Mr. Speaker, I hope my friend from Souris—Moose Mountain does not leave the Chamber. The motion today provides us with an opportunity to talk about our vision of democracy: electoral democracy, parliamentary democracy and economic democracy.
I agree with the Leader of the Opposition moving a motion to make the ethics counsellor responsible for reporting to the House and not to the Prime Minister himself. It only makes sense. People cannot report to someone they are responsible to and then investigate the same person. There is an apparent conflict of interest.
It struck me rather strange this morning when I heard the opposition House leader talk about the importance of accountability and things being built on trust. I think 11 members of the Canadian Alliance Party campaigned against the MP pension plan. In many cases, after the election on November 27, these members decided to pay back into the pension plan. They broke a fundamental trust and a fundamental promise that they made to the voters in their ridings.
If we want to build a parliamentary system on trust, on confidence and accountability, it seems to me that the deputy leader of the Reform Party from Edmonton and others should do one of two things. They have now bought back into the pension plan after criticizing us strenuously and comparing us to hogs slopping at a trough. They should either submit themselves to a recall of their voters or resign their seats like the member from Hamilton, the Minister of Heritage, did when she campaigned against the GST and then was part of a government that supported it. If they have changed their minds the members should resign their seats and face the voters in a byelection to receive a new mandate. That is accountability.
If some of the Alliance members had said before the November election that they had changed their minds on the pension and would opt in and buy back past service, that would have been a different story. However, those who did not do it broke a fundamental promise and a fundamental part of what that party is all about in terms of accountability and respect for the House. They should resign their seats and submit to a byelection if indeed they mean what they say. That is an important part of what we are debating today.
I will use the words again of the Leader of the Opposition and the House leader of that party who talked about the importance of building on trust and the importance of accountability.
When we talk about the ethics counsellor being responsible to the House of Commons, we do this in a broader vision of our democracy. I believe our country is in a democratic crisis. Our parliamentary system gives the Prime Minister far too much power. The Prime Minister appoints all the senators, all the supreme court justices, the head of the army, the head of the RCMP, all the important heads of agencies, and makes thousands of patronage appointments to all kinds of organizations, agencies and crown corporations. He does this without any parliamentary accountability whatsoever.
If the Minister of Industry had any zeal for democratic reform he would lead a crusade to make sure that some of the powers of the Prime Minister's office went to the House of Commons and parliamentary committees in terms of important appointments.
We also have too many confidence votes in the House. If we had fewer confidence votes parliament would work in a more congenial and democratic way in trying to solve the problems that face the Canadian people. Those are just some of the issues we should be dealing with.
Parliamentary committees should have a lot more power and independence to initiate and timetable legislation. However the government will not even take the minor step of allowing the committees to secretly elect their own chairs. Such a step would simply follow the precedence of secretly electing a Speaker of the House. The government is in the dark ages in terms of basic democratic reforms.
On the electoral and democratic side, no wonder the Minister of Industry hides his head in shame. Only 5% of Canadians polled support the unelected Senate. The minister, however, sits across the way and says aye, aye and cheers on the Prime Minister to make more and more Senate appointments to that house of hacks, flacks and political has-beens.
The time has come for genuine reform to abolish the unelected, undemocratic and unaccountable Senate. Canada should also take a serious look, as has almost every other country in the world, at some kind of proportional representation in our electoral system so that every voter could have equality and not cast a wasted vote.
The Liberal majority government, elected constitutionally for another five years, received 40% of the vote on a turnout of less than 60% in the last election. That means fewer than a quarter of Canadians voted for the government of the day.
Canada is one of only three countries in the world with a population of more than eight million that does not have some form of proportional representation in its electoral system. Only Canada, India and the United States do not have some kind of proportional representation.
Under a PR system every voter would be equal. No vote would be wasted. People would be included and involved in creating a parliament that would actually reflect how people vote. That is the kind of democratic reform we should be looking at.
We should also get rid of the kind of enumeration mess we had in the last campaign. Over a million people were denied democracy because there was no house to house enumeration of voters. Most of those missed were younger or poorer people living in inner cities or younger people who had moved.
These are some of the things we must change to make Canada more democratic and inclusive.
We must also look at the question of economic democracy and the fact that Canada is now governed more and more by trade deals, the WTO, NAFTA and huge transnational corporations that have more and more power.
It is not a question of trade per se. There will be trade. There will be more and more international trade and more globalization because of technology. It is a question of losing democratic control over issues that affect our lives because of the power of transnational corporations.
These huge corporations are not really run by entrepreneurs. Many are run by bureaucrats and technocrats who are responsible and beholden to no one. They are like big icebergs at sea, bumping up against countries, distorting economies and denying local control and decision making over social programs, health programs, cultural programs, labour standards and farm programs.
This should change. Canada should lead the way in trying to build labour, social and environmental standards into trade agreements. Such agreements should protect the cultural identities of nation states and allow them to make important decisions over the lives of their citizens in health care, shelter, employment and other important areas.
That is part of the democratic vision people should hope for and espouse from the Parliament of Canada. The country is sleepwalking toward a crisis in democracy. Barely 60% of the people voted in the year 2000. In 1997, 67% of the people voted. Thirty or forty years ago it was routine to have 80% or more of the people voting in federal and provincial campaigns.
People are disengaging from the process because they feel politicians do not listen. In so many ways the people are right. We elect a government that has a mandate for five years and there is no power sharing. About 60% of the people voted for the opposition parties and 40% for the government party, and yet the Prime Minister has the unilateral power to make most important decisions.
If the Prime Minister wants to leave a legacy he should begin the process of democratizing the political institutions, the economic and electoral systems of Canada, so that the ordinary people, through their representatives, will have a real say over the common good and the direction of Canada.
The motion today is but a small step in that direction. It would make the ethics counsellor responsible not to the Prime Minister but to the House of Commons. The person would report to the House of Commons as does the chief electoral officer, the privacy commissioner, the official language commissioner and many others who operate in a way that is just and proper and in a way that governments past said would never work.
Let us not be afraid to take at least that one step toward democratic reform.