Mr. Speaker, in regard to the last two suggestions made with respect to dealing with time allocation and giving the Chair more power, I did mention them fleetingly in my remarks about time allocation. It is one of the things I said in the debate. The government is very eager to give the Chair power over what amendments would be votable at report stage, but not so eager to give the Speaker power to hear motions of time allocation which, in the judgment of the Chair, come too early or before adequate debate has taken place.
The first question was on omnibus bills. This is probably an occasion for me to give a brief history lesson, without wanting to look too long in the tooth. Perhaps the Minister of Transport will remember this, and so would the leader of the Conservative Party. It was out of an omnibus bill that a first good wave of parliamentary reform came, with the bell ringing incident in 1982 that was in response to an omnibus piece of energy legislation. The Lefebvre committee was created.
Contrary to what the government House leader said earlier, the Lefebvre committee came at the end of a parliament. The government House leader said he thought that reform always came at the beginning of a parliament, but there was actually quite a bit of reform that came at the end of the parliament of 1980 to 1984 as a result of the committee that was struck out of the bell ringing incident.
The Minister of Transport was on that committee and will perhaps confirm to the government House leader what a wonderful job he did at that time in helping other members come forward with parliamentary reforms. Those reforms were built on by the McGrath committee. The first report of the McGrath committee basically said to adopt the Lefebvre committee recommendations.