Mr. Speaker, my question tonight refers to a question that I asked in the House quite some time ago, back in June of this year. At that time I raised two questions in the House for the ministers of democratic reform and democratic renewal.
For folks out in TV-land who are not familiar with this, there actually are two separate ministers, one for democratic reform and one for democratic renewal. None of us can tell what the difference is between democratic reform and democratic renewal. It is not part of my question, but if the parliamentary secretary chooses to finally explain the answer to that mystery at some point I would love to hear what it is.
At any rate, I asked two questions of these ministers. The first one dealt with a private member's bill which has since been defeated or withdrawn, so therefore there is no need to discuss that.
The second question related to the government's response to the report of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, which at that time was being written, on the subject of electoral reform. The procedure and House affairs committee had at that time, in response to the response of opposition parties in the House to the Speech from the Throne, been charged with the task of designing a system for reforming Canada's electoral system.
The system recommended by the committee was then to be placed in effect and to have the effect of causing Canada to start down the road toward potentially replacing its current first past the post electoral system with some other electoral system, if it is the judgment of Canadians that it would be better. At that time, I asked the following question:
Let me ask the [minister] responsible for electoral renewal, will he be acting promptly on the recommendations of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs regarding electoral reform?
A couple of weeks later, the report was indeed tabled, making recommendations. Specifically, it recommended a two-pronged process.
It recommended a public input process, in which the principles behind electoral reform would be brought forward. It would be a process in which members of the public would be selected and led by a facilitator. The second prong of the approach would be to have the parliamentary committee on procedure and House affairs, or a special committee, debate and determine a specific new electoral system.
The process would start on October 1. I initially proposed that it start on September 1 in order to give us more time. It would report early in 2006, and right about this time, maybe a little later than right now, the two groups would be meeting to review their preliminary hearings.
The schedule was to start on October 1. What happened was that the government, as far as I can tell, did not do anything whatsoever in order to act to make this happen. On October 1, it still had not responded as to what we were to be doing.
Finally, several days later, a response was tabled not in the House but rather at the Clerk's office, because the two ministers did not have the nerve to actually stand up and table this non-response. What they said was that they could not meet the deadlines. They said the deadlines were impractical and the committee should have known better.
My questions are the following.
If the schedule was unrealistic, why did the parliamentary secretary to the minister, who will be answering us today, agree to that schedule? Indeed, he helped design the schedule.
Why did he object to my original timeline, which would have started the process on September 1 and which would have allowed more time?
Finally, why did the government wait until after the October 1 deadline to even bother giving a response at all?