Mr. Speaker, we once lived in a country where the Governor in Council ignored the will of the elected legislature. We once lived in a country where the executive council ignored the will of the legislative assembly. We once lived in a country where the chief minister and the cabinet ignored Parliament. That was a country long ago. That was a country some 18 decades ago and it was that ignorance of the elected legislature that led to the people rising up. It led to insurrection, it led to the rebellions of 1837 and it led ultimately to reforms. It led to the introduction of responsible government, first in the legislature in Halifax, Nova Scotia, which was established in 1758, and subsequently, several years later, in the predecessor Parliament to this one: the Parliament of the United Province of Canada in the 1840s.
It led to Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin establishing the first responsible government, the first great ministry of Canada, on February 25, 1848. It was an important milestone that established the fundamental concept that the executive branch of government is accountable to the elected legislature, that the executive branch of government cannot ignore the orders of this place, cannot ignore the bills that are passed and adopted in this place and the other place, and cannot ignore the will of the elected House of Commons. Until that point, the Governor in Council regularly ignored Parliament and the elected legislature. Bills were often vetoed by the governor. Orders of the House were ignored. The Governor in Council hired and fired advisers at will and made his own decisions, the legislature be damned.
The introduction of responsible government was an event so important that on Parliament Hill we have a statue to Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin that overlooks the Ottawa River and is labelled at the bottom, chiselled in stone, “Responsible government”. Since the introduction of that responsible government, Canada's democracy has evolved to the point that we now accept that the government is accountable to the House, but the Liberal government is rolling back 18 decades of parliamentary evolution with its defiance now of four orders of the House and its committee.
The situation in front of us is rapidly evolving from a situation in which the government is simply refusing to provide documents related to the termination of Dr. Qiu and Dr. Cheng, and the transfer of materials from the Winnipeg National Microbiology Laboratory to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, to a situation that is much more serious and that involves the rule of law. The rule of law is such a sacrosanct part of the trinity of our principles of a belief in democratic institutions, human rights and liberty and the rule of law, that the 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms put in its preamble that this country recognizes the supremacy of the rule of law, and the Liberal government is seriously undermining that rule of law with its flagrant disobedience of the four orders of this elected chamber.
There have been two strong precedents in recent years to support the orders of the House and its call for documents. One is the case that has been referred to many times, in which Speaker Milliken's ruling of 2010 made clear that it is the grand inquest of the nation that this chamber has an unfettered, absolute right to call for the production of papers, full stop. There was a more recent example two and a half years ago in the mother Parliament of the United Kingdom, when the Conservative British Prime Minister of the day defied Parliament and said she would not release the Attorney General's solicitor client-protected opinion on the Irish backstop in relation to the Brexit deal.
She refused to hand over those documents, and the House found her in contempt and ordered that her Attorney General come to the House with the documents, which Attorney General Geoffrey Cox did because the British government understood the importance of the rule of law, the importance of Parliament and the importance of democracy. That is why the current Canadian government cannot be allowed to get away with this flagrant defiance of four orders of the House.
I will finish by saying this. Why do Canadians send 338 of their fellow citizens to this chamber if their decisions are going to be ignored? Why do we spend $400 million a year on this chamber and the other one if our votes do not mean anything? Why do we vote to adopt orders if they do not have effect? Why are we spending billions of dollars on these buildings, some $5 billion on Centre Block alone at last count, if the processes and procedures in this place do not mean anything?
We cannot allow this open defiance of the House to go unchallenged. We must uphold parliamentary democracy, and we must ensure the government fulfills the order of the House.