Mr. Speaker, I notice the member took offence to some of the things I was saying. People who are watching and listening today should realize that the Alliance Party, through the hon. member, has introduced a bill stating that an official party should have at least 10% of the members of the House, which is 31 members, or should have members in three provinces. The Bloc, of course, comes from only one province.
The member would classify as a fringe party 63 members of parliament: all the Bloc, all the Conservatives, all the New Democrats, the voices of one-third of the Canadian people. Those three parties received about 33% of the vote. Is that democracy? Is that inclusiveness? Is that empowering people? Is that what the Reform Party and the Alliance Party stand for? Do they stand for excluding the voice of the people in the House of Commons?
There is the party with a former leader who went across the country talking about the equality of people, saying “Let the people in. Let the west in. Let the people speak. Let us treat everyone equally”. Now those members have a bill in the House of Commons that would mute the voices of one-third of the people in the country.
People should know where the reform alliance party stands. Never has anyone in the history of the House of Commons moved such a draconian bill. No one has ever tried to do this before. It would mute the voices of one-third of the people.
The left in the country will be around here for a long time after the Reform Party disappears. I do not know whether the member has any sense of history in terms of the contribution of the CCF and the NDP in health care, social programs, the mixed economy and the charter of rights, all of these institutions. Maybe he was not a very good student of history.
I want to ask him this: why would he propose an idea that is so contrary to what his former leader used to say about the equality of the people, which was that everyone is equal and should have a voice in the House of Commons in the Parliament of Canada? He wants to exclude 63 MPs representing a third of the electorate. That is the most draconian idea I have heard since the ideas that came out of the era of Joe McCarthy in the United States.