Mr. Speaker, I would like to talk about the minister's time allocation motion, which would limit the time for debate on this bill. Since I am not running in the upcoming election, I would like to put something on the permanent record here in the House.
I believe that the quality of debate in the chamber could be improved. The government says that speeches are repetitive. That is its argument for limiting debate. I think what is going on is that the opposition is doing its job in criticizing the government's legislation. However, the speeches we hear, and I would say we hear this a lot from the government side, and to be fair, sometimes from the opposition side, are not real debate in terms of a clash of ideas, in terms of responding to each other in a give and take, back and forth exchange of ideas and a testing of ideas.
The reason the debate needs to continue is to have better-quality debate. If we had good-quality debate, we could finish it in a couple of days and would not need to limit the number of speeches.
We in the opposition are challenging the government. We are pointing out problems. We are bringing up facts and evidence, and we need a response from the government. If we got a proper response and had a back and forth debate, a real debate, instead of just reading speeches where we pass by each other, from an intellectual point of view, we would not need to limit debate.
Therefore, I call on the government—