Madam Speaker, I thank the member for Winnipeg Centre for bringing forward the suggestion that we withdraw this aspect of funding in the estimates, which has triggered this debate. It is an important debate to have about the role of the Senate and its redundancy because it raises the question of democratic reform overall.
I listened to the Minister of State for Democratic Reform speak about democratic reform, but it seems to me the Conservative Party has gone so far from its original propositions around democratic reform that it is now just a pale echo of what it once stood for.
In speaking about democratic reform, we in the NDP have always called for democratic reform of our electoral system, for example, proportional representation, which is a much stronger and more credible position to ensure there is fair and democratic representation in Canada and that the way people vote actually counts in terms of the reflection of the House.
Why does the Minister of State for Democratic Reform, who is supposedly responsible for democratic reform, have nothing to say about the question of something like proportional representation and how important that has been in many different legislatures and parliaments in the world? In fact, we are now one of the very few places that does not have some form of proportional representation.