Let them abolish it. Let us say that if there are savings to be made, we should shut it down. Shut it down for six, eight, nine months a year. We should try to compress all of parliament's work into one week. If we sit for just one week, we will save $27,000 an hour times 24 hours for 51 weeks. That will save a bundle.
Democracy does have a price, and I think that passing a motion such as Motion No. 2 would be to deny the right of all parties, including the opposition parties of course, to introduce amendments.
While the government is using this faulty argument, while it is trying to prevent us from representing our constituents, it has, since 1993, pocketed no less than $31 billion of the surplus in the EI fund, money that belonged to unemployed workers. The government has many ways of limiting opposition to a bill.
I will give an example. We do not need to give the government House leader ideas for keeping us down; he has all sorts of his own. One of the tools used by the government House leader is closure.
What is the main reason for closure? It is intended to silence the opposition members. The government House leader decrees “There will be another two and a half hours of debate on such and such a bill. We feel that you will have said all you had to say in those two and a half hours and we are not interested in hearing any more. It does not matter whether you can provide additional arguments, whether research assistants found a study somewhere in the world or in Canada to show to the government that it is headed in the wrong direction. The government has decided to put an end to the debate after two and a half hours with a gag order. You will have said all you had to say by then”. I say two and a half hours, but it could be one hour, three hours or three days. We cannot accept such a measure.
From 1984 to 1993, the Conservative government used a gag order 49 times for 519 bills, or 9.4% of the time. In the seven years it has been in office, the Liberal government has resorted to closure 60 times for 350 bills—