Madam Speaker, this is actually the first opportunity I have to congratulate you on your appointment. I know that it took a number of years before the male dominated Parliament of Canada saw fit to put a female Speaker in the chair.
I want to thank all my colleagues who were involved in the debate today for the varying perspectives they brought to it. Just as it took a long time to have a woman in the Speaker's chair, it took a long time to give the vote to females and to aboriginal Canadians.
As my colleague from the Bloc mentioned, young men and women of 17 years old, young adults, can go off to war and possibly give their lives for our country, but they do not have the opportunity to vote.
Many Canadians do not know that this is exactly what aboriginal Canadians did for a number of years and through a number of wars. They gave their lives or lost their legs or arms and came back to our country disabled. They could not vote, they could not access some of the same establishments and they did not get the same rights as other veterans.
Canada is not apart from being an unjust society. We have a history there. I think we need to move beyond that history, open up the initiative and once again build a truly democratic, just society.
Canadians do not have faith in this parliamentary system any more. They do not have faith in our electoral process. We need to work very hard as parliamentarians to again build that trust in our system. It cannot be a matter of saying one thing prior to an election and then coming to the House of Commons as government or opposition members and not being true to what we were saying out there during an election. We have to maintain a democratic system and we must build that faith in our system again.
Ideally the government should be bringing forth this legislation. Then we would not have to go through the whole process of private members' business, hoping for the luck of the draw and then hoping beyond hope that our legislation will be deemed votable. We should not have to be in that situation.
The legislation would be good, progressive legislative and electoral change, and it should be coming from the government, like so many pieces of legislation that the government should be bringing forth to improve our country. It will not do that, so we will.
As opposition members we will push, and I know there are some government members out there who will push. They will take the government kicking and screaming into the next century, and hopefully we will see some change and some improvement in people's faith in our democratic system.