Mr. Speaker, what my friend failed to mention was that the motion before you, at least the portion of it that would restore government bills, is actually a fairly standard motion at the time of a new throne speech and follows thereafter. In fact, we had such motions in 1991, in 1996, in 1999, in 2002, in 2004, and in 2007. It is not unusual; in fact, it is almost what we might call standard operating procedure. That is why it is normally done as a unanimous consent motion.
However, there were a couple of things that changed here.
One is that in drafting the motion, on the government side we decided to not just deal with government bills but to try to be fair to everyone. We decided to look at all the other things that were going on in Parliament in which other people had an interest.
We knew that the member for St. Paul's had expressed an interest in seeing the committee on murdered and missing aboriginal women continue. We thought that made sense as something members wanted to see. There were other committee mandates out there; an example is the study that the procedure and House affairs committee is going to do into members' expenses. That was requested toward the end of when we were sitting in June, and we thought it would be silly to extinguish it. That is something that had been asked for by the opposition, and the independent members actually had standing on that committee protected, so we wanted to ensure that they could have their interests protected as well.
Therefore, we went beyond just dealing with government bills and looked for everyone's interests to be protected. We looked at anything that anyone had proposed and at all committee mandates that were in place. It was a balanced approach that ensured nobody suffered a disadvantage. It was not just the usual approach of only pursuing the government bills; it was to reflect everybody's interests.
Instead we hear from members of the NDP almost a different kind of approach, which is that not only do they not want a fair and balanced approach, but they want to cherry-pick only the stuff they care about and then allow everything else to be dropped.
That may be one approach to doing business. I am not sure it is productive. I am not sure it is constructive. It certainly does not respect the hard work that was put in by parliamentarians on advancing those bills last spring.
We want to see the work of parliamentarians and the interests of all parties respected. We think that this is a balanced motion that does exactly that.