Mr. Speaker, I think it would be helpful to those watching, and certainly to some members of Parliament who are here and have already participated in the debate, to set the context of why we are having this conversation.
Various members seem to have connected this to one piece of legislation or another, or the government's intention on one bill or item in the throne speech. It has nothing to do with any of that. All of this has been created. It is a manufactured crisis and a manufactured inability of the majority Conservative government of the day to simply negotiate in basic common sense and good faith.
A prorogation, which I will remind my colleagues across the way of the Conservatives own making, bears a small parenthetical moment because the prorogation was for what again? Right, it was to help the government reset the channel. It was in desperate straits.
If we cast our memories back to the end of the last parliamentary session, it was Whack-a-Mole on scandal with the Conservative government. Every day we woke up to another scandal by either a member getting accused by Elections Canada of fraudulently running the last campaign or another senator perhaps having stolen money from the Canadian taxpayer, all of which was associated to the Prime Minister and going right into the very heart of the Prime Minister's inner circle, his chief of staff and directors of this and that.
We find out today that the scandal was at an even deeper level, a more rotten level, because the Prime Minister assured all Canadians at the time, in the spring, that it was the grassy knoll theory, it was a rogue chief of staff, as if those two things go together for a prime minister like this that he would hire a chief of staff who would suddenly one day just go rogue and keep him in the dark of something that was dominating the news of the day.
Now what the government came back with after its attempt to reset the channel to change the conversation was a throne speech with a number of items borrowed from the NDP's last platform. The Conservatives are welcome, and I hope they actually do them.
The second set of things is to protect consumers, which is nice. I know the Minister of Finance may have had a bit of an itch watching these various announcements come out because so much for the invisible hand of the marketplace. The Conservatives with their deep-founded ideology that the market solves all in all cases now find themselves a finance minister in charge of measures that come out of a social democratic party's previous election platform to help on credit card fees potentially, maybe moving from voluntary, which is very nice. Perhaps the Minister of Finance would like to have voluntary tax measures for Canadians such that, “You can pay your taxes. We would like you to, but if you don't want to pay your taxes, we'll have a cuddly relationship like we do with the banks and they can voluntarily reduce those fees for Canadians, or not, without any consequences”.
Also, they would see their Minister of Finance having to be responsible, and maybe even interfering in the marketplace, for the cellphone rates that Canadians pay. Members will remember that the Conservatives went out on a very high horse and said that they were going to bring in competition for the Canadian cellphone market.
How has that been going so far? It is an absolute disaster. The Conservatives have created uncertainty in the telco market. There has been absolutely no new entrance into the cellphone market and the Minister of Finance laughs at those very consumers he now pretends to care about. One wonders about the authenticity of those words in that throne speech.
However, I will come back to why we are here, which is another closure motion. It is another motion to shut down debate.
I do not know if the Minister of Finance is paid per heckle, but I wonder if he could, for the next 18 minutes, contain his enthusiasm for my remarks and then he and I can have an exchange of ideas through what we call the question part of this debate. Apparently he cannot contain himself nor have any ideas.
The political loans bill is legislation that the minister and his party supported through the process. It is a political loans bill that was meant to catch those members of Parliament, or generally Canadians, who ran for political office, ran for the leadership of their parties, and allow for Elections Canada, as it simply did not have the ability, to go after those who had not repaid after a certain time. Now the Conservatives wrote this bill, with the support of the NDP in principle, but they then brought in a bill that was so ultimately flawed that Elections Canada said that it was utterly unworkable. The Conservative members on the committee said that it could not be rewritten. Now we have a motion—