The member can name all the prime ministers she wants; she will not find one prime minister.
All we have to do is look at time allocation and understand what it is. Time allocation is the limiting of the ability of members of the House to stand and address the legislative agenda. No government prior to the present one has used time allocation as a tool to pass legislation as much as this one.
Let us take a look at the 2012-13 budget bills. There are two of them. In fact, those two bills consisted of 1,000 pages. I am talking about the omnibus bills that were brought forward by the government. We cannot blame the backbenchers for not really understanding it, because I suspect it was never explained to them. These two bills were being used and manipulated by the government. It was using a budget as a back door to pass a legislative agenda. Numerous bills that should have been stand-alone bills were snuck through the back door of these massive bills.
The Prime Minister of Canada, back in the days when he was in opposition, and hopefully he will be back in those days in a couple of years, talked about one omnibus budget bill that consisted of 160 pages, not a 1,000 pages. This is what the now Prime Minister and then leader of the opposition had to say:
We can agree with some of the measures but oppose others. How do we express our views and the views of our constituents when the matters are so diverse? Dividing the bill into several components would allow members to represent views of their constituents on each of the different components in the bill.
He asked government members, in particular, to worry about implications of the omnibus bills for democracy and the functionality of Parliament. He was right back then. Imagine what he has done today with the Conservative-Reform majority government. He has swallowed those words. That is the type of behaviour we have seen from the Conservative majority government. It has gone out of its way to limit debate in the chamber.
Does anyone know how many times I have had the opportunity to stand on the issue of time allocation alone? One of the Conservatives asks how many. One would need more than two hands to count as I believe it is now just over 30 times we have had time allocation since the last federal election.
What about the issues we are talking about? We could talk about the Canadian Wheat Board. Time allocation was brought in on that even though the farmers in the Prairies were denied the opportunity in law that they were supposed to have in a plebiscite. The government wanted to not only silence the farmers on the Prairies, but to silence members in the House of Commons too, so it brought in time allocation.
Whether it was the pooled pension plan, copyright legislation, the gun registry, back to work legislation, financial systems review, some of which are relatively simple pieces of legislation, both budget bills, free trade agreements like with Panama, Canada Post, Air Canada, first nations accountability, the government brought in time allocation after time allocation. It is a government that uses time allocation as a tool.
When we talk about democracy, we need to recognize the importance of the House of Commons and what takes place inside it.