Mr. Speaker, I must say that this is the most bizarre argument I have ever heard on any issue. The parliamentary secretary is saying that we should not worry about the rules that apply to this debate because the debate does not matter anyway, that no one is going to pay any attention to it, so do not worry about the rules. We on this side of the House believe that the views and the debates in the House of Commons matter. It is a question of absolute contempt for the parliamentary secretary to have said what he has just said.
To come to the point that was raised by the leader of Her Majesty's loyal opposition, either this motion means something or it does not. The parliamentary secretary says it does not, which means it is an affront to the House to bring it here. However if it means something, then surely the government is bound to follow the practice that has been established for years, the practice that has been outlined by the leader of Her Majesty's loyal opposition, and deal with implementation before it deals with ratification.
The government cannot have it both ways. It cannot ignore history as it is trying to do and it cannot say that this matter is terribly important but it does not matter at all. That is an affront to common sense.
I want to come to common sense for just a moment. The Leader of the Opposition very ably has raised the practices that have been followed here with respect to votes on ratification, many of which I have some familiarity with. I had the privilege of introducing some of the measures that led to those international treaties. He very correctly and irrefutably set forth the law and the practice. Had his argument been refutable, the parliamentary secretary would have refuted it, but he did not do that. He simply said that the debate does not matter so do not talk about rules. The precedent is very clear.
Let us speak for a moment about common sense because precedent and practice is based upon common sense. How can we ratify something when we do not know what it is? It is precisely that question, precisely compelling logic that a Parliament must know what it is voting on before it votes that has created the precedent cited earlier by the Leader of the Opposition. That is why we have implementation before we have ratification. That is why the government comes forth with what it is that it proposes to do before it asks us to approve that kind of action.
It is not as though the government has not had time to spell out what it is asking Parliament to do. It has had more than five years. It was in November 1997, five years ago now, that there first was a meeting of the federal, provincial and territorial governments to try to deal with this issue. It is another question that the government, in all its arrogance, walked away from the agreement that was reached in that federal-provincial conference and said it did not need the provinces. In effect, it is saying the same thing now, that it does not need Parliament because the votes that Parliament casts on issues of this kind do not matter.
It is not as though it has not had time. It has had plenty of time. It has been five full years, five wasted years and we still do not know and it still does not know what it is it is asking the House of Commons to vote upon in the motion that it has brought forward today. There is no certainty. The government has this the wrong way around. It is asking us to vote for something when it itself does not know what it is asking to have approved. That is an affront to the House.
More to the point, the very reasoned argument brought forward by the leader of Her Majesty's opposition is clear. The precedents are clear. This practice breaks those precedents. That breach of precedent means that the motion being presented here today should not be allowed to come before the House.