Madam Speaker, the Bloc members point out we are into a debate on a different motion than what was scheduled for today, which was the one day when we were supposed to be talking about the rules of the House and the impact on our democracy. I will endeavour to make the link.
The Standing Orders and the Speaker, I believe, should work to preserve and protect the rights of members and the health of our democracy by constraining these practices of Standing Order abridgment. Requests for unanimous consent motions should not be entertained outside of certain very narrow circumstances, and those circumstances should involve a required consultation with all elected members, not just three or four.
The Standing Orders should constrain the use of programming motions, such as through prohibiting the use of time allocation or closure on a programming motion. The deadly combination of a programming motion and closure is allowing the government to pass a bill at all stages in an afternoon.
By constraining their own abridgment, the Standing Orders could reduce these abuses that are weakening our Parliament and roll us back toward unconsidered mob rule. I have no desire to see our Parliament reduced to a body that ritualistically gives perfunctory approval to bills that ministers assure us are very good, while endorsing unconsidered motions simply because they sound nice at first hearing.
Our parliamentary democracy, providing the mechanisms for the people's representatives to genuinely debate about important ideas over a reasonable period of time, is worth defending and preserving, and that is the issue we need to be discussing today.
However, we have Liberal members, and one in particular, who want to talk for a great deal of time on a different Bloc motion: a motion that we are formally debating right now, but we could be debating at any time. They want to discuss it at great length to avoid this vital conversation about the health of our democracy, and that is shameful.