Madam Speaker, on what appears to be the last day of the spring session we have the opportunity to look back on what we have learned during this session and look at how we might avoid making the same mistakes next time.
This motion here today gives us an opportunity to look back at prorogation and all that it is a symptom of, and ask ourselves some serious questions about what we are doing here in this chamber.
This chamber holds 308 people who come from every corner of this country and from every conceivable background and identity. We represent, individually and collectively, all the extraordinary diversity: the different voices, viewpoints, faiths, beliefs and creeds of this country. Our job is to come together to figure out the best path forward.
Whether we sit on this side of the House or that side of the House, we are all Canadian and we all share a core set of beliefs that together we can have a fair, more prosperous, better country to leave to our children and grandchildren. This is the spirit that imbibes the public service. This is why we spend so many days of the year away from our families, our homes and our communities to come and build a sense of compromise and a sense of moving forward in ways we can all agree with.
That is why it is so troubling to have seen over the past four years a culture of division, cynicism, secrecy and lack of accountability permeate the House in its entirety. There were two prorogations in two years, the first to avoid a vote of non-confidence that would have surely brought the government down, the second to avoid difficult questions on how much the government allowed to happen around the torture of Afghan citizens. That is not the kind of presentation we need to be putting to Canadians.
We have a House in which the winner of question period is the one who can shout loudest and where the points are made to disrupt and distract people.
It becomes a game of scoring points, finding the right word to put others on the spot, trying to find a strategy that will please our grassroots and not giving a fig about what others might say, especially when they are not going to vote for us anyway. We are impoverishing this House and the very principles we are here to defend.
The government has understood. It was elected a few seats shy of a majority by just 5.2 million Canadians. Of the 33 million citizens of this country, roughly two-thirds of them are voters. A little over 5 million votes could almost give it a majority. The government realized that it was a climate in which it could promote cynicism and disengagement, suppress voter turnout, and suppress people's feelings that government can be a force for good and a place that gets things done.
Instead, it pushed this idea of dysfunctional parliaments by demonstrating how dysfunctional it can be under a government that does not believe in government. It does not believe that we have a duty to work together to build a better country and a better future.
We are meandering aimlessly at a time when we are faced with tremendous challenges with regard to the environment, human rights and poverty, both here at home on our native reserves and throughout the world.
As Canadians, we have an obligation to face up to our duties and responsibilities and the opportunities that present themselves because we live in an extraordinary and prosperous country where everyone is entitled to express their opinions.
That is why there is this desire to shut down debate, to quash democratic instincts, to marginalize voices that come forward with differing points of views, whether they be Richard Colvins or Linda Keens, or any women's group who speaks out against them and are told they need to be quiet or else their funding will be cut. Anyone who disagrees with this government gets pushed aside and that unfortunately applies as well to the opposition when the government thinks it can get away with it.
That is what this past prorogation was about. It was about making sure that Parliament, that government, that Stephen Harper could use, sorry, I apologize, that the hon. Prime Minister--