Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to speak again on this motion, which is similar to the motion on which I spoke earlier today.
I have several points. My main point is that it does not make any sense, because it would close down the Government of Canada and many provincial governments. In Canada's Constitution, there is a provision that laws of Canada have to be passed by both Houses of Parliament. That means that we could not vote on supply bills, on which we will be voting later tonight, that provide the money for the coming year if the Senate did not approve them.
If all of the Senate's money were taken away, the Senate would not be able to approve this legislation. As of April 1 next year, the Government of Canada would be deprived of money. It would not be deprived of statutory programs, but money for the entire public service. We would have no CRA, for example, because nobody could be employed there. What does the CRA do? It collects the taxes not only at the federal level, but for all of the provinces as well, except for Quebec. It collects income tax, corporate income tax and HST for those provinces that have it. Not only would the federal government run out of money as of April 1, nine provinces would have a huge chunk of their revenues taken away by this action.
As a result, the whole Government of Canada would grind to a halt. We must think of that. Do we want to find out what is going on through CBC? CBC gets huge subsidies, so it would not be able to continue. We would not have food inspection. We would not have all of the things that Canadians rely on. We would not even have employment insurance, OAS or things of that nature. While those monies would be protected, because they are statutory, the people to administer them would all be gone because there would be no civil service left.
If foreigners wanted to help Canada in this government-less state, they could not go to our embassies abroad because we would not have any embassies. All of the lights would be turned out in the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.
I am not sure the NDP has thought through how government really works. The NDP is not a party that favours zero government. If anything, the NDP is the party of big government, yet the effect of its proposal would be to eliminate government.
For these reasons, I think this is not a good message. It is not a good idea to do something that would eliminate the federal government and many of the provincial governments.
For those reasons alone, we are certainly not going to support this crazy idea.
There are other things that I would like to mention as well. I think that this is disrespectful to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is in the process of considering a long overdue reference by the federal government. We have been recommending such a reference for a year or more and the government did it just recently, thereby wasting a lot of time. Had it done it a year ago, the Supreme Court probably would have decided by now and we could proceed. It is highly disrespectful of the Supreme Court.
We have to obey our Constitution. The law says that the Senate and the House of Commons have to approve. It is not just a federal law, it is a constitutional law. It would require at least seven provinces and the federal government to change it. We have to wait before we proceed in a meaningful way to hear what the Supreme Court of Canada says.
This is also highly disrespectful towards the provinces. At least seven of the provinces, ten in certain cases, have to give approval for constitutional changes in the Senate. For the NDP to simply present a motion to starve the Senate of its funds and think that will do it does not respect provincial rights. The Senate is supposed to be a body that represents provincial interests and the provinces are central to the determination of the makeup and rules governing the Senate.
It really does not make sense to have a motion that disrespects the Supreme Court and the provinces.
The third problem is that this motion benefits the government because it is a debate about the Senate and the government does not mind that. The government quite likes that. The government has no problems with that. What the government does not want to do is to debate the role of the Prime Minister and the role of the Prime Minister's Office in the transfer of the $90,000 by Nigel Wright to Senator Duffy. A motion that dealt with that, like calling for documents on this transfer of funds, would have been much more interesting from an opposition party's point of view than a harmless debate about the Senate. A debate about the Senate right now is not really useful before we hear from the Supreme Court as to what we are allowed to do. We will not hear from the Supreme Court for some time.
Lastly, it has been erroneously stated that Liberals are for the status quo in the Senate. That is not at all true. I would like to describe what our democratic critic, the former leader of the Liberal Party, the hon. member for Saint-Laurent—Cartierville, thinks about Senate reform.
First of all, we have to recognize that the distribution of Senate seats is highly unbalanced. Alberta and British Columbia have six seats each. New Brunswick has 10, so the original provinces, the Maritimes, and Quebec and Ontario hugely benefit in the distribution of seats compared with Alberta and British Columbia. If we move to an elected Senate, that means that the Senate would become more powerful. It might become as powerful as the House of Commons. If that were to happen, it would be hugely unfair to British Columbia and Alberta, so I do not know what the Prime Minister is trying to do with his proposed elected senators, without any return to the Constitution and without talking about the distribution of Senate seats. The Prime Minister comes from Alberta. He would be disadvantaging his own province whose proportion in the Senate is far less than its proportion of the population of Canada.
My colleague said that the first thing one would have to do to move toward an elected Senate would be to have a negotiation involving the distribution of Senate seats to make it fairer and more in line with today's population. If one could achieve that, then one could move constitutionally toward an elected Senate. He also said we would have to have some division of interests, so that the Senate and the House of Commons would be complementary in their activities rather than being a recipe for deadlock between the two. We see in the United States and perhaps in Italy that the House of Representatives and the Senate cannot agree and there is a deadlock. We want to avoid that.
It is a complicated business. That is one approach that could be taken, which my colleague thinks is a good idea and which I think might be a good idea, but we should not underestimate the difficulty of that approach as we know from our own history. It is at least a principled approach to Senate reform, as opposed to this proposal that we have today of starving it of funds, which is a recipe not only for shutting down the Senate, but for shutting down the whole Government of Canada and the governments of many provinces as well.
In closing, my main argument is that this approach by the NDP does not make sense because the NDP is a party that favours government. It does not make sense to eliminate the government if you are in favour of government, but their proposal would do exactly that: eliminate the federal government and many of the provincial governments.
This does not jibe with the Constitution or the Supreme Court. It is absolutely not the right approach.
What it does show is that the NDP is certainly not ready for government. I would think the most principled action by the more sensible members of Parliament for the NDP would be to vote against their own crazy motion.