Mr. Speaker, I will have the pleasure of sharing my time with one of my colleagues, a member of the Standing Committee on Official Languages, the hon. member for Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup. I have used up half of my time just by naming his constituency.
Following the last intervention by our colleague from the government side, I think it is important to take stock of why we are here today.
Our NDP colleagues decided to seize this opportunity to use the whole day to debate a topic that is close to their hearts, which is appointments to officer of Parliament positions.
I read the motion carefully, and I can say that it is very well drafted and very well documented. It brings together many fairly interesting points. I particularly note the openness of the NDP, which amended the motion to meet some of the expectations we had regarding the parliamentary appointment process. The same cannot be said of the party in government.
I think it would be important to remember why we are here. I, too, am a new member, since I came to the House in October 2015. I have noticed something with this government. I do not want to say “contempt” because I cannot believe that the government as a whole scorns the work of the House, but it certainly seems to view Parliament as some kind of mandatory formality. The government does not seem to enjoy having to answer to parliamentarians. It does not seem to enjoy being questioned by opposition members. The government does not seem to enjoy it when we call into question the absolute truth it would seem to possess. The Liberals do not seem to enjoy being reminded of the promises they made to voters in 2015 in order to get elected and to form government or of the fact that the majority of these promises have been broken.
I can certainly say that we can feel the Prime Minister's discomfort each time he has to come to the House and answer members' questions. “Answer questions” is perhaps not the best phrase, because the Prime Minister's question periods have not provided us with a lot of answers up to now. Instead, we have had the same answer several times, using the same lines we heard repeatedly in 2015. The Prime Minister seems to have forgotten that he has been in government for 18 months, that things have moved on since then, but that the promises made by the Liberals have not been kept.
This is a radical change from what the government set out to do. In fact, the government has not done a lot in the House up to now. Few bills have been passed, and it is having difficulty getting its own amendments through. Why? Because there is a malaise, because the government does not respect the opposition or the work done by other parliamentarians, whose role is to hold the government accountable and responsible for its actions on behalf of all Canadians. That is the role of parliamentarians, of the official opposition, of the NDP, and of the independent members. That is why we are here.
It is quite astonishing that an opposition party is forced to explain to the government how to implement a non-partisan appointment process. I can understand that, for the third opposition party, having a committee where everyone has a vote is an interesting experience. However, if we want to succeed in having independent officers, it is something that must be seriously studied, because it really can change things and prevent a fiasco like this, where the government has embarrassed a candidate for a very important position.
In fact, the Liberal party has literally jeopardized the future of a very qualified person by throwing her to the lions but being unable to adequately defend her. I am, of course, referring to the nomination of Ms. Meilleur, who certainly has a degree of professionalism and undeniable skills in the area of language rights.
She did an extraordinary job when she was working for the Ontario government. However, she was also very actively involved with the Liberal government, provincially and federally, and she contributed to its election fund. Obviously, in our opinion, Ms. Meilleur’s appointment was a reward for all that work. That does not appear to have been obvious to the Liberals or to the Prime Minister’s Office, which approved the appointment. However, to opposition parliamentarians and several groups advocating for the rights of Canada’s linguistic minorities, this appointment was unacceptable.
In short, this government does not like Parliament. It does not want to be accountable to the opposition. It thinks it did not have to consult the opposition and only had to inform us of the decision to appoint Ms. Meilleur to this position. I do not know why it thought that it would simply go through, but it takes ignorance of how the House works to think that the members of the official opposition and the second opposition party would let something that big go through.
However, it is not surprising when we know what the Liberals think of the House. Right after the election, they introduced Motion No. 6 to completely change the way the House passes bills. That is when we saw something rather unusual in the House. I do not have to remind everyone about the time the Prime Minister crossed the House to strong-arm our whip into taking his seat. We had never seen anything like it. That is how it began.
Then there was a series of time allocation motions. This government, which talked about openness and transparency, said that it would not use these last-century methods to silence opposition members in order to get its bills passed. It should have then started co-operating with the opposition to avoid having to use time allocation. However, it quickly decided that it was not worth the effort to take the time to speak with the opposition, and it imposed time allocation. In a simple letter sent to the media even before discussing it with the opposition members, they said that they were going to try to unilaterally change the rules under which the House works. The Liberal government has shown unbelievable contempt for how the House operates.
Sunny ways, representing an open and transparent government, have turned into a dark cloud of closure and non-transparency. The famous openness that we expected never came, as we have seen with the appointment process.
I heard a Liberal member say that they did not want to give veto power to anyone in the House, and certainly not to a third party, when it comes to appointments because that would infringe upon the right of the majority. However, we are talking about officers of Parliament. It is precisely the role of the government to be well prepared and to ensure that the nominations it submits for consent by the other parties meet their criteria. It is the government’s role to find the best possible candidates who will have the unanimous support of the House, because we rely on these officers of Parliament to maintain the trust of the citizens who watch us. Indeed, the public sometimes thinks that we are given to fits of partisanship, but they are perfectly justified in their thinking, because that is the only means we have to reason with this government.
We are going to seriously consider the NDP proposal because it is the only logical proposal aimed at forcing this government to respect the other members of Parliament when it comes to making non-partisan appointments for officers of Parliament.