Mr. Speaker, I can hardly wait to get on to the business of the day, the modernization of parliament, which is of course gripping the nation.
Some of the arguments I have heard, particularly from the House leader of the New Democratic Party, seem to be based on when there is no good argument, resort to humour and ribald humour is even better. Perhaps someone will notice and maybe the media will put a member's funny clip on the news, and we will all be better off for it.
The other parties too seem to think this is light-hearted humour and, again, perhaps some ribald humour is even better. However, there are big issues here today.
I remind the House that when people quote from Marleau and Montpetit, Marleau and Montpetit is a collection of the record of precedents in the House. It is not an instruction book on what will happen, especially when there is no precedent.
We recognize that today is a precedent setting day and we are not pretending it is not. To quote Marleau and Montpetit and say they have not dealt with it in the past, is simply not understanding the purpose of that book. The book is a collection of precedents. Today will be another one either way, whatever the ruling is, it will be again another ruling of precedence.
Those who would argue that the Speaker should not make decisions on behalf of the House, every day Mr. Speaker, you are called to make decisions on behalf of the House. It is precisely because the Speaker has a duty to rise above the interests of political entities in the House and address these parliamentary activities that we have come to appeal to you today.
The House leader of the government side said that we have not even been asked to have been recognized as a group as a coalition. You know of course that that is not true, Mr. Speaker. You know that there is a letter in your possession with 20 signatures on it stating precisely that, that we do wish to be recognized as a coalition, as one entity. We have chosen one parliamentary leader, one House leader, a whip and so on. The members of the House should know that this has taken place.
It is interesting too how much time has been spent today in the presentations trying to mix apples and oranges. There was all kinds of talk about the Elections Act and a bit of talk about the Parliament of Canada Act. However, they are mixing the two.
When we talk about resources in the House, we have not talked today about monetary resources. That will be something that will be negotiated, if ever, with the Board of Internal Economy. It is not something that is done here in the House. It is always referred to the House leaders for negotiations.
To follow the logic of the House leader for the Canadian Alliance who said that in the British practice if a member was not elected under a certain standard he or she should not get any resources under a certain name, then when the Reform Party changed its name to the Alliance, the members would not have had any resources. Of course that is absurd. It did not happen that way.
It is also interesting that, whether it is legislation or standing orders, when we refer to all the quotes today about parties, they are all in lower case; a party, an entity. We call ourselves a coalition. Others might call themselves an alliance, which is perfectly fine. I remember asking for that change. I did not want it to be called a party but rather an alliance because the first principle of the Canadian Alliance was to form coalitions. It was in the constitution of the party.
It was also interesting that a recent mail out from the Canadian Alliance to all its members asked if it should consider a merger with the Tories or should it consider forming a coalition in the House of Commons. To argue against it today, when the Canadian Alliance was asking its own members if they wanted to form a coalition, does not seem consistent.
Someone has tried to point out that a coalition is for governments and not for opposition parties. Says who, Mr. Speaker? Coalitions are put together in order to make democracies work better.
When coalitions function well, do not take resources away from others and just allocate the current time in the House, allocate the number of questions and allocate supply days, nobody loses. It is allocated based on the number of people.
I am not asking for funds, but it was interesting when I was negotiating assets such as House of Commons questions, supply days and monetary issues this spring as House leader. Every single time I insisted it be done on a per capita basis and other House leaders agreed. That is the proper way to do it because of course it reflects in the best way the will of the Canadian people who have sent their representatives to the House of Commons.
I will also point out that although much fuss has been made about memberships in political parties, I would like to point out the example of the member for Portage--Lisgar who holds memberships in both the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada and the Canadian Alliance. I assume he holds two memberships because he says he does. Not only does he hold two memberships, but on his website and in his public speeches he encourages all of us to buy memberships in two political parties. He has chosen to sit with the Canadian Alliance and I accept that. That is his decision. However he has two memberships in two different political parties and encourages others to do the same. Again, I have no problem with that. He chooses to sit there and that is fine. We choose to sit here and put together a coalition to advance common themes.
We have been expelled from the Canadian Alliance caucus which is obviously a different status than being suspended. The whip sent a letter to many of us saying that he no longer represents us. We are gonzo. We are out of the whole frame of reference there.
There happen to be 8 members involved in this matter, but what if there were 18 or 28 members? At what stage does it become significant to the House? We could argue that maybe one person does not make any difference in the House but once we start getting significant numbers of people, it starts to affect the status. If we push it to the extreme, the Leader of the Opposition could expel everybody from his caucus and sit there with 16 questions a day and hundreds of thousands of dollars in assets, saying “It is all mine”. That is simply untrue.
It is different, and not because it takes away from the New Democratic Party. No one is suggesting that a single question be taken away from the New Democratic Party. It does not affect the Bloc Quebecois, not a single question, not a single supply day, not a single difference in the order of speaking in the House of Commons.
Mr. Speaker, what you have before you today is a group of 20 people who say it is only right. We were elected to the House of Commons to represent our constituents. By the way, I was elected under policies that put my constituents above even the party. The best way to do that is to form a coalition with 20 like-minded people who say it is time to get on with the business of the House and hold the government accountable in the best way possible, in our opinion. To deny that coalition access, not to money because nobody is talking about that today—others are but none of us are—but to deny us access to questions, to membership on committees, to a certain number of debating spots, is to say to several million people who supported these 20 members of parliament that we just do not rank, that we not get the same ranking as any other member of parliament. That is unacceptable.
To just finish off with the language issue, the government House leader said that the standing orders are silent on the word coalition. When the House is saying party in those standing orders, it is talking about a political entity in the House.
I was first elected in 1993 and came to the House in 1994. The first thing we said was that we did not want to have a whip. We wanted to have a caucus co-ordinator. I believe, Mr. Speaker, that you will remember that. This was an attempt to try to describe the role given to that position, which is to co-ordinate the activities of the group.
The standing orders are completely silent on the term caucus co-ordinator. It does not exist in the Parliament of Canada Act as far as the extra salary to a caucus co-ordinator. It does not exist that the caucus co-ordinator meets with other caucus co-ordinators. It talks about whips because it is the tradition of the House to call them whips.
Mr. Speaker, you can call them whatever you want. In 1994 we called them caucus co-ordinators. We then changed it back after a few years to whip but no one cared. The whip got the salary. The whip budget was intact. The whip did the job whether called a caucus co-ordinator or a whip.
When we call ourselves a coalition it is because we are like-minded people intent upon advancing like-minded principles in the House of Commons. We want to do that because we think it is in the best interest of democracy. Because it makes no difference to the other political parties that will not get shortchanged, I ask you to consider it favourably and consider these arguments instead of perhaps some of the humour, which I thought was less than ideal but passed as argument earlier, and grant us the status as a coalition of 20 here in the House of Commons.