Mr. Speaker, I know I only get five minutes, but I think I need at least half an hour to counter some of the inane arguments that I have heard on this issue.
Just to talk about the single issue that the Conservatives repeatedly brought up, they talked about Senate reform. We are talking about electoral reform, our electoral system that gets us to the House of Commons, but they repeatedly talked about Senate reform in their remarks. Therefore, I would counter that single issue argument.
The Conservatives put together a series of focus groups. Those focus groups as we know are designed mainly to look at Senate reform. They threw electoral reform into the mix hastily, I might add, after I put my Motion No. 262 forward. They basically hijacked that motion. They hired a biased think tank, a special interest group, to have one meeting in each province across the country with hand-picked attendees at these meetings.
I have heard from some of those attendees. What they are telling me is that 45 minutes of each day of these focus groups was spent discussing electoral reform. The Conservatives call that broad consultation.
Consultation takes time and the member who previously spoke said that the Conservatives want to have consultation. Here is the way to do it: support Motion No. 262 and have that consultation process go across the country and involve citizens, have full participation and citizen engagement.
The Conservatives say a report will be written and that report is supposed to go to the minister, to the government, but I ask: will Parliament ever see that report? We are not so sure.
The Conservatives also said that the NDP has put forward some ideas on electoral reform. That is just what they are: ideas. I thought that was our job in Parliament, to put forward ideas, to have fulsome debate on those ideas. For the member to say that we put something forward is quite ludicrous as well as to speak against putting ideas forward in the House. We have been putting them forward for years.
Motion No. 262 is a specific motion. It is calling for broad consultation, something that all members of the House say they want to hear. Over a period of time we want a full discussion by asking Canadians about the values and the principles that they want to see in an electoral system and then have that report come back to Parliament, to the members of the House, so that we can continue the work that was started in the last Parliament by Ed Broadbent and others in the House.
Every one matters and every vote should count. However, over the past 10 years we have seen a decrease in voter turnout. Why is that? It is because more and more Canadians feel that their vote does not count. That is especially true among young voters. They need to be engaged in a fulsome debate as well, not just in one province, in one town, to have a one day discussion, but across this broad country to involve them at every level.
We look around the House and we see less than 30% of the members are women. We should be plus 52% if we had equality in this country. My colleague, the member for Nanaimo—Cowichan, talked about the need for electoral reform to ensure a more gender equal representation and I thank her for those comments.
I also want to honour the work that was done previously by our former leader and member for Ottawa Centre, Mr. Ed Broadbent, who worked tirelessly on the issue of electoral reform so we could have gender equity in the House.
I also want to thank the member for St. Paul's for her comments. She spoke about Doris Anderson and her work to bring electoral reform to this country. Doris never gave up on that subject. Right until the day she died, she was fighting for electoral reform.
Our voting system is outdated. Most other older European nations use a voting system developed in the 20th century, while Canada uses a voting system that was developed in the 12th century. It is outrageous.
Canadians know their system is outdated and unfair. They are ahead of the government on this issue. Canadians are ready for a change and the government knows this or it would not have put electoral reform into its Senate reform debates. Canadian need to be heard.
I call on all parties to support this motion and let us move forward so everyone's vote will count.