else to do it, as we have seen in HRDC.
I have said this often before and it can be summarized in one sentence. One of the biggest problems in this institution is that we go to the polls once every four years or thereabouts to democratically elect a dictator. That is the democracy we have.
We have to change this institution so that there is accountability and respect, so that all members of the House can have meaningful input on the governance of the country. We are democratically elected to represent our constituents.
In some cases the government's own backbenchers have less input than the opposition MPs and we do not have very much. The Prime Minister cannot stand in our lobby and wave his finger in our faces, telling us how to vote or he will not sign our nomination papers. He cannot do that, but he can sure do it on the other side. We can see them walking out of the House after votes, sometimes almost in tears that they had to vote. We have seen it time and time again.
This institution needs to be changed. It is time to elect a government that will bring about meaningful change and show respect for Canadians who have sent us here.