Mr. Speaker, I will be addressing this motion shortly, so I will not belabour many of the points that I will be raising at that time.
I would ask the hon. leader of the New Democratic Party one very simple question. He knows full well that prorogation is used in every legislature across the land. Although thankfully, and I mean that very sincerely, we have never been faced with a New Democratic government at the federal level, there have been a number of NDP governments at the provincial level across Canada at different times.
The documentation of this is very clear. NDP governments have used prorogation at the provincial level much more often than it has been used at the federal level. In fact, there are some legislatures where there were New Democratic governments in office that used them five or six times in one legislature, the equivalent of one Parliament, not once or twice as is often the case at the federal level.
I would ask my learned colleague from the NDP whether he is also suggesting that that somehow is an affront to democracy when his colleagues in British Columbia, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Ontario also use prorogation much more often than has been used at the federal level?