Mr. Speaker, it is with pleasure that I rise and address what I believe is a very important motion that members really need to understand.
Apparently we now have a government that wants to work a little harder. The Conservatives say that is what this motion is all about. Well, they are not going to fool the members of this chamber. They are not going to fool Canadians. This motion does not have anything to do with working a little harder.
One of my colleagues asked why the government had decided to bring in this motion at this time. I think it is important for us to start talking a little about that and about the motives of this particular government in terms of the timing.
In the 39th Parliament, before a Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, the Clerk of the House of Commons made comments on the cost of running the House. As a part of that cost, about two weeks of extended hours is budgeted for. If the House were to deem it necessary to sit additional hours, and it knows it is going to sit additional hours, then there is an expectation that in fact it would have been budgeted for.
What we have found is that the government did not do that. The government House leader never approached any of his colleagues to say that they could anticipate sitting additional hours because we, the government, “want to work a little harder”.
It was not budgeted for. One could ask, as my colleague from the Atlantic region has pointed out quite correctly, why do we now have this motion before us for extended hours?
One of the reasons we have this motion is because of what I would classify as inappropriate behaviour, and because the government, through the Prime Minister's Office, is in a bit of dilemma right now. What the government may really be trying to accomplish is an exit from the House of Commons a little earlier in the hope that maybe the opposition would be more open to rising early due to having extended hours at this time in the legislative calender.
The government is hoping that at the end of the day we will get out a little earlier in June. This was not an issue. It was not being talked about. There was no formal discussion amongst House leaders, no formal discussions about if we do this or that in looking at extended hours.
The government House leader, possibly and most likely, after serious discussions with the Prime Minister's Office, came to the conclusion that what we need to do is lose a little bit of focus on what is happening in the Prime Minister's Office and to try to maybe change the channel.
We in the Liberal Party are not going to buy into that. We are committed to working hard. We are going to work just as hard and, I would ultimately argue, even harder than the government to ensure that there is a higher sense of accountability inside this chamber.
However, a lot has happened over the last week. Yesterday I stood in the chamber and made the suggestion that we should be having an emergency debate. What we are really talking about is the most senior official in the Government of Canada, the chief of staff to the Prime Minister, providing a substantial cash gift to a sitting parliamentarian.
This raises a whole host of issues in terms of whether this arrangement was fully compliant with the rules of the Senate, the Conflict of Interest Act, the Parliament of Canada Act or even the Criminal Code. These are very serious allegations, that Senator Duffy was promised by the Prime Minister's Office that the Senate committee would go easy on him if he kept his mouth shut. That is what was alleged to have happened here.
We are talking about the executive branch of government paying a parliamentarian to stay quiet and in return promising an outcome of an independent Senate committee. These are serious allegations. In the last two question periods, since we have been back in session, this has been the focus of all the attention. The Liberal caucus has focused its questions solely on that issue. We are the only party that has done this. We recognize there is something seriously wrong with this picture.
We cannot choose to believe that this is just something in which one individual, Nigel Wright, took upon himself and did not share any thoughts whatsoever with the Prime Minister's Office. We just do not believe it. He is the chief of staff for the Prime Minister's Office. There is a lot more to this than what the government is letting on. Therefore, we believe there is a need for the Prime Minister to come clean.
However, now the Conservatives have come up with the idea that they want to work hard. We in the Liberal Party have been working hard for Canadians ever since the last federal election and prior to that. We will continue to work hard and fight for the middle-class jobs and try to prevent the government's behaviour of continuously hiking taxes, such as the net tax increases the Conservative's have imposed on Canadians. We recognize what the important issues are for Canadians, and one of those issues is what has taken place in the Prime Minister's Office today.
When the government says that it now has a motion to have extended sitting hours, is it an attempt to try to get the opposition to bow down and say that we agree to exit early? This is not something that is going to fly with us in the House. At the end of the day, the Conservative government and the Prime Minister need to be held accountable for the actions that have occurred over the last number of weeks, and we are committed to doing that.
When the government House leader brought forward this motion, he said that it would provide for extra hours, that it was about managing the votes and that it was about the concurrence motions. This is how he sold the motion that we have been asked to vote upon. However, if the government were really sincere and genuine in wanting to deal with House business in an orderly fashion and it had nothing to do with issues such as the scandal that we have seen come out of the Prime Minister's Office, then the government House leader would have sat down with the opposition House leaders, the New Democrats and the Liberals, and talked seriously and fairly about how we could, in an orderly and timely fashion, have an agenda to pass whatever legislative agreements. That is what should have happened.
If it was deemed among the House leaders that we still needed to had those extra sitting hours, then fine, we would not need to have this type of debate, which is time limited, because there would have been an agreement put into place.
The government could have dealt with its legislative agenda in a fairer fashion, in which opposition members would have been afforded the opportunity to possibly prioritize bills and say which bills most concerned them and wanted to ensure there would be adequate debate on them. If it meant, in order to allow that to take place, there had to be extended hours, then there would be extended hours. A lot depends on what the true legislative agenda of the government is.
We have seen a change in government, from the minority days, when there was a higher sense of co-operation in things that took place in the House to this brand new Reform-Conservative-paranoid government. I suspect we could probably use a whole litany of adjectives.
The current majority government and its agenda is absolutely unacceptable. It says one thing and does another. It says that it is decreasing taxes, and that is not true. It is increasing taxes. It talks about being conservative in managing our finances well. It has taken surpluses and turned them into deficits. When it talks about democracy, no federal government in the history of Canada has been more anti-democratic in terms of presenting—