Mr. Speaker, the motion is adding or tweaking a particular piece of legislation to give federal employees more paid vacation leave. That is what it is about.
I would like to see the matter votable. I would vote against it. I would like to see more than myself voting against it and my colleague from the NDP voting for it is the government members across the way taking a clear stand on it. We will not get that today. We will get the one obligatory speech that the hon. member just gave and other government members will talk about how they have problems with the process. It has nothing to do with the process whatsoever. The hon. member and her colleagues are worried about the opportunity for the NDP to cut into their electoral base with unions, particularly public sector unions in Ontario. That is the real issue. I see a couple of members across the way nodding their heads.
I know where I would stand. I know where the NDP would stand on this issue, but the government is avoiding it. The government is running from the issue. It is hiding on an issue which is fairly clear cut issue. Rather than deal with the issue of increased paid time for federal employees, government members will hide on it and tell us that it is the fault of the provinces, that it is too complex to be dealt with and that it is a piecemeal amendment and all these types of things because they do not want to hurt their electoral base in Ontario into which the NDP could cut. It is strictly optics.
I could talk today on all sorts of principled objections that I have to this piece of legislation, but at the end of the day it really would not matter because my NDP colleague has not been allowed the opportunity to have this as a votable item. At the end of the day we all know that we will get up and give our speeches. The hon. member will not have an opportunity to put this forward in an actual amendment or a change to the law because the government does not want to have the issue addressed. It does not want to allow private members or members period in this place to vote on it. That is a crying shame. It is one of the failings of the government.
There are some problems right now on the government side as I am sure all members well know. There are camps where members are trying to slit each other's throats over the power hungry grabbing for the leadership, the prime ministership. This directly applies because if there were mechanisms for backbench members to voice the concerns of their constituents, if they were allowed to come up with real amendments to legislation like this one today, even though I would be opposed to it, if they were allowed to put even one bill per session--