Mr. Speaker, the parliamentary secretary for the government has complaints about the content of the speech by my friend in the NDP. He did not even notice when he moved an amendment. I gather it is unparliamentary to refer to the physical presence or absence of members in this House, but we can still draw attention to their mental absence from the House in spite of their physical presence.
I want to ask the member to share his thoughts on our amendment and on the whole issue of an equality between the government and opposition in terms of how the extension of hours works.
By the way, we have seen today that the government seems to want to use that time not to have more debate on bills but to move more time allocation motions and to fit more of those into one day. However, that aside, we take the view—and I think the member would agree—that if there is going to be an extension of time spent debating government legislation and if we are going to have that extra time for discussion of government initiatives, surely the same courtesy should be afforded to the opposition. As well, surely we should not trust the government to be some kind of neutral arbiter of the rules of the House when clearly it is instead always trying to tilt the playing field to its advantage.