He still is that party's worst nightmare.
We need to put this into some kind of codified law. I accept that there will be members who break with their own party over issues, who might want to sit as independents and who in good conscience can no longer support the direction of a party. That is perfectly fair. It is perfectly fair for a member to say he or she has seen what another party is doing and is impressed by some of it, but the obligation is to sit as an independent first and then go back to the voters so that the voters can decide whether or not they will accept that person as a member in a new party.
The other thing I would like to offer, and maybe we could ask for all party consent on this, is that we should take all the red book promises over the years and put them in a glass case at the centre of Parliament so that when school children in years to come ask their teachers why an accountability act was needed, they could be told to look at the red book.
Imagine if there was a red book year after year. We could just change the cover and tell our voters, “Vote for us; we will support child care. Vote for us; we will fix EI. Vote for us; we will fix the environment. Vote for us; we will have an independent ethics commissioner”. When someone has the temerity in the House to stand and say that perhaps we should ask the government to be accountable to some of the red book promises and have an independent ethics commissioner, the government of the day will say, “Absolutely not, all of our promises are strictly voluntary”. No wonder there was such deep cynicism.
The people I met while knocking on doors in places like Schumacher, Elk Lake and Kirkland Lake felt that they had been written off the political map of Canada by a party that never bothered to come out to them, except every three years with the same old Liberal red book. None of those promises was ever acted on. No wonder people are not voting. People are not voting because they feel nobody here listens to them.
The worst act of cynicism we have ever seen is the famous Liberal deathbed pinata. The Liberals put in all their promises over all the years that were never acted on and smashed it across this country. They said, “Please God, vote for us otherwise all these promises will never come to naught”.
The most cynical thing about this deathbed pinata is the revisionist myth that the promises were enacted, that all that money was spent, that all the little children across Canada were finally cared for, that the environment was finally fixed, that EI was finally fixed, that the first nations of Canada, who those people disgracefully and systemically ignored, were suddenly repaired because the money was out there. That is cynicism. The cruel myth is that voluntary promises are not enough. We are obligated as parliamentarians to do our best to live up to the commitments that we make.