Mr. Speaker, I listened with almost perverse fascination to my hon. colleague's speech for 20 minutes while he talked about the need to have integrity in voting and how the government needs to listen to the opposition on this issue of immigration.
The issue of immigration is paramount to the future development of our country and it needs to be debated and brought forward. As my hon. colleague points out, something this important should not be slipped into a budget vote.
However, when a government does something that will affect so many Canadians and knows that it is wrong, those Canadians must turn to their members of Parliament. It is a role of each member in this House to stand up at certain times and say that we cannot allow this, that this is not the way it is done. Sometimes those votes come at a cost. Each of us, as a member of Parliament, has had to make decisions that we know will cost us personally.
This is a situation where the government brought this bill in because it knew that members of the Liberal Party would be more interested in saving their own jobs than representing their countrymen, the people in their regions and in their ridings. The government knew that the members opposite would not stand up when the time came so it felt free to do what it wanted.
I find it absolutely appalling that the member would stand and say that the government did something wrong. The government is doing something that it believes it can get away with, and it is doing that through the collusion of that party.
Last night we had a vote in the House but I would never say whether people were there or not. My glasses were off so I could only count six or seven people at a time. I cannot say whether the member actually stood and voted but he is paid to vote. He is paid to stand in this House and represent his constituents. He is not paid to come after the fact, shrug his shoulders and say that it was a terrible thing but that he could not afford to lose his job, that he could not afford to go to an election or that he could not afford to stand and challenge the government. He is paid by his constituents to be there for these votes that are so crucial.
If this is such an important issue, and I believe it is, then we need to say that we will not stand for it. Whether or not the government is threatening confidence, his job as opposition is to either stand and challenge the government or to roll over and stop complaining.
Where has the member been on these votes?