Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to be speaking to this Liberal opposition day motion. It has been a very interesting debate for most of the day, primarily, with the Liberal opposition getting beaten up in an unprecedented fashion.
A couple of days ago I read some quotes in the House about the minority government of Lester Pearson from the 1960s and how successful it was. One of the accounts was prefaced by the words that it was a “chaotic government”. Another one, I think, was “confused”. But both accounts, at the end of the day, and this is the historical record I am referring to, indicated that this was an extremely productive period of time. It may not have seemed like it at the time, but the fact of the matter is that the government, over that period, brought in a new Canadian flag, a medicare system, amalgamated the armed forces, and several other serious pieces of legislation were enacted at that time.
There have been other periods, too, of minority governments that have worked very well, and I have mentioned those before, such as Filmon in Manitoba and Davis in Ontario. And there are probably a lot of other good examples.
However, the public has been trained to believe that somehow a majority government is the ideal. The facts are not borne out by that. After the Pearson government, we had a majority government under Pierre Trudeau. It did not accomplish an awful lot in four years. As a matter of fact, the public was so unimpressed with the first four years that they returned the government in a minority situation with David Lewis and the NDP supporting that government for two years, in which we did get a number of very good pieces of legislation passed.