Mr. Speaker, congratulations to you on your appointment.
I thank the hon. member for his speech. In many respects parliamentary reform is something that has been talked about here for probably at least one generation. I know that it is easy for members on either side of the House to talk about it, probably when they are in opposition. The bullet comes, of course, when some party forms a government. Parliamentary reform becomes just terribly inconvenient or messy or really inefficient when a government is formed and is trying to blast things through.
On the specific issue of the ethics counsellor. I thought it was interesting. There is a huge difference between reporting to parliament and just having coffee with the Prime Minister, for instance, and tossing off a note saying everything is okay.
I would be interested to hear the hon. member give a brief comment on what has gone wrong since red book one.
Now very specifically, in regard to the symposium that took place earlier on Parliament Hill today when we talked about trying to do something practical about democracy, we heard from an expert source that it is not so much that the rules need to be changed, because we have all the rules in the world. We would be able to change them at will if there were unanimous consent, I am sure, on both sides of the House. The expert said that the rules are there to allow us to do whatever we want to do in terms of making sure that we really do have a working democracy, but he said that it was caucus culture, that there is a sickness there. I wonder if the hon. member could talk about any caucus culture on the government side that seems to be just desperately against this whole idea of really freeing things up.