Mr. Speaker, it is my turn to speak to the government’s Motion No. 18. No one will be surprised to learn that we will vote against this motion, for several reasons that I will have the opportunity to raise in the next few minutes.
To begin this short 10-minute speech, I will be very clear. I am blessed to be one of the Conservative members who will have the opportunity to speak on such an important motion as this one, which aims to change the Standing Orders of the House of Commons. I consider myself lucky because Motion No. 18 was tabled yesterday and the debate will end in a few minutes, when there were only two hours of deliberations yesterday and we resumed the debate at 11:30 this morning.
I do not have a lot of experience in the House of Commons, as I have only been here since October 2015. However, I have had the opportunity to speak with several of my colleagues who have been here for a very long time, even though none of them have been here since the creation of this beautiful House, of which I am proud to be a part. Never in memory have the Standing Orders of the House been changed by a motion that was hastily moved at the end of a parliamentary session and that divided the members of the House. According to all the comments I have received, this is a first. Moreover, it is quite a first, but it is not at all a credit to the Liberals opposite. It is shameful to act in this way.
Since the October 2015 election, this government seems to be quite unco-operative when it comes to the business of the House. It does not appear to understand its role as the governing party, and more importantly, it does not appear to understand at all the role of the official opposition, which is to ask it to justify each of its decisions.
When I was the mayor of Thetford Mines, I had to justify each of my decisions to the community. If a decision made at a Monday night council meeting did not please the community, I would hear about it the next morning at Tim Hortons, because people would quickly find out about it. Therefore, if, God forbid, at some Monday night council meeting I was unprepared and together we made a bad decision, the next morning, it was we—the councillors and the mayor—who be called to account.
If we became better and made good decisions on a Monday night, it was because not all the councillors supported the mayor’s decisions. They understood that their role was to point out the flaws in decisions that were not that well thought out. Therefore, even if we cannot refer to them as the opposition in the same way we do here in the House, having town councillors challenge our decisions made us all better. The following day, instead of being criticized, we were praised by the community, because we had made good decisions.
I appreciated the fact that the councillors did not always agree with me. I appreciated that they approved of some of our decisions and questioned others. That upset us sometimes, since we did not always agree with them, but ultimately these councillors who acted as the opposition made us all better.
This is what the Liberal government does not seem to understand. The role of the official opposition is to improve how this country works and improve the decisions made by all governments, regardless of political stripe, by allowing the official opposition and the other opposition parties to examine them. That is how the House must operate.
What protects the members of the House so they can properly perform this role? Certainly, they sometimes bother the government when they ask questions and criticize it.
We sometimes point out its failings and oversights. We do not always see eye to eye. Sometimes, we prevent the Liberals from keeping their promises because those promises were reckless to begin with. Other times, we would like them to keep their promises, but they always have all sorts of reasons not to. I am sure government members find us incredibly irritating at times, because we do not share their thinking, but that is our role.
What holds us together, what makes it possible for us to fulfill this role for the benefit of all Canadians? The answer is simple: the Standing Orders of the House. Without these rules that allow us to question and challenge the government's decisions and positions, things would slowly but surely turn into a dictatorship, even under another name. Why? Because the government would then be able to do whatever it likes without subjecting itself to the opposition's scrutiny, making all the decisions, good ones and bad, its bad decisions remaining unchallenged.
That is why I am sending this message to my colleagues across the floor who are not in government, but who sit in the House and on committees. They were there when we exhausted all avenues and used every tool at our disposal to make our point that the government cannot do what it wants to the rules of the House. These rules belong to all Canadians, as they serve to protect them from a government whose arrogance might one day reach such heights as to compel it to want to use the full measure of its power to introduce the policy it wants without regard for the opinion of Canadians who might not share its views. That is why we are here in the House.
Motion No. 18 is a manifestation of this arrogance. It has to be said, because this is the first time since October 2015 that I have seen such a lengthy motion. It is written in very small print. When I was mayor, I remember receiving complaints from citizens telling us not to use such small print because it made it difficult to see the big picture. Some of our more senior citizens asked us all the time if we could use larger print. People use small print when they want to make it so others cannot read them. This applies to Motion No. 18. They would rather we did not read it, so it is full of numbers and other stuff. Motions will pass, however, even if they are too wordy. That is the Liberal way. They are always looking for a back door to sneak through, hoping not to rouse the opposition along the way. That is why I now declare, as my opposition colleagues will surely agree, that this will not stand. We will not be fooled by the Liberal government's methods.
Before we vote on this motion, I just want to say that I am very proud to be an MP. It is a privilege to be elected to the House. This government swept to power on a tide of false promises about sunny ways, openness, transparency, and doing things differently. I hope that, by “doing things differently”, it did not mean “doing things unilaterally”.
Unfortunately, ever since last year, Motion No. 6, the infamous discussion paper that the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons tabled in the House, the many closure motions the government has imposed, and the partisan appointment processes we have witnessed in recent weeks and months have exposed the government's blatant lack of respect for the work of opposition members.
Motion No. 18 is essentially the dregs of the government's latest attempts to unilaterally change the rules of the House. The government may have watered things down considerably, but the outcome is the same. It will use its majority to force changes to the House rules without getting consensus, even though there has always been and should always be consensus to change the House rules.