Mr. Speaker, I agree with the first item my colleague raised. I would also like to respond to his question about making all bills votable.
I had a conversation earlier with the leader of his party about good faith. We talked about all hon. members wanting to do good things. If we presume that members are here in good faith to do a good job, it would be easy to accept all matters as being votable. However our recent history shows that when things go wrong or get a little tight, people look for ways to be disruptive or to delay issues, et cetera. I agree with the member for Winnipeg—Transcona that delay is part of the democratic process.
The member's presumption would have to be that members would not abuse the opportunity and would not be frivolous in bringing items forward. I would much prefer that private members' items would have to qualify under the existing and maybe even stricter basic criteria so that they would not be dealt with at all if they had been previously dealt with.
Right now many bills and motions come forward which are very close to being the same but are a bit different. People who draft legislation say that if they change a couple of words in a bill it can come forward. If the issue has been dealt with in the House already there are also ways to do that.
As a compromise, I suggest that if a member is prepared to go through whatever process is involved to get his or her bill before the House, is prepared to give his or her presentation on the merits of the bill and be subjected to scrutiny and questioning by members of the House, there could be a preliminary vote to determine whether the House has sufficient interest in the matter going any further.
That would deal with the problem of making everything votable. It would have to be three hours and the number of members on it would be restricted. There is an equal disincentive or negative if we have ten excellent bills before the committee but only five could be picked to be votable.
The member is quite right. The private members' issue has many opportunities. We can already do swapping. The House has done that in the past with consent. There are ways that can work but the problem areas to address have to do with efficiency, equity, fairness and transparency. Right now we do not meet all the tests.