Mr. Speaker, although I appreciate the comments from the government House leader, I wonder what he means by the opposition not wanting to just go ahead with starting things over. When prorogation is invoked, the entire government program is supposed to be reset. It hits the restart button and starts over from zero, from scratch.
On the other hand, the House leader is now saying that Conservatives want to start over with a new throne speech and want the opportunity to make it seem that the government is shiny and new, when in fact they are taking all of their old bills that they could not have passed when we were all working very hard last summer, as he correctly pointed out; all of us together working very hard could not get them passed because they were so faulty. We had a lot of problems with those bills. They were just not ready for prime time.
Instead of saying we should work through the month that just went by and see what we can do about improving those bills, the Conservatives set prorogation in place so that we could not work on those bills. Instead the Conservatives are telling us that we are ones who are trying to delay Parliament, the ones who are obstructionists for their bills, but they pushed the reset button themselves.
They should be consequential. They wanted prorogation so that they could have a throne speech, which, by the way, was highly criticized for being devoid of content, with many words but very little content. They wanted to go ahead with the throne speech and make it seem as though the government had something new to offer, which to all intents and purposes does not seem to be the case, but it has to be consequential.
Prorogation means the reset button. The government does not have the right to redefine the work.