Mr. Speaker, thank you for the intervention. I will take your advice. The purpose I was trying to communicate was that debate should be meaningful and more members should be listening and participating in debate in a meaningful way.
Nothing in the contributions during debate changes what cabinet has decided. The ministers adopt none of the recommendations made by members of parliament in debate in the House.
The outcome of the votes in the House can be predetermined because there are no free votes allowed by the government. Not everything has to be a vote of confidence. In other words, what I am saying is parliament has become a rubber stamp for the agenda of the Prime Minister's Office and the passage of legislation is reduced to a formality or a constitutional requirement.
All MPs are in the House for question period anyway. Why will the government not allow scheduled votes to take place immediately following question period? It would save some time.
Speaking of question period, the defining moment each day in the House is question period and it has become a circus. There are virtually no informative answers given even to important questions asked during question period.
Private members' business is another example of where the influence of individual members of parliament has been diminished. Virtually none of the private members' bills or motions are passed by the House. The very few that are passed are usually killed in the Senate. All private members' business should be votable.
The resources available at the House of Commons to assist private members' business have either shrunk or dried up. This includes legislative drafting lawyers. Private members' business is just like a pacifier given to a baby. The baby quietly keeps on working with it, in the hope that something will come out of it. Despite a lot of hard work, nothing comes out of it. That is what private members' business has become in the House. Nothing comes out of it.
The committee system in this place has become more important than the work in the House because that is where the field of action has moved. Even the committees are stifled because of the partisan nature in which they operate. Their membership is dominated by a majority of government members who tightly control the work of the committees. Government members often gang up on opposition members.
The chairs of the committees are appointed or designated by the PMO. They are not elected. Future business of the committee and witnesses to appear before the committee are decided in a partisan manner.
The government is also fighting to prevent committee hearings from being televised. It knows that the way it runs committees is a farce. Ministers just go there to introduce bills but do not hear the witnesses, the debates or the amendments to legislation with which the committees deal. Debates in committees also become redundant and meaningless most of the time.
Canadians engage in a great deal of time and effort preparing petitions. After the submission of petitions in the House by their representatives, the petitions are put on a shelf and a small reply, which is meaningless most of the time, is issued after a few months. The government takes no effective action on petitions. Since I have been elected I have not seen any significant action being taken by the government on petitions.
Whenever delegations from the Parliament of Canada travel abroad, it should be a team effort. Many times opposition MPs are denied briefings and are left out of some of the events and meetings abroad.
The ethics counsellor should be appointed by parliament instead of by the Prime Minister and only reporting to the Prime Minister.
An additional standing committee should be created and chaired by the opposition. Its mandate should be to review and report to the House on all aspects of acts and reports of the privacy and access commissioners and of the ethics counsellor.
The appointment of the clerk of the House, with due respect to the clerk who is a very nice person, by the Prime Minister defeats the purpose of election of the Speaker by the House. The appointment of officers of parliament, for example the privacy and access to information commissioners and auditor general, et cetera, should receive a committee review before the motion is presented to the House.
Most of the time too many government bills are empty of content. They do not go far enough and are only window dressing. I am talking about many bills. Too many government bills are followed by a large number of regulations which are not debated in the House. I consider that to be governing through the back door because regulations which control the whole intent of bills are not debated in the House.