Madam Speaker, I will speak for only a few minutes so that my colleague from Brandon--Souris has a chance to speak before 11 o'clock as well.
I want to say first that we support the bill before the House today, which will change the procedure of how bills achieve royal assent. Our party supports the bill and I gather that all parties in the House support the bill as well. It is a very minor and very timid step toward parliamentary reform of this great institution of parliament.
I do object, in terms of parliamentary reform, to the fact that the bill to reform parliament originates in the Senate, a place that is not elected, not democratic and not accountable. It is rather ironic that a bill to reform this institution comes from a House that needs reform or, in my opinion, abolition, because those people do not have any legitimate authority when they are not elected like members of parliament. They have no accountability. They are senators until the age of 75 and are accountable to absolutely no one. Even their estimates are not very accountable to the House of Commons because the chair of the committee of the Senate that is responsible for Senate spending has refused to appear, or at least has refused to in the last two years, before the appropriate House of Commons committee.
This is my first point : We have to abolish the other place and have a parliamentary system that is totally democratic and accountable to the Canadian people.
In terms of the bill before us today, it is kind of ironic that this bill was in the works for the last 20 years. It has gone through all readings in the other place and now is before the House of Commons. It amends a procedure that has been part of the parliamentary system for about 500 years. For many years here we had a person called the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod who would always knock on the door here whenever royal assent was required. A tiny change was made recently when a woman began doing the procedure. She is called the Usher of the Black Rod. We are about the only parliament in the world that does this for royal assent after every single bill. The British, the Australians and the New Zealanders have made changes to speed up the process by having written royal assent. We have not done that yet in Canada, so we are finally catching up with the times in terms of this procedure.
I also want to say at this time that I think we need pretty radical parliamentary reform to make this place more relevant to all the citizens of this country. We need electoral reform in Canada as well, but this morning I want to talk about parliamentary reform.
In our country, the executive, the Prime Minister, has far too much power, not just at the federal level but at the provincial level as well. Our Prime Minister appoints all the ministers, the parliamentary secretaries, the head of the army, the head of the national police, the head of every important agency, all the senators, the people on all of the important commissions and agencies, and the justices of the supreme court, the federal court and so on. That is awesome power that is given to the Prime Minister under our constitution.
What we need is a parliamentary reform package that would in many cases allow the Prime Minister or the government to nominate someone and have the relevant parliamentary committee ratify or reject the nominee from the federal government. This is the kind of process that we need to take away some power from the executive, from the government.
We also need to take away the power of the government to set election dates whenever it wants. Many democracies in the world have a fixed election date. That should be the case in our country as well so that the Prime Minister does not play with the election date for partisan purposes.
We should have a fixed budget date. With a fixed budget date we could have more planning in terms of the provinces knowing when the federal budget will be delivered. As well, the school boards, the hospital boards and the municipalities then would know when provincial budgets would be delivered. That would be a planning process which would work well on behalf of the people of the country.
We should have a fixed date for throne speeches, fewer confidence votes in the House of Commons, more power for parliamentary committees, more independence for parliamentary committees and more power for individual MPs. That is the kind of democratic reform package we need here in the House of Commons. This bill is just one little timid step in the direction of reforming this institution.
We should also reform the voting system in Canada to bring in a system of proportional representation so that each and every single vote would be equal. Equal citizens would have equal influence. If a party gets 15% of the votes it would have 15% of the seats. As it is now, we are one of only three countries in the world that have more than 8 million people and still use a pure first past the post system, the others being India and the United States.
About a year and a half ago in the United States, George W. Bush got 550,000 fewer votes than Al Gore, but who is the president of the United States? George W. Bush. Historically we have had the same distortions here in this House of Commons.
Even Britain now has started to reform the process, bringing some PR into the Scottish and Welsh parliaments in electing all their MPs to the European parliament through a system of proportional representation.
These are the things we should be doing: reforming parliament, reforming the electoral system and reforming how we finance election campaigns to bring in more public financing. Today's bill is just a small step toward making our system more accountable and more democratic for the ordinary citizens of this country.