Mr. Speaker, I congratulate you on your appointment. I do not know how many have done that but I am happy to do so. This is my third parliament, so we have obviously spent some time together as I think this is your fourth.
I want to respond to the throne speech. I was here, as hon. members were, on the day the throne speech was read. The first thing I did was, as everyone did, go for the area of the speech I thought would be most important for my constituents.
I ran for politics because I believed parliament needed some very basic reforms. I thought I might moderate or somehow change my views, but I have not. The longer I am here, the more I recognize that such reforms are needed.
Those changes are still very important to me and many of my constituents. Even now the lack of progress on basic parliamentary and democratic reforms is creating problems in Canada from a regional standpoint and is diminishing our stature internationally.
How would I know this? It is partly from being in the job for so long. I have met ambassadors, ministers from other nations, senators and congressmen from our neighbour to the south, people who have seen and experienced how it works in other places. One of the natural things we do is make comparisons.
It is overdue. I would say that if Canada were a more populous nation with more than the 30 million people we have, our system really would not work. What we have today only works because of our relatively small population.
Too much power resides with the Prime Minister and the Office of the Prime Minister. Members of parliament and other government and democratic institutions are neutered to some degree because of it.
I must return to the throne speech. I had to go to the very last page of the throne speech to find anything at all on democratic reforms. Guess what it says? We will look at electronic voting maybe and there will be more dollars for the library of parliament.
Those are both simple, straightforward initiatives that I do not think anyone in the House will disagree with but that is not democratic reform. Plain and simple, that is not what anyone who is interested in democratic reform was looking for, including an awful lot of government backbench members of parliament.
So where are we? In January, the Canadian Alliance House leader proposed a set of democratic reforms. These democratic reforms had a lot of support from the other opposition parties. They are not built out of thin air. These had been building for some time.
I would like to quote from the beginning of the document called “Building Trust”. It is a quotation from the Leader of the Opposition who said:
Canadians are justly proud of our heritage of responsible government. But our parliamentary democracy is not all that it should be. To much power is exercised by the Prime Minister instead of being shared by our elected representatives. Excessive party discipline stifles open discussion and debate. Grassroots citizens and community groups feel that their opinions are not respected or heard.
That is the Leader of the Opposition in his introduction to the document.
There were several things focused on in the document: free votes in the House of Commons; some changes to the standing committees; a call for a new standing committee on privacy access and ethics; and making the ethics counsellor or officer a true officer of parliament. I want to focus just on two of those reforms; free votes in the House of Commons and the ethics counsellor.
When we talk about free votes, there is an attempt to cloud what we are saying, so it is not clearly understood. That is why I want to focus on that.
Now, to best get at the free vote issue, I have to quote once again. I will quote the previous leader of the opposition during a debate on April 21, 1998. The one thing I have learned after three years in this place is the last time that one thinks one can say something is often the first time somebody is listening, so I am going to say it again.
There is a myth in the House that lurking out there somewhere is the fiery dragon of the confidence convention, the erroneous belief studiously cultivated by the government that if a government bill or motion is defeated, or an opposition bill, motion or amendment is passed, this obliges the government to resign. This myth is used to coerce government members, especially backbenchers, to vote for government bills and motions with which they and their constituents disagree and to vote against opposition bills, motions and amendments with which they substantially agree. The reality is that the fiery dragon of the confidence convention in its traditional form is dead. The sooner the House officially recognizes that fact, the better for all.
We are calling for an official commitment by the House to conduct votes freely without jeopardizing our parliamentary positions. That would be very simple.
The second issue I would like to talk about is the ethics counsellor becoming a true officer of parliament. Many of the members in the House will remember the Liberal red book from 1993. It states:
A Liberal government will appoint an independent Ethics Counsellor to advise both public officials and lobbyists in the day-to-day application of the Code of Conduct for Public Officials. The Ethics Counsellor will be appointed after consultation with the leaders of all parties in the House of Commons and will report directly to Parliament.
That has not happened. He reports to the Prime Minister. He is appointed by the Prime Minister. It is a conflict, plain and simple.
All these reforms are analogous to the little boy with his finger in the dike. There is a flood out there and instead of a wall of water we have a wall of opinion saying “we want changes”. It is coming from the public and from members of parliament in all parties. We have a very select few who are resisting all of that.
I tell my constituents that we have to look at this not from a personal history standpoint but from the standpoint of the broader history of the political landscape. These changes will happen. It is just a matter of when.
In summary, the Prime Minister could be known for what he did, but he will probably be known for what he did not do.