My hon. friend over on the other side is indicating that there were two. I do not remember. It was long time ago and a lot of water has gone under the bridge betwixt then and now. However, there have been very few. Most of them are just routinely rejected.
I would like to go back to the fundamentals of this. The fundamental is that committee stage does not work. That is the problem as I see it. If we would have a truly independent committee, one that was not controlled by the minister, his office, his parliamentary secretary and the minions, if we had true freedom to express ourselves and to vote freely on proposed amendments, very often we could improve legislation. It would be better for the country, the nation as a whole and for our citizens. It would increase the respect that Canadians have for the House of Commons, if we could actually do that without being coerced.
I would like to finish my little digression and say how this bill now finishes. After we have dealt with it in the House at report stage, it then goes to third and final reading. As we know, that also then includes debates. When the debate is finished, we vote on it. If there are sufficient numbers demanding it, there can be a demand for a standing vote, in which case we once again all come into the House. As we stand individually to express our yeas or nays, the clerk responds by stating our names from memory, which is quite a remarkable feat, and we then go on record as to whether we are in favour of the bill.
After it is passed here, it goes to the Senate and goes through a similar process there. If the Senate amends it, it comes back here. If the Senate does not amend it, it gets royal assent and goes on from there.
It just happens that what the government House leader is doing today is throwing a monkey wrench into the process by claiming that he wants this place to be like the house of commons in Great Britain. Of course he is very selective. He is being very careful to make sure that he just picks those parts which will promote his and the government's agenda but he does not pick the other parts.
For example, in Great Britain, it is not at all uncommon for opposition members to be the chairs of committees. What do we have here? We have the government coming to a committee. It has been predetermined who is going to be the chairman. The one day we will get a full contingent of the members of the government side in the committee is when they want to out vote anybody else.
Then we have this absurd way of electing the chairman of the committee. The whole issue is that usually when there is an election there is a list of candidates. When I ran for election as a member of parliament, there were four or five candidates each time and people had to choose from among these different candidates. There were actually more than six candidates on the ballot in 1993. There were some fringe parties there as well. There are some who want to call us the fringe party. That obviously is not true since we are the only party other than the Liberals that went up in popular vote in the 2000 election.
We do not elect the chairman by having a list and a ballot so we can check who we want. We do this in the House of Commons. We do this for our elections in the ridings. There is only one name permitted on the ballot. The name on the ballot is the first person who yells out his or here nomination after the clerk has taken the chair at the organization of the committee. One of the government members will immediately say that he or she nominates this person or that person to be the chairman. That is it. The motion does not have to be seconded. There is a vote on it. All the members who are in favour say “yes” and all who are opposed say “no”. There is no list of candidates. There is no secret ballot.
We went through this recently in the finance committee. I made a very strong argument for a secret ballot in order to free up the members on both sides of the table to vote freely without fear of recrimination. Incredibly, on command, the government members refused the request for a secret ballot.
Why do we not have these members go to their constituencies at election time, stand up on a platform and have the people yell who they want to vote for? Every vote should be public. Why do they insist on it? What is so scary about a secret ballot? It is incredible that these members, who love to talk about parliamentary reform to make this place more meaningful, cannot see that a secret ballot is important and that there should be a list of candidates.
In the particular case of the finance committee, I said I would vote for the person who won. I cannot say his name and I do not know the name of his riding. The person who became the chairman of the finance committee had my support. For the most part he has been fair, good to work with and has a good way of running the committee. Sometimes he goes a little fast but most of the time he is okay. I would have supported him. I had no problem with that. I do not think that is a place where we should have overt partisanship.
The backbenchers are not prepared to free themselves up in committee in order to express themselves without fear of recrimination. Even though they had the opportunity, they refused a secret ballot. It is interesting that the request for a secret ballot on whether or not to vote for the chairman by secret ballot was refused. That would require unanimous consent and it was denied.
I am talking about the broad picture of why the motion is here today. It is here because committees do not work. The motion would be totally unnecessary if the government of the day, or the Conservatives for nine years prior to that, had done its job. Since the Liberals have been in power we have had two elections in seven years. Running a $200 million election every three and a half years is a total lack of respect for taxpayer dollars. That is an aside.
We have a government that in the past seven years has just not been open to amendments. We would like to see some glimmer of hope that some of the amendments would be given careful consideration, not simply given time to talk about it.
This issue has arisen because opposition parties have used report stage in the House to demand standing votes on a number of motions to amend which are, not only in the words of the government House leader but also in motion before us, deemed frivolous.
The motion states in part:
—the Speaker will not select for debate a motion or series of motions of a repetitive, frivolous or vexatious nature or of a nature that would serve merely to prolong unnecessarily proceedings at the report stage—
Why do opposition members do this? I think back about a year ago, when we were dealing with the now famous Nisga'a treaty. There was a lot of fuss made about it. The government House leader and some of the other members of the Conservative Party and the NDP said it was a waste of time. I agree with them. We started on a Monday night and we finished Thursday morning. We stood up and sat down for many hours.
That type of thing does not stand well in building respect for this place. If all we are going to do is hit that on the head with a mallet to make that go away and not deal with the root cause is like a surgeon. Instead of removing a wart on the hand, he takes an axe and cuts off the hand at the wrist. He has removed the wart all right but it is overkill in a gross degree. That is what this motion is. It does not deal with the root cause of why we in the opposition would come up with such a large list of amendments.
I remember when we were dealing with Nisga'a. I explained it to the people back home this way. I said that it was an important agreement and that it affected the well being of natives basically in perpetuity from that point onward. It also affected the non-native neighbours in perpetuity from that time onward because, among other things, it involved changes to the constitution. It involved permanent changes on how we would deal with these issues.
It is wrong to do things like that without giving adequate time not only for this place to debate it, but also for us to have a wider debate with Canadian citizens.
There is an old saying which states that democracy only works when the governed agree to be governed. It is called the consent of the governed. That is so true. I often speak to students in schools and explain to them how in this country we have a system of government completely different from governments that have existed in history. Instead of having a king with absolute power, his soldiers and other people who did his will and imposed it on the people, we have the potential for having a true circle of responsibility and accountability where members of parliament are elected by the people.
Members come here reflecting the will and the wishes of the people. They make rules that govern our society. The people, by virtue of the fact that they consented to this motion or bill through their parliamentarian, agree to be governed by that rule. What happens if we break the circle of accountability? What happens if along the line we impose a dictator, someone who has absolute authority? The circle of accountability is broken and no longer can we expect Canadian citizens to willingly consent to be governed when they are being dictated to by somebody who is out of the circle of accountability. It has to be the people, the parliament, the people.
People are responsible for obeying the laws of the country which are put together by parliament. However, parliament is accountable and responsible to the people who send us here. If we lose that circle, the system is flawed and it will fail. I am sure one of the reasons there is now such a lack of respect for this place is that in total this place does not reflect the will of the people.
I will now answer the question of why members of the opposition are bringing forward these amendments. As I was saying, I explained the issue to my constituents right after we had that long vote. I said that it was so important to Canadians that it demanded the time of parliament. For us to give notice to the government that this is so important that in one way or another we will use one week of parliament's time, that notion is a valid notion.
My first choice by far, rather than voting for three days or three and a half days, would have been to debate the issue here in the House of Commons. We did not have adequate debate. The record of the government shows that over and over it has invoked time allocation to limit debate after the debate has just started or, in some instances, even before it has started.
There are a number of occasions on record where the government has moved time allocation on this and all subsequent stages before we were even at the subsequent stages. In other words, we are not supposed to talk about it; we are just supposed to do it. The government is the bully in the schoolyard, the dictator. It is out of the circle of accountability and responsibility, and that does not serve democracy well.
I feel obliged to go back into the records because there was a very fine speech given in the House almost three years ago.