Mr. Speaker, I thought I might assist the Chair by reflecting on some of the arguments that have been made so far.
It is said that politics makes strange bedfellows. This is no less true of procedural arguments when we find the Alliance House leader citing myself, the Bloc House leader citing Pierre Trudeau, and finally, even more interestingly, the government House leader citing the Leader of the Opposition and seeking refuge in the actions of the Leader of the Opposition when he was in the Alberta legislature for what the government is doing today.
This is certainly the strangest of the arguments that we have heard, because it may well be the case that the Leader of the Opposition had an affinity for closure when he was in the Alberta legislature. When it comes to closure one could say of almost all governments that we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God when it comes to time allocation and closure, particularly those who have had the experience of government.
However, two wrongs do not make a right and a hundred wrongs do not make a right. Every introduction of time allocation and closure has to be judged on its merits That is what we are asking the Chair to do. There is time allocation that comes after lengthy debate and there is time allocation that comes after insignificant or insufficient debate.
I believe that what we have developed in this parliament, which I think is grounds for the frustration we find here today, is a tradition of introducing time allocation after insufficient debate. Major measures are introduced in the House but the government is very impatient. It would have been unthinkable at one time, as the House leader for the Bloc pointed out, for something as significant as this to be time allocated after only a day or two of debate.
Debate is not something to be avoided in this place. Some may have noticed that we have on the wall out there in the NDP part of the lobby a quote by the former dean of this House, the member for Winnipeg North Centre, Stanley Knowles, who said on December 10, 1968, probably in a debate about procedural reform or on a point of order:
Debate is not a sin, a mistake, an error or something to be put up with in parliament. Debate is the essence of parliament.
All the opposition asks is that when we deem it appropriate, we be allowed to debate things for a sufficient period of time. What we are asking for in this parliament is certainly not a pattern of obstruction.
I remind the Chair that yesterday a bill of 900 pages in length passed this House in one day of debate and went to committee, just as the government asked. So this is not a pattern of the opposition saying that the government cannot do its business, that we will tie up the house of Commons and nothing is going to happen. That is not what we are talking about here. We are talking about one bill, a very significant bill having to do with changes in employment insurance, and various opposition parties are saying that they want to debate it a little while longer, that they have some concerns they want to put on the table.
When another bill, a significant piece of legislation in anyone's judgment, Bill C-8, the financial services sector legislation or whatever it is called, which is, as I said, 900 pages long, is debated in this House for one day and sent to committee, there is no pattern of obstruction there.
I believe, as I have argued before, that the Chair does have and should exercise the power to restrain governments that are time allocation happy, shall we say, and this is certainly a government that falls into that category.
It makes it all the more ironic that the government House leader should cite what happens in Westminster. Westminster is an entirely different situation, but if the government wants to talk about Westminster, then let us talk about the power that the Speaker has at Westminster when it comes to time allocation. We only got one side of the story from the government House leader. I do not think we should get too much into citing Westminster. We have our own traditions in this place, but I think we can learn from Westminster in the same way that we can learn from other parliaments.
We have our own traditions here. We had a tradition in the House that where there was a desire for lengthy debate on a particular bill, that kind of debate was permitted. That tradition has been allowed to erode over several parliaments. This government takes it for granted that it has the right to exercise its perceived right to bring in time allocation after only a day or two of debate and it does not expect to even receive any trouble for doing so.
So, Mr. Speaker, you do have something to consider here. Unfortunately, I think the point is well taken that you cannot do anything about time allocation on this particular bill because the point of privilege was introduced after the vote. Perhaps it should have been introduced before so that you would have had the opportunity to rule on this particular time allocation, because you really cannot rule on time allocation in general. You do have to rule on time allocation specifically. This will, I think, make it difficult for the Chair in this particular circumstance.
However, I have every confidence that we will be here again. Perhaps we will be here before a vote is taken or at the moment at which a motion for time allocation is introduced, which would give the Chair more opportunity to say, depending on the circumstances, that it is a motion he is not going to hear at that particular time because he does not believe the House has been given sufficient time for debate on that particular matter.
Finally, it does not surprise me that the government does not want to have a great deal of debate on this. Maybe it does not want Canadians to know in any great detail, thanks to the speeches by opposition members, just what is in the bill and what is not in the bill. Maybe it is embarrassed by the fact that it has been literally robbing the unemployed for years and years to pay for its surplus. It has been on the backs of the unemployed and at the expense of the benefits that once would have gone to unemployed people that the government has achieved its so-called fiscal successes. Perhaps that is something that it would rather not talk about. In that context, we fully understand the guilt that has driven the government to this procedural extreme.