Mr. Speaker, I have a great deal of respect for my friend, as I do for a number of folks on all sides of the House, who deeply enrich themselves with the knowledge and history of this place. It is important that all sides have members who dedicate themselves to that conversation, because we all are actors passing across the stage. We are here for a time, we never how long, and yet we must maintain and, I would argue, improve the quality of what Parliament does on behalf of Canadians. The issue we are debating now is the ability of members just to get into the House to vote on behalf of their constituents, a motion which, by the way, the Liberals tried to kill at one point in these proceedings, which is ironic to a detrimental level.
We have been talking about the rules that govern us as members of Parliament representing our constituents and that the long-standing tradition by prime ministers throughout history was to never change those rules unless all parties agreed, simply because it is a good test. Otherwise, one could imagine a government with a majority, a false majority, in this case, changing the rules to its own advantage over the opposition. We all recognize that a majority government has enormous strength and power to pass through its agenda, yet the role of the opposition to hold it to account is central to everything we do.
The Liberals are using the line that they would not give a veto to the Conservatives over one of the Liberal election pledges. Ironically, that did not stop them from breaking their pledge on electoral reform. They themselves broke that with no help from anybody else. However, this notion that it went from an election pledge to somehow override the long-standing and important tradition that we as parliamentarians try to make the place better seems to me a distortion of the power of a promise ill-defined and badly made at some point by some political leader in the middle of a campaign versus the strength and integrity of the House of Commons.
I have a frank question for my friend, which I might ask in private but am asking in public. He mentioned the pattern we were seeing from the government, which came in with great promise to make Parliament better, to be more open and transparent about the way to conduct ourselves, yet has demonstrated its tendency to want to override the will of Parliament, to distort the power that already exists in its favour. Can that pattern be broken or has this ship simply sailed too far away to get it back to some level of sanity and decency?