Mr. Speaker, the Conservatives have been in government since 2006. Seven years later they have made no changes to the Senate, which they ran on and said they would do. Why? It is because there is a constitution that governs reform to the Senate. They tried to make an end run with some of those reforms.
I was on the committee that was looking at the Senate bill from the government earlier on when it took office, and the constitutional expert said, “You cannot do this”.
Second, the new member of the New Democratic Party in the House asked a question about the last 20 years, obviously not aware of the history of Charlottetown and of Meech Lake where a referendum went to Canadians about a triple-E Senate, and Canadians said no; so now we move on.
We heard Canadians say no. We did not move on this. The Prime Minister said he would do it. He did not go to the provinces to discuss it. He did not try to get the seven provinces with 50% of the population to agree to reforms. In fact, most of the provinces, with the exception of a Conservative province, said, “That is not on our front burner, people; we have all kinds of other things we want to talk about”.
Now, let us talk about Senate reform. This is not about Senate reform. This is a motion to say we would like to hear from the Prime Minister what really happened. I would like to hear questions on that.