Madam Speaker, I am very happy to speak to the motion because it bespeaks a continuation of what we were dealing with earlier today, the undemocratization of the House of Commons.
Members from across party lines have for years eloquently described the frustration of being an MP. There is the frustration of going home and speaking to the people who sent us to the House, listening to their concerns and feeling impotent in our ability to represent their concerns in the House.
We agree with the basic idea and principle of the motion put forth by the government that we do not want to have a situation where frivolous amendments are put forth merely to drag the House into a prolonged period of irrelevant action. On the other hand, as my colleague for Elk Island has said, we cannot allow the rights of the minorities to be compromised. That is what we are talking about today.
It is not only the rights of the minorities, but the rights of the majority. We have a situation today where the House is ruled by a Prime Minister who has an iron hammerlock upon the goings on of the House and of the country.
The public understands that and we understand that. That is why we saw voter turnout of less than 60% in the last federal election. That is not something to be proud of. That is something that should be a red flag that says we need to do something to engage the public. We need to do something to bring back the confidence that people should have in this great institution.
Over decades this institution has whittled away. The democratic powers of elected members have been removed year after year. The late Prime Minister Trudeau said something to the effect that members of parliament are nobodies 100 feet off the Hill. I suggest that members of parliament are nobodies on the Hill and that is the problem.
The public understands that and we understand that if we are to be truthful about it. The fact of the matter is that there are good people across party lines who have great things to contribute for the betterment of Canadians from coast to coast, but they do not have the power to represent their people.
Certainly we are accountable. Every four years we are accountable. However during that intervening period of time do we really have the power to represent our constituents so that people can adequately judge us on the actions that we engage in? No, we do not because we do not have the power to represent our constituents.
We have seen over the years the corpses of members of parliament lying beside House because they have tried to do the right thing. They have tried to represent their constituents and to represent their conscience. When that falls afoul of the leaders of parties they are emasculated, rendered impotent, and at the worst level they are thrown out of their party.
Who can forget John Nunziata, who on a matter of principle, a matter of conscience and indeed the issue of the GST and a government promise, said he could not support the government on the particular issue? It violated a promise that he made when he was elected. As a result of doing that he was thrown out of the caucus.
This is the situation faced by every political party today to varying degrees. It is something we have to change. Members of my party have put up ideas such as the ethics counsellor. We put forth a motion to give the government an opportunity to vote for the promise that it made to the Canadian people in the first red book.
The government voted against its own promise of having an independent ethics counsellor. We do not want an ethics counsellor who answers to the Prime Minister; neither do the members from the other side. What we should have is an ethics counsellor who is independent of the Prime Minister and who responds to the House.
We are concerned that with this motion the Prime Minister will exercise more undue and unnecessary control over the House and further strengthen his hold so that decisions will further be made by the Prime Minister and his office staff, who are a group of unelected, unaccountable and invisible individuals who rule the country.
Many members of the public watching today may not know or understand that the structure we have created today prevents and inhibits their views, wishes and desires from being exercised in the House.
Another serious problem is that we do not have any free votes. We talk about it but in effect we do not debate it.
Committees, by and large, are make work projects for members of parliament, and the health committee is a case in point. We have a crisis in our health care system today. Over the years members from across party lines have, as has the NDP critic for health, stood shoulder to shoulder with us. We may have a difference of opinion on what needs to be done to fix the problem but we certainly stand shoulder to shoulder in saying that we need to look at it. We need to examine it and implement effective solutions to save our publicly funded health care system. Given the fact that this is the biggest problem affecting Canadians, not an academic issue but a blood and guts issue where people's lives are at stake, we have a government that has directed the committee to study plain packaging of cigarettes, aboriginal health and other issues that, while important, pale in comparison to the overarching issue of how we manage to save our public health system.
Is the government dealing with the issue of our aging population? We have an aging population and a demographic that will turn all our social programs on their end, from CPP to health care, to other social programs. It is an impending crisis that looms on the horizon. The failure to deal with our aging population and the impact upon our social programs, and indeed on our economy, will have such a profound impact on our society that we will not be able to deal with it and those people who are the poorest in our society, the most vulnerable, from the aged to the young, are the ones who will get hurt. The only way to deal with that is to deal with it proactively. We cannot deal with it in a knee-jerk reactive mode. We have to deal with these problems proactively because it takes time to develop the solutions and enact them. If we do not do it now people will be hurt.
On the issue of the environment, Canada has been repeatedly told that we have some serious environmental problems. We need to address them but are we? No. We go through this mill that goes around and around. Ideas are tossed around in a big circle and they go nowhere quickly. Our failure to deal with these issues causes untold hardship to the public.
People in our health care system who are watching their rivers being polluted by a minority of the industrialists who dump garbage into our rivers and streams want to know why the government is not dealing with it. What do they hear? They hear the sound of silence. They hear nothing. Does that engender respect and a willingness to engage and work with the government? Does that engender a desire to get involved in the political process? No, it does not. In fact, most people want to get involved but they recognize that the House does not work and that maybe they should find other ways to exercise their democratic rights. Unfortunately, too many people have become so apathetic that they are not getting involved at all.
Part of the reason that we have this situation is the unwritten code of conduct we have in the House, a code that rewards zealotry over objectiveness and a code that says if our ideas, our objectivity and our professional training run adverse to the leadership, we must be removed or follow blindly what we have been told. It is a code of conduct that says one must blindly follow the leadership of their party. It is a code that excludes external information from other sources when they run adverse to what the leadership of the party says.
This is disingenuous. We have a system that naturally rewards being able to destroy the other side. Indeed, the role of the opposition is to keep the government on its toes. It is to be the toughest critic of the government that can be found, but it should not and must not preclude the ability of members in every political party to engage in constructive and positive discourse for the betterment of Canadians.
If we cannot use our God given brains, if we cannot engage and pull out the best and brightest ideas from the people of our country, if we cannot stimulate and inspire the people of our nation to bring forth and have acted upon their ideas to make Canada the best nation in the world, what are we here for?
We cannot do that right now. We are seeing cracks develop in our great nation. We talk about western alienation. We talk about the well known disaffection of the west, but it is not the only alienation. We have eastern alienation. We have the maritimers saying that what goes on in Ottawa has very little to do with them. They feel left out.
We have rural alienation. We have a rural-urban split that is not well analyzed or spoken about. The rural alienation is very real. A lot of people who provide the economic backbone of the country are forgotten about. Because of a lack of health care, a lack of resources and an abysmal or a non-existence infrastructure on the part of the government, we have people who are turned off, tuned out, and have a great deal of antipathy toward the federal government.
We have aboriginal alienation, large swaths of aboriginal communities who are suffering the worst possible social parameters in the country today. That has been going on for too long.
My party has been wrongfully accused of being against grassroots aboriginal people. We are the only party which has given the grassroots aboriginal people a vector, a voice in the House. We are not as interested in advocating for the leadership they have as we are in ensuring that the wishes, the hopes and the fears of grassroots aboriginal people are brought into the House in the most eloquent and forceful terms possible. We have tried to do that time and time again.