My colleagues are getting very excited, Mr. Speaker. It is hard for me to contain them, but let me deal with another subject.
Let me turn to the theme of democracy. If the Prime Minister were really sincere, he would hold a referendum on the principle of proportional representation instead of just making minor and superficial adjustments in the chairmanship of parliamentary committees.
There have been some other little tinkerings that the Prime Minister has been able to wonderfully spin over the last six months as real parliamentary reform. I happen to be one of the last surviving members of the 1986 McGrath committee and the things that we recommended then have still not been implemented. Also, what the Prime Minister has suggested as part of his package--unless he surprises us tomorrow with something real--does not come anywhere near what we recommended back in 1986.
The guts of our recommendation with respect to committee reform was that when members are appointed to committees they should be appointed for the duration of a session or a Parliament and they should be beyond the reach of the whip: no more goon squads.
If the Prime Minister can do that tomorrow, he will have done something. If he can say that from now on when Liberal members begin to have independent thoughts they will not be yanked from the committees, and that when they leave or have to be replaced, they can replace themselves, that they, not the whip, will decide who their replacements will be, that is what the McGrath committee recommended. That then would give true independence to committees, or at least a kind of independence that committees have never had.
So I urge the Prime to take seriously that recommendation as well as others. Otherwise, if the whips, and ultimately the Prime Minister, retain that leash, if at any time the people on the committee can be yanked if they are threatening to make a career ending move, this is not parliamentary reform.
But democratic reform, and the Prime Minister used this phrase, is not just about the House of Commons. We all love this place, some of us more than others, but it is not the only thing happening. How we get here also counts. That is where electoral reform comes in, I say to the Prime Minister. Why could the Prime Minister not have announced--and perhaps he is willing to consider--an all party committee to look into electoral reform, to look into forms of proportional representation? It does not have to be a commitment to a particular kind of electoral reform. Why not allow a debate to take place either here in the House or across the country about ways in which we can make every vote count?
If the Prime Minister is concerned about the health of Canada as a democracy, then he should be concerned that there are so many people out there who feel that their votes do not count. In various first past the post scenarios that voters encounter, they feel that it does not make a difference. We could design a system where it did make a difference and where everybody wherever they vote would be contributing to the ultimate makeup of their Parliament. I commend that particular suggestion to the Prime Minister.
Again with respect to the democratic deficit, I did not really expect the Prime Minister to deal with this one: the trade agreements. What is more antithetical to a healthy democracy than to have more and more decisions made not in legislatures, not in parliaments and not by elected people, but behind closed doors as a result of arguments being made by high-priced trade lawyers, bean counters or whatever? That is not democracy. For more and more of the things that we were able to decide in this House when I first arrived here almost 25 years ago, we are not able to decide those things anymore. They are decided somewhere else. I say that is the real threat to democracy.
The fact is that we cannot decide what kind of drug patent legislation we want to have. We must have the kind of drug patent legislation that conforms with trade agreements. The fact is that apparently we could not allow a Canadian company to do a portion of the census work that is now being done by Lockheed Martin because a former minister of industry, now the ambassador to the UN, said it was the trade agreement that made him do it. When it comes to sovereignty, when it comes to culture, when it comes to all kinds of things, we have seen the ability of this House to make decisions constricted by trade agreements.
Again I would say to the Prime Minister that if he is concerned about democracy he should look at the way in which the trade agreements are taking away the power of parliaments to make decisions in the public interest. Nothing could be more threatening to that ability of countries or parliaments to act in the public interest than chapter 11 of the NAFTA, the investor state dispute settlement mechanism. While the Prime Minister was part of the last government, I thought for a while that the former minister of trade, now the Minister of Health, at one point was actually coming around to the view that there was something wrong with that investor state dispute mechanism.
But now he defends it--although now he does not have to defend it anymore as somebody else has the job of defending it, of defending the indefensible--and we in Canada are left as one of the few countries in the world that has this mechanism built into an agreement with our biggest trading partner. It will never be in the FTAA. It will never be at the WTO. The European Union and others have seen what a threat this is to their ability to act in the public interest, particularly with respect to the environment, which the Prime Minister expresses a concern about. Is the Prime Minister not concerned that if we act in the best interests of the environment, and if that act conflicts with the profitability of certain corporations, if they are foreign corporations they can they take the Canadian government to court? Should that not be a concern? Is that not anti-democratic?
So I will say to the Prime Minister that I think he should be looking at the trade agreements but I do not really expect him to, because I remember 1988 when the Prime Minister first came here. It was right after he was first elected that we had the final debate and vote on the free trade agreement. I do not know if the Prime Minister remembers this, but just after the vote I remember stepping into an elevator with him right out here--with the Liberals of course voting against it--and saying, “You're not really against this thing, are you?” Because he was a right-wing business Liberal, the Prime Minister, and he still is. He knew enough not to answer the question. He just smiled and got off the elevator.
The Liberals have been, after Mulroney, the architect of more and more free trade. They have shored it up politically and rhetorically and with more agreements. So it is hard to take all this democratic deficit stuff seriously without some kind of commitment to electoral reform, without some kind of re-examination of the trade agreements, particularly chapter 11, and without real parliamentary reform that actually puts members beyond the reach of the whips when they are on committees.
There is a lot more I could say. Right now the steelworkers in Hamilton are worried about their pensions. They are worried about the future of Stelco but they are also worried about their pensions. Was there some kind of commitment in the throne speech to do something about safeguarding the pensions of the workers who count on these pensions? I would have thought that the Prime Minister might have had a passing interest in Hamilton. Maybe he just does not want to even think about Hamilton, and the steelworkers get sideswiped because he does not want to think about Hamilton so they do not get thought about. But we should be thinking about them. We should be thinking about workers all over this country who are insecure about their pensions and about what happens to their pensions when the companies that they work for go under.
What about the strategy for the auto industry in this country? Nothing was mentioned. There was no hint of an industrial strategy. Perhaps the auto strategy has to be left up to one of the leadership candidates for the other party, who seems to have her own auto strategy.
In any event, as I have said, I have heard a lot of throne speeches and I would say that this one was particularly light on details. Maybe that is because we are so close to an election and the Prime Minister does not want to have to defend anything in particular.
But I will say to the Prime Minister through you, Mr. Speaker, that the NDP is on the move. And the Prime Minister knows it. That is why we have had this sort of fake to the left while he is going down the political football field, but it is not going to wash, because there is no Romanow and no debate on missile defence, and a whole lot of other things are missing. If the Prime Minister really wanted to be authentically moving to the left, we would have seen it in this particular Speech from the Throne.