I am not reprimanding anyone on my side of the House, bien au contraire. I will get to that in a little while and I hope the hon. member will listen attentively.
I am not too worried about consistency when debating the Alliance members. Their party is the one which not too long ago wanted to take some people whose profiles they did not agree with and put them at the back of the store. It is the same party that chastised its own members and put them at the back of the House. It is the same party that turfed people out of their critic roles and all kinds of other things when they made statements they did not like. So I will take the remonstrances from the people across the way with a grain of salt.
Let me get to what was said a while ago about Canada's record as a liberal democracy. We can have our debates inside the House and disagree with one another all we like, but to pretend that this is akin somehow to our not being the liberal democracy that we are, the international observers that we are, the international defenders of peace that we are and have been, is simply wrong.
It says all kinds of wrong things about the people who work for Elections Canada, with which I do not agree. It says all kinds of wrong things about our peacekeepers, about Canadians working as volunteers offshore trying to install parliamentary democracies and other liberal democracies elsewhere in the world.
I for one am very proud of what they have done, and I am very confident about every effort they have made, such as representing Canada in Zimbabwe. We have been chastised for that by the House leader for the official opposition, which is wrong. None of us on this side of the House, regardless of how we agree or disagree with the motion that is before us, would agree with the premise raised by the hon. member that our international election observers cannot defend Canada as a result of a dispute on how to elect committee chairs. That is simply ridiculous.
This is internal cuisine that we have here. That is what it is. We will solve it and that is fine, but we should at least put it for what it is and not start saying that Canada somehow misses its international role as a result of a dispute two sword lengths across the way for our electing committee chairs.
There was an indication a while ago about how we did modernization and how all of us live by the modernization rules that we have set in place.
We put in place a modernization rule whereby members on all sides of the House could know a day ahead of time what the subject would be. What did the opposition do yesterday, those same people in favour of modernization? They put forward two motions so that we would not know which one they really wanted to move today. Next week perhaps there will be 10, and the week after the entire phone book so we will not know what the topic will be. They are completely going around the modernization rule which they themselves said they are in favour of. Let us remember what is going on here before we believe everything we are told by the other side of the House.
I want to talk about the parallels that have been drawn with the Canada Elections Act. I am the minister responsible for the Canada Elections Act. I put forward Bill C-2 to modernize our election laws, to put rules on third parties and to do all those things so that there would not be some of this grey money, shall I call it, that was entering the political process and so that we could not have these campaigns artificially defeating some of our people in the House. There was the no more prime ministers from Quebec campaign which some of us saw not that long ago. Do we remember those campaigns? Do we remember how they got there?
We remember all those things. We put forward Bill C-2 to plug up those loopholes. Which party voted against it? Do we remember which party was against Bill C-2, which party was against those transparency rules? It was the Alliance Party. Do opposition members think I have forgotten or that any other member on this side of the House will soon forget?
After we put that in place, the National Citizens' Coalition protested. Of course the National Citizens' Coalition is not national and it is not a citizens' coalition or anything close to it. Anyway, that organization decided it would launch a court action against me and the government for having passed that. Then it brought the government to the Supreme Court against having transparency rules. Does everyone know who was the leader of the National Citizens' Coalition when it did that?