Mr. Speaker, I will wade through that diatribe to find a question. The question that I actually find is that in fact members of the hon. member's own party, somewhere near 40 of them, voted for such legislation to be brought in in the last Parliament, and would it not be an interesting exercise to go through such a thing again? That is what we hope to do.
In terms of justifying this floor crossing practice and saying it is tradition, there are many things in our tradition that we have left by the wayside, many of them quite bad. Thankfully we do not have some of the traditions that we used to have in yesteryear . Perhaps women not voting or minorities or natives or any of those others not voting are traditions the hon. member would like to grab back because they were considered to be sound and wise traditions, even in Winston Churchill's time.
He chose to go after a party in the middle of this debate and deride it for whether or not it had the attention of voters--while the NDP doubled its votes in the past election and then went up another half again--and to take this debate to such a base level. All we were suggesting is that the voters need to be brought back into the conversation of where it is that members of Parliament stand on issues. When voters hear a candidate during an election deride another party, run it down and accuse it of all sorts of terrible things and then within hours find that the candidate is in agreement with such things, the voters have to question the validity of the electoral process. All the New Democrats are saying is to allow the voters to make a decision and wrest control from the parties. If a member finds it so abhorrent to actually sit with a party any longer that the member needs to cross the floor, the member can simply return to the voters and seek that mandate, for clearly this is not an occurrence that happens every week.