Mr. Speaker, I generally agree with every word my friend from Burnaby South says, but I have to say I was disturbed to hear in a comparison that the Harper administration governed better than what we are seeing from the current government. I have lots of concerns about broken promises by the Liberal government, but I have to say that when it assumed power, I was encouraged by, for instance, initial signs, such as the transparency of the mandate letters. That suggested a readiness to govern. The Prime Minister's Office is no longer all-powerful. Clearly, cabinet ministers are actually running their own portfolios.
What I am deeply distressed about in the current debate is that we must not conflate anything done by the Harper administration. Prime Minister Harper used prorogation, for the first time in the history of Canada, to avoid a vote he knew he would lose in this place. The current proposal from the government would improve that, but not as much as the proposal the Green Party has made to ensure that there is a vote of confidence in the House before any prorogation to keep any future prime minister from using and abusing powers egregiously, as Stephen Harper did. We must not, in our effort at the moment to make partisan points, forget what the last nine years were like, when we had 100 uses of time allocation.
Since my hon. colleague and I are actually friends and have worked academically on a new book looking at how Parliament gets distorted, I would put it to him that it is not that one party does it better than another. It is that the power of political parties over the lives of MPs inevitably erodes democracy.