Mr. Speaker, it is a matter of high privilege to stand in Canada's Parliament to debate the issues that pertain to our citizens, our taxpayers and, indeed, the future of our country. Pivotal to that whole event or that whole process, of course, is the operation of Parliament itself.
I always think eagerly of the enthusiasm with which our new pages come to the House every year. They are all excited. They have finished high school. They have been accepted into the pages program. They come here and are ready to observe how our Parliament works. I often think of them as being the embodiment of the youth and in fact the guarantee of the future of our country, representing thousands of young people across the country.
As a member of Parliament one of the things I do is visit schools quite frequently. In Alberta it is in the grade six year that there is a unit on government. I make myself available to the teachers in my riding and I visit the classrooms. These grade six students have very insightful questions. Very frankly, occasionally when they ask some of these questions it is really challenging to give them a really good answer and to explain to them how Parliament works or how it is supposed to work and how indeed our country is one of the best countries in the world because of our democratic system.
Deep inside, I always worry that I may not be actually telling them what they really should know and that is how dysfunctional their Parliament is. I try to downplay that, but I also mention to them from time to time that members of Parliament sent to Ottawa by their constituents very often have their hands severely tied and cannot really represent their constituents, for various reasons.
So the main emphasis in my talk this morning is going to be on the fundamental reform of Parliament that I think is desperately needed. We as individual members of Parliament come here with the express purpose of and also the dedication and the commitment to representing our constituents first, representing the well-being of the country second, and third, making sure that we look at the long term so that the country is stable, well run, economically viable and successful, and that our resources in the country are well utilized, well into the decades beyond the time when we will be here.
Mr. Speaker, I was remiss in not mentioning in my opening sentence that I am sharing my time with the hon. member for South Surrey--White Rock--Langley. I am very honoured to share my time with her since my uncle is one of her constituents.
Let us talk a little about the need for the idea of a free vote. It is a serious flaw here that we have disciplined votes. I do not mind a party having a stand on something. I think that is great. I think it is wonderful if we can go to the people of Canada at election time and say that we are going to stand for balanced budgets. That was one of our big themes in the election prior to 1993. We said that we were going to stop that incipient sliding into deeper debt which would totally hamstring the young people of the next generation and generations to come with them having to pay the interest and the debt.
For our party to have come here at that time with that as our primary theme, to balance the budgets and to stop borrowing, I think that was an excellent theme. I am very proud of the fact that as a party we were able to present a united front on that, to the point where a Liberal government, which means, as we know, Liberal spending, was actually willing to do the things that needed to be done, to a degree at least, to solve the problem of continued borrowing. It is also true that they were lucky in the sense that they came on to the scene at a time when, due to some of the policies of the previous government, free trade and an economic boom in North America, the revenues of the government increased.
If we were to look at the numbers, we would see that it was just a fortuitous stroke of good fortune that they came here at the time when they did since the government expenditures actually have increased substantially, but at least we were here with that agenda and we gave a united front.
My party persuaded me to join the party based on those policies. It persuades me to stand up and vote with it because I agree with those policies. I will concede that the Liberal members opposite probably often get up and vote with their party because they are persuaded that it is the right thing to do.
However, we know of a number of instances where individuals, and in some cases a large number of individual members of that party and perhaps other parties, have voted against their will because they were instructed how to vote because of party solidarity, not letting the government fall and all that stuff. That, I think, is deplorable.
I really believe that we potentially have in the House 301 talented individuals, most of whom are able to think very well. They are well endowed mentally. Many of them have excellent training academically and yet we find they sometimes go against their better judgment in order to vote for something because it is government policy. I would like to see that changed. That is the main theme of my talk.
There should not be punishment for dissent. John Nunziata should not have been punished by being given a chair beside me because he simply decided to vote against something in the budget that was not according to the way he thought it should be.
It is interesting that we have rules in our Standing Orders and in the Parliament of Canada Act. It is against the law to influence a member of Parliament to vote a certain way. Bribes are considered a high crime, yet for some reason we do not object when a prime minister, a party whip or any of the other party apparatus says that we must vote a certain way or else. To me that is a serious breach, especially because our laws provide that members of Parliament should have the ability to vote freely.
I remember being on a school board many years ago. It happened with great frequency that one of the members would make a motion. The motion would seem quite reasonable at first so someone would second it. Debate would start and suddenly one of the members would say that we should think of the consequences if the motion were to pass. Another person would pick up on that train of thought and say that something else could happen. It would not take very long until the consensus of the group was that we could serve the people best if we rejected the motion. We did our job as a school board.
I was the chairman of the board at the time and when I asked for those in favour of a motion to raise their hands, sometimes even the person who moved the motion had been persuaded that it was a stupid motion and decided to vote against it. The majority of the board was opposed and the motion was defeated. We went to the next motion or item of business.
That does not happen in here. We have this insane imposition on our decision making. Even though the Speaker says “the question is...” and he reads the motion that we are debating or that we are voting on, the people who vote are forced into the mode of saying that what they are really voting on is whether there should be an election. We cannot make decisions that way if the real vote is on a question other than the one we are voting on.
I simply make the point that the fundamental change we need in this Parliament is that we put together our collective heads as wise counsellors and we make the best decision because we are persuaded in that direction rather than being coerced into voting the way we do.