Mr. Speaker, again, this speaks to the different ways of thinking about Parliament.
If opposition days were just a day for the opposition to get the whining off their chest, have their little whine time in the House, and then we would move on and get back to doing what the Liberals get to do because they have a majority of the seats, even though they got less than 40% of the vote in the House, then we would not see any value in extending the opposition days. The thought might be that the opposition members just want time to whine about whatever and they got to whine, so let us move on.
That seems to be the attitude of the government in this motion. However, if the rationale for the supply days, or opposition days as they are more commonly known, was that the opposition deserved to have a certain proportion of the time to address concerns that may be embarrassing to the government or that the government did not want to spend time on, then we would adopt it. As members would imagine, I do not support the former interpretation. However, it is quite reasonable to also extend the time for those opposition days. This time is for that. It is the time for the opposition to bring forward those issues that the government does not want to discuss.
For the benefit of the House, the opposition day motion we had was to separate out the infrastructure bank, or the government's privatization scheme, from the omnibus budget bill. It was also an NDP opposition day motion that created the special committee for democratic reform. As I said, it came up with a proactive proposal to help the government meet its election commitments, that it then reneged on.
That is productive work. The idea of the supply days is that a certain proportion of the House time is dedicated to that work. Part of the problem is that this motion undercuts that fair proportion of established time. We heard earlier from members who were concerned that this was really about the government, not the Liberal backbenchers but the cabinet, infringing on the time that Parliament had to conduct business that was not necessarily what the government would have us be talk about. That is sad for the government, but it is important for our work.