Mr. Speaker, as always it is a great honour to stand in this House. In standing and speaking for the people of Timmins—James Bay, I never forget the honour I have in carrying their trust and being part of an institution that predates me by many centuries, and which I hope to God will continue on. It is something we are all part of.
Tonight we are debating an issue which in the many lows I have seen in our Parliament may be among the lowest. This is not to dwell on it, but sometimes there may be a breaking point when parliamentarians need to step back and say that there is something fundamentally going wrong within this House. This is not to denigrate the role of the Speaker, but I was very surprised when the Speaker threw up his hands in response to such a crisis, and said that he reads the rules literally, and unless it was written literally, he is not able to act. I was very surprised by that. However, what we are attempting to do tonight is to provide those tools.
We need to look at the issue at hand and what sparked this motion.
In the 10 years that I have been here, I have seen a continual decline in the quality of discussion. I am not trying to present anything naive such that there was a glory day of Parliament. I think Parliament has always been somewhat of a challenged place because it is made up of human beings. This is what democracy is. We have had better conversations and we have had low-brow conversations within this House.
However, the most serious thing that we are ever asked to do as legislators is to consider sending men and women into harm's way. That is the most serious thing that will ever confront any of us. Therefore, when the Leader of the Opposition asks a respectful question in question period and is treated to ignorant gibberish as a response and the Speaker says it is allowable, then we have a problem. When the responder for the crown can swear in question period not once but six times over three questions and that can be considered parliamentary because it is part of question period, because as we are told, “Well, it is question period, not answer period”, that is really not acceptable.
I have heard my hon. colleagues from the Conservatives tell us that this motion would somehow tie their hands unfairly. Yet, we know from within this Parliament that the Speaker has enforced the rules, that if the question is not pertinent to the issues of government, he cuts off the question. I have seen questions cut off numerous times in this session. The Speaker will tell us that if he feels the questions coming from the opposition are not respectful enough of ministers, he will cut off those questions, and he has cut off those questions. However, it is perfectly acceptable within his reading of the Standing Orders to treat the Leader of the Opposition to such contempt on the issue of Canadians going to war as somehow being parliamentary, but we know it is not.
We do have to address this issue. We have to address how it is in the interpretation of this House acceptable to swear six times in three questions and consider that to be parliamentary, or to respond on the issue of Canadians fighting in Iraq with some of the most ignorant drivel that I have ever heard in this House is parliamentary, but to call it out and question it is unparliamentary.
We see this pattern repeated again and again in this Parliament. We see it even with the apology. Normally when a member makes a mistake and comes into the House and gives an apology, the issue is considered done. It is sort of a gentlemen's and gentlewomen's code that we have always had. However, we saw an apology come after three days of defiant repetition of this side-show gibberish. The member stated in the apology that he did it on his own, that nobody told him to do it, but within minutes of that apology, we are seeing reports that that is simply not true. We are hearing that the plan had come right from the Prime Minister's Office and that the member was told by Alykhan Velshi, the director of issues management within the Prime Minister's Office, to say these lines.
Suddenly now it is parliamentary to stand up with an apology and not tell the truth, but it would be unparliamentary for me to challenge it because somehow, as an hon. member, we are supposed to take him at his word, even when the apology is simply not credible and not truthful.
What we are speaking about is something bigger than decorum. We are speaking about something that is bigger than just this charade that is being played out within Parliament, this contempt of democracy where we call each other honourable members and we stand and talk about the institution of Parliament and speak in the third person, but what we are seeing is that our parliamentary system is becoming increasingly a sideshow. It is a Potemkin democracy.
We see the officers of Parliament continually undermined in their work. Their role as independent officers of Parliament is to hold government and members to account. Yet we see that their ability to do their job is continually undermined.
We have seen how the parliamentary committees have been turned into a circus, once again, a sideshow, taking away the traditional role which the parliamentary committees had. We are not naive about this. There is a fundamental obligation to Parliament to work together, but that does not happen anymore. I have seen the deterioration.
The only thing that is left for Canadians to tune into now is that 45 minutes of question period where the issues of the day are supposed to be debated, where ministers of the crown are supposed to stand and answer. I used to tell my American friends that no matter what they say about the parliamentary tradition, we have a fundamentally vital Parliament because we know ministers of the crown have to stand and answer. However, it is getting harder and harder to tell Canadians that they can look to question period as a credible place to get answers.
This is not to say that in changing the Standing Orders the ministers cannot hesitate. It does not mean they cannot prevaricate when it comes to answering. It also does not mean they are not allowed to obfuscate, which we know they have done many times and they consider that part of the parliamentary tradition. It means they cannot denigrate this place through ignorant sideshow antics that take the fundamental credibility of the House to do its job and shoots it right down into a sideshow. That has to stop.
We know that in the parliamentary tradition the Speaker does have that obligation to stand and say that there is a bigger institution. I heard our hon. Speaker talk the other day about the obligation we all have to respect the office of the Speaker. I certainly believe that. But I do not believe it is the respect of the Speaker because he wears the black robe, but because the Speaker represents the obligation of Parliament to stand for something besides the cretin act that it has become. If the Speaker tells us that he does not somehow read the authority that stands in the Standing Orders that there have to be questions of relevance and answers of relevance, that somehow question period is exempt, then we have to change the Standing Orders because question period of all the periods of discussion in the House is when the matters of the day, the matters of national and international importance have to be addressed. If we see a pattern developing where this can be turned into something that is absolutely meaningless, then there is absolutely no credibility left in this Parliament.
I am sure many of my hon. colleagues have seen where the speaker in the British Parliament called out the prime minister of the day on questions of relevancy. That is a reminder of a larger obligation. We see within the British parliamentary system where within its committees if they do not actually have unanimous reports, it is considered a failure of the parliamentary system because within the committee system parties are supposed to work together. Under this present Conservative government that would never happen.
We are debating an important issue tonight and I actually hope that the government will even allow it to come to a vote. We saw the procedural shenanigans it came up with before. Once again, the opposition day is one of the few opportunities that opposition members have to set the agenda, and the first response of the government this morning was to attempt to play procedural high jinks and prevent it from getting to a vote.
I think the Conservatives felt the blowback from the Canadian people who say they are tired of this attitude, this contempt for Parliament. They want a vote. They want us to behave better than how we have been behaving. If the questions that are put in the House of Commons in question period have to be based on the relevance of government business, then there has to be a quid pro quo and recognition that the answers somehow must be relevant to that. I think all of us pray that we will never see such a spectacle again as we saw last week.