Mr. Speaker, I must say that I reject entirely the premise that the member makes that the process we are engaging in is not open and transparent.
In fact, I find it amazing that a member of the New Democratic Party would actually bring this forward because in the procedure and House affairs committee, it was the government that presented a motion that in effect would have members of the procedure and House affairs committee travel across Canada in a parallel consultation exercise to the one that we have already announced.
Yet, do members know what happened when we put that motion? The NDP voted against it. The NDP, the Bloc and four out of the five Liberals voted against it. The only member who voted with us was the Liberal member for Vancouver Quadra.
We wanted to ensure that the committee members who represent the procedure and House affairs committee in this House had an opportunity to travel across Canada and engage Canadians in the very process that the member is suggesting, or at least she had suggested in her bill. Yet, her own party voted against that motion.
I find it, frankly, more than a little hypocritical to suggest now that the consultation process that we have started and announced on January 9 is not open and transparent.
Let us reflect again exactly what is going to happen in that consultation process. There will be meetings across Canada. There will be 12 meetings, one in each of the 10 provinces, one for the territories and a separate consultation process for what we call a youth meeting. At each one of these meetings, there will be 40 members who are selected to represent the broad demographic, cultural and other ranges of the clientele or the population within that region.
These individuals will be able to extensively study the material beforehand. Then they will be able to have a wide open dialogue and consultation, expressing their views on a range of issues on democratic reform. This is going to be as open and transparent a process as probably we have ever seen.
However, to add to that process, once again I say that we wanted to have parliamentarians engaged in the same process in a parallel stream. Yet, what happened? The member's own party voted against that.
I can only stand here in amazement and suggest to the member that perhaps if she was truly serious about engaging this consultation process, she should have a discussion with her own members who sat on that committee and question them as to why they voted against our motion.