Mr. Speaker, what we are speaking about here is the abuse of the power of prorogation.
I appreciate the government House leader's comment. However, I did note that he did not particularly suggest that there had been any abuse in the circumstances that he raised.
I submit that there is very clear abuse by his government of the power of prorogation. It was very specifically used, in both cases, to avoid accountability.
In one case, it was to avoid a motion of non-confidence that the Prime Minister had told Canadians would take place on a certain date, and then sure enough he headed off to the Governor General in order to avoid that fundamental definition of accountability.
Second and most recently, there were questions about these allegations of transfer of prisoners into situations where they could face torture. These questions were going to be coming up again when the House came back, and the Prime Minister simply did not want to face them. So he shut down Parliament.
That is wrong. It is an abuse of power. What we are proposing is something very simple. That the abuse of power be constricted, restrained, so that prorogations could not take place for more than seven days without coming to the place that is being prorogued and ask whether members want to have the locks put on their doors or whether they want to continue to do their work.