Reg Alcock

[Standing Orders, February 27th, 2001]

You're too smart for that.

[Standing Orders, February 27th, 2001]

Madam Speaker, I will try to squeeze my remarks into the 20 minutes that are available to me. Let me see if I have it straight. We are gathered here to debate the right of the opposition in this case to force the entire House of Commons of Canada to spend hundreds of hours voting on important motions like changing a period to a comma.

If I understand what I am listening to, that is what we are doing right now. I have some sympathy for that debate. Some members may not know that I was the opposition house leader in the legislature of Manitoba. Certainly the member for Winnipeg North Centre knows this. I have great sympathy for the opposition and its need to have tools that allow it to force accountability.

To that extent I listen to the debate with some sense of concern. In every place, whether it is the legislature of Manitoba or this great chamber, there are two conversations that go on. There is the conversation that goes on here with the TV cameras turned on, with the lights on and with Hansard turned on to record all of our remarks, and then there is the conversation that takes place in the corridors, behind the curtains and in the coffee shops.

I do not know a member of any party who thinks it is a good idea for us to spend hundreds of hours standing and sitting to vote on frivolous motions. When we get away from the hot atmosphere here and the attempts to embarrass each other and all that kind of silly debate, I have not heard anyone who feels it is a productive use of our limited time to spend the time we do on issues of this sort.

I want to put some of this in context. I too worry about excessive use of time allocation. I too worry about the tools the government has available to drive legislation through without proper examination or proper debate. I too worry about a House where one side becomes so powerful that it need not take into consideration any other opinion.

There is legitimate concern that this parliament, like legislatures and parliaments around the world, has evolved into a tool that permits the government to do exactly that, to impose its will on parliament without having to give proper consideration of debate on the other side.

However to every action there is a reaction. Oppositions have resorted, in part because they have limited tools available, to these rather frivolous and extreme kinds of actions to make their case, to a point where it makes all of us look silly.

I heard one member earlier talk about the Nisga'a treaty tool in an attempt to give some dignity to the fact that we sat up here day and night for about 40 hours. I think that member's claim to fame was that he actually voted on every amendment because he could run in and out to the bathroom.

Before I get into some of the solutions that I think exist to this problem, let me try to provide a bit of a context and be quite serious about it. I spend a lot of time thinking about it, as I know other members of the House do. I have had very lengthy and, I think, fruitful conversations with the House leader for the New Democratic Party, who is one of the more experienced and distinguished members of the House. He has spent a lot of time here and is very thoughtful on these issues. I respect his advice.

The first question is how do we get here? I would argue that there are whole bunch of forces at play. One of them is that the speed of life, the speed of business, the speed of change, the need for decision, everything in the external world is moving faster.

Bill Gates, in his most recent book, describes the decade that we are now in as the decade of velocity, the decade in which the major challenge to everyone will be to manage rapidity, the speed at which things have to happen. This just did not occur at the millennium. This increasing speed has been going on throughout our lifetime. It has been going on throughout history and has accelerated to a pace where changes take place within the context of one generation. They are intergenerational. They are multiple changes within a single generation.

As a result, there has been enormous pressure on the institutions of government to respond quickly to changing circumstances in the external world and to changing circumstances in the communities within which our citizens to whom we are accountable live.

Over time, slowly but sequentially and invidiously, the governing side of the House has adopted a series of tools that allow it to move its agenda forward faster and allow it to clear it quickly. It is worthy of recognition that this has taken away some time for thought. It has taken away some tools that the opposition had to force more debate and to slow down the speed with which something could happen.

I believe the debate on reform of this chamber is an important one. It is a debate that needs to go on now. However, I do separate it from this motion. One of the reasons I feel comfortable doing this is that we have commitments now. To talk about reform is not idle chatter. It is not a hopeful thought. It is in the Speech from the Throne.

In the Speech from the Throne, the government said it recognized there was an issue. In fact let me read it because I think it is important to focus on this part of it.

One of the things I admire a great deal about our current Prime Minister is this workmanlike, piece by piece, step by step approach to solving problems. There is no fancy banner waving. There is the problem and how we are going to find a solution. That is what I see here.

The throne speech states:

The institutions of Government will continue to be strengthened. Since 1993, the Government has taken a range of measures to enable members of Parliament to more effectively represent the views of their constituents.

In this new session of Parliament, the Government will make further proposals to improve procedures in the House and Senate. Among other measures, voting procedures will be modernized in the House of Commons and, to assist parliamentarians in carrying out their duties, the Government intends to increase the resources of the Library of Parliament to better serve the research needs of standing committees of the House and Senate.

It did not stop there. The next day the Prime Minister stood in the House and in his speech, his personal commitment to the House, he said:

Like any human institution, the House of Commons is not perfect. It can be strengthened. Over the years many changes have been made to improve parliament and more will be made to bring parliament into the 21st century.

The House leader is working with his colleagues from all parties on reforms that will make the House work even better for the benefit of all Canadians—

That is a commitment. That is not idle backroom chatter. I am satisfied with that.

The member for Winnipeg North Centre mentioned some of my feelings about this in her speech. She wondered how I could be defending this motion today. I am very comfortable defending this motion. I am tired of being part of a process that looks so foolish, so stupid and has common Canadians scratching their heads saying “What are you guys doing?” This is a bogus procedure. It is one that destroys good work. It wastes important time of which we have too little. I have no qualms at all about getting rid of it.

What is the tool we have chosen to moderate it? We did not say it cannot be done because report stage motions are an important tool. What we do in this motion is reaffirm power and authority already held by the Speaker. We do not give it to the government or to the government House leader. We give it to a colleague who has been elected by all members of the House and who has a majority support in the House.

That colleague is not charged under the motion simply to dismiss opposition motions. The Speaker, as the speaker in Westminster has done, is empowered to examine those motions. If the Speaker feels the government is being too harsh and too forceful in driving things through, he or she can allow all sorts of motions, or if it is felt they are frivolous, he or she may dismiss them.

It empowers one of the modern day democratic reforms. It was not that long ago when the House finally got itself together enough to take an individual who used to be an appointment of the government's side and said “No, we are going to give this person power independent of the government”. That is the position that the motion adds to.

I want to reflect a little on what may come now because I heard a couple of things. I could close my ears to the silliness which I thought was coming. Actually maybe that is a bad word to use. I will apologize for using that word. I do not mean to demean the comments of other members in that sense. Having been in opposition and having been forced to sometimes stand and criticize things I felt positively about, it is very hard at times to feel comfortable doing that. I realize members are trying to protect a principle of accountability. However, what they are trying to defend is something that is so frivolous. They have to be very hard in their hearts to do that.

I tried to pick that apart and hear some of the other things that were being said. There was a comment about the recent vote on the ethics counsellor. There is a saying that a friend of mine has on a poster on his office wall. It reads “For every complex problem there is a simple answer and it is wrong”.

That is the problem which arises when we approach changes in the House lightly. We can all see one little thing that we think is important and needs to be changed. We can all come up with an answer on how to change that one little thing that bothers us at this moment in time. That is not how the House got where it is today. That is not how the rules, the procedures, the precedents and all the things that allow us to work in the chamber have evolved. It takes time. It takes thought. It takes reflection.

This is the place in our country that manages power and authority in the lives of all of our citizens. This is the Chamber in this country that gives citizens their rights. This is an important debate which should be approached carefully and thoughtfully. It needs to be approached with the full involvement of all members of the House. However it has to work both ways. We all have to recognize the demands being imposed upon us externally. The House needs to modernize.

I would like to add another dimension to this issue. I will go back to Mr. Gates for a minute. Mr. Gates talks about the tremendous impact that new communication information technologies have had on the world. He calls it the 1980s, the decade of quality. As these new tools became more ubiquitous and more people used them and feedback loops were developed, people could begin to manage in real time the quality process that affected their business, or manufacturing, or service organization or whatever.

He calls the nineties the decade of re-engineering. As these tools got more robust and as the accumulation of data got stronger and the ability to strike knowledge from that data got stronger, suddenly we saw in very large organizations very similar changes. It was like a stepping down into flatter, faster organizations moving certain kinds of decisions out to the periphery of contact with customers and clients and drawing some kind of information into the centre to involve senior management more directly in decision making. These were radical but important changes. These were changes that increased service quality, product quality and lowered costs.

If I can take members back a step to that little paradigm I would ask them what the quality movement meant for government. It happened in the external community. Where are the quality circles, the service feedback and the client operation improvement systems in government? They do not exist.

What has re-engineering meant in government? God knows there have been enough consultants running around the country selling packages on re-engineering usually trying to bolt crude private sector models, which continuously fail, onto public institutions. Government is a fundamentally more complex organization than the largest business.

What is the restructuring, the re-engineering, the change that has taken place in government? As the world has speeded up and as this tremendous change has taken place in the external environment that affects the lives of everybody we serve, how has this institution changed? The answer is, it has not.

Re-engineering in government since the late eighties and up until now has meant privatization. It has meant separating those things that government delivers from government.

I was an advocate of it when I first came here. I chaired the transport committee when the ports were privatized. I bought all the arguments. I thought we could put them out there so they could be fast and responsive. They could deal with the community, respond to local conditions and all those wonderful service things. What were we really saying? We were saying that government was too slow, too stupid, too inept to be useful in the lives of Canadians.

That is the challenge to us. I am talking about every single person in the House. I am talking about this institution. I am talking about every single Canadian because this place affects every single Canadian. The challenge that confronts us is how we make the instruments of democracy more useful for everybody. That is the debate we are starting. I suspect it is a debate that is going to go on for a long time because it is a huge challenge in governments all around the world.

The problem I have is the attempt here to personalize this. This is the Prime Minister's issue. This is the House leader's issue. That is nonsense. This is an issue that every democratic government on this globe is struggling with and failing in right now.

There is a huge challenge, a much bigger challenge than anyone really fully comprehends yet. I am excited about it. Let us debate those changes.

Let us debate the ways in which we get adequate examination, accountability and control over the important instruments that affect the lives of Canadians. We should stop debating the importance of this entire House standing and sitting for 400 hours to change a comma. That is silly. We all know it is silly, so let us stop it and get on with what I believe will be the most important piece of work the House does in this decade.

[Standing Orders, February 27th, 2001]

Madam Speaker, I am particularly interested in this topic and I wonder if you would inquire of the House whether there is unanimous consent to give me unlimited time.

[Speech From The Throne, February 6th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for his interest and his assistance to us in meetings with the Quebec government on this very important issue.

Value will come from the ability to accumulate data. What HRD did is something that we would like to see happen again. We want to put proper safeguards and controls in place so that people understand what is happening and have the right to interact. However the member is absolutely right to identify it as an important issue. It is critical that all members of the House get involved in this debate in the next couple of years. If they want to learn about it, they can attend a conference at the end of March.

[Speech From The Throne, February 6th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I will resist the urge to play with this response. I have never been embarrassed by the Prime Minister, and I am a westerner. The things that I talked about in my speech, which I think are so important to the future of this country, are there because of the Prime Minister's willingness to listen and work on these issues.

I did single out one party. It is possible for us to constantly spend our time in this Chamber looking at that little phrase that each one of us will misspeak at some time or another and pounce on it saying that this is what we mean. The reason I singled out the leader of the Conservative Party was that was the first set of deliberate insults and deliberate fabrications that were put on public record in the first set of ads. I think that is different from debate where we get into pulling out those little twists.

I recently wrote a paper on communication. It is very difficult for us, as politicians, to communicate because we are so used to listening to a person on the other side just long enough to find that phrase that we can flip back at them in order to discredit what they are saying. We do not listen to what they are talking about and that soon becomes the way we function. We never really hear what we are saying.

I dismiss that part of the debate. However, I do think there were some deliberate acts that did not serve all of us very well. There has been a concern about the drop in voter turnout, but I think that has less to do with disinterest on the part of Canadians and more to do with disgust in this last process.

[Speech From The Throne, February 6th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, before I begin my remarks, I would like to note that I am splitting my time with the member from Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik.

I also wish to mark the passing of a colleague of ours, a former member of the House, Mr. David Iftody, who died suddenly last night. He will be missed.

As this is the first time I have had an opportunity to speak in the House since the election, I will begin by thanking my constituents who have demonstrated their faith in me for the third time. I am honoured by their support and I pledge, as I have always done, my efforts to serve them to the best of my ability.

I also want to thank my wife and family. I am blessed with three wonderful children and a wife who takes on a lot of extra responsibilities so that I may be here. She gives up a lot and I really appreciate her efforts.

I also want to thank my many friends and volunteers who worked so hard for my re-election and worked with me throughout the intervening years to serve the people of Winnipeg South.

Finally, I want to thank my staff who I believe are among the best in Canada and who work very hard for very poor pay, very limited remuneration and do an excellent job.

I want to welcome the new members. I also want to welcome you, Mr. Speaker, as Deputy Speaker and Chairman of Committees of the Whole. We have a new Clerk but I think we have the same table officers returning.

I also want to thank all of the people around the Hill who work unseen by us to make our lives so much easier, whether it is the drivers, the security guards who are always so friendly and helpful, the people who clean our offices, the Hansard staff and an enormous number of people who toil day in and day out so that we may do the work that we are here to do. They do not often get the recognition they deserve.

Since I have very limited time, I want to simply highlight a few things. I was very disappointed in the way this campaign evolved in the last election.

I hold the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party responsible for starting it. We all launched into what was a very bitter and personal campaign. As a result, I think the Canadian people lost an opportunity through that process to hear us debate some of the things we debate all the time around here. They lost an opportunity to hear some discussion of ideas to improve the country. We lost a lot in that.

There were a few things our party put forward that were exceptional. As a person who represents a suburban riding in the south end of Winnipeg and a university, there were a couple of things that went entirely unnoticed in the Speech from the Throne that are enormously exciting and important for our country.

We made a commitment, and it was repeated by the Prime Minister, to make Canada among the top five countries in the world in investments in R and D by the year 2010. That is a staggeringly important announcement, not just for the research community but for our entire quality of life. The government made that commitment and I am enormously proud of it.

We also made a commitment to bring broadband access to all homes by 2004. I am sure a lot of people do not know what that means. It is an enormously important commitment, one that says we will all have high speed broadband, wideband access to our homes.

Everyone talks about getting television on their computers. That is a very small part of what it means. It means having the power to drive the kind of interfaces needed in order to have user friendly access so we can take advantage of the services which can be made available with the new information and technologies. It means we can literally talk to our television sets and order whatever we want by voice. It means my mother and grandmother can interact with the technology. It is shatteringly important and I am surprised we made it. It will take a lot of effort to get there.

I represent the University of Manitoba, one of the best universities in the world and certainly an important resource in my community. There are commitments around research and development, broadband access and registered learning accounts.

We talked about this as being the knowledge economy and the need for lifelong learning. The government has now put its resources behind that. We are giving people an opportunity to retrain, build their skills and invest in their own futures. It is an incredibly important initiative and one that I am sorry was not debated more wholesomely during the election.

I will focus on one set of issues because I have such limited time. Each time I run for election I come back here and set my own agenda in addition to the ones that I have committed to with my constituents during the campaign. We have some local infrastructure, an underpass and urban transit that we are going to work on. I see that reflected in the Speech from the Throne.

My big passion is the whole business of what is euphemistically called e-government, the adaptation by government of the information and communications technologies that have become so pervasive in the private sector. Either Gates or Michael Dell said that the Internet changes everything. We are just beginning to realize how true that is and what a profound change is going on.

If we look back at what has happened in the private sector with large corporations and all the talk about downsizing, rightsizing, flattening, speeding up and the customer is king, all the stuff that has taken place in the last decade and a half, there have been enormous and profound changes in the way businesses do business. The world has speeded up. Bill Gates calls this decade the decade of velocity. The skill necessary now is how to deal in a world that is moving faster and faster. Government will have to get there and learn how to live in that world.

Whether we want to or not, we are going to evolve from a structure of government that is hierarchical and based on traditional methods of accountability and department structure into a more network form of government. We are interacting on a very immediate basis with the levels of government and citizens in ways that are just unprecedented. We have to get our heads around that and start thinking about what this means for our role.

If we change the structure and operations of government we cannot help but affect the accountability mechanisms, the governance. We cannot change the way in which information flows in a government and not affect the way that decisions are made.

I do not have a particular passion for parliamentary reform. It is not the thing that drives me. However I see some portions of parliamentary reform as being critically important to advance the rate at which we adapt new technologies and the way in which our government will change.

It is important that Canada lead that change. We go back and forth in that leadership position around the world, but other governments in the industrialized world such as Japan and Australia are making some important strides right now.

I want to sound a note of caution. There is a commitment in the Speech from the Throne to bring forward a review and a redrafting of the existing privacy legislation. This will be a critically important debate, one to which we need to pay a lot of attention and one that I am concerned about.

Privacy is a right. It is not just a right in the charter but it is a right that the supreme court has read into the charter. It is a right that we all exercise. I am a little tired of people talking about customers, that we will move to a customer style of government. This is nonsense.

It has been tried around the world. It has failed all over the place because it fails to recognize the fact that I may be a customer of government in a few transactions but I am a citizen of Canada all the time and as a citizen I have rights. The government is accountable to me as a citizen. One of the ways I exercise that right is in the way it respects me and the way it treats the information that it has about me.

At the same time there are huge values to be gained as a citizen by allowing the government to accumulate information to better serve me and to better understand how government functions and how society functions.

At the heart of that is privacy legislation. Currently it is being worked on by a committee of bureaucrats. I am sure they are bright and beautiful people. However this is a bill that must be crafted on the floor of the Chamber by all of us. This is a bill that concerns the rights of all of us. It is something that we must be very involved in. We cannot let it go through the House simply because it has received the stamp of approval of the executive.

In conclusion, I wish all members well. I think it will be an extremely interesting few years in which we can make some major improvements.

[Privilege, September 27th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your giving me the opportunity to speak to this matter. I am speaking to a matter of privilege raised by the hon. member for Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Aldershot.

I realize it is somewhat unusual to be speaking this long after the original point was raised, but I am deeply interested in the matter. In a way it relates to some of the discussions that just took place on the previous matter of privilege.

I will not go through the history of it as that has already been put on record and the government has had a chance to speak to it, but I want to raise what I believe is one of those generic, organic understandings we have of what our democracy is all about.

Eugene Forsey, when he was called upon to describe it for the new online system here, talked about a responsible government with a cabinet responsible to the House of Commons and a House of Commons responsible to the people. That is how we describe it too. That is what we teach children in school. That is how we understand it to be, that this is the place where citizen's rights are acted out.

I will contrast that with a comment contained within a report commissioned by the Privy Council Office that describes the Canadian House of Parliament as weak in most of its roles because of special Canadian factors that make the Canadian parliament especially weak, even in comparison with other parliaments based on the British Westminster parliamentary cabinet model.

I reference it in that way because for me one of the things that allows us to play our role as representatives of citizens and that allows citizens to hold their government responsible to them is their ability to access accurate information about the operations of government. It seems to be a very fundamental issue.

We rely upon an impartial public service to serve the members of the House equitably and to provide information to them that is, dare I say, policy neutral, not designed to spin or shape the attitudes of members but to give them the facts upon which we can come to a decision.

The member has brought forward information relating to a private member's bill. It is information that related to this side of the House because it was information that was supplied to members on this side of the House about why they should not vote in favour of his particular bill.

There are two specific points. In that information and in a document supplied to cabinet someone within the public service wrote that the privy commissioner believes Bill C-206 is a serious threat to the privacy of Canadians. The member, being somewhat surprised at this, wrote to the privacy commissioner and asked: “Is serious threat to privacy an evaluation that can be directly attributed to you?”. The privacy commissioner wrote back and said “No, neither my staff nor I have ever used that term”.

We have information supplied to cabinet and information supplied to members of the House because the same allegation is made in the documentation provided to members of House. It would seem to be at odds with the very person it is attributed to.

This is a chamber for debate and we are debating all the time. The information used in debates may be called into question by any one of us at any point in time, but there is a different bar to which I believe the public service needs to be held. It is incumbent upon them to supply us with information that is not just kind of accurate but that fairly represents the situation with which they are confronted or to which they are asked to respond.

The second point is that they also reference in this information a comment by the privacy commissioner in his annual report because he did have concerns about the bill. While they highlight that, what is interesting is that they forget to highlight that he had concerns about several government bills that were passed by the House and received royal assent.

What we have seen over the years is an erosion of the rights of members of the House. They are not our rights. They are the rights of Canadian citizens that we exercise on their behalf.

I have just a final point. In this documentation and in other things that have been written about access to information and privacy legislation there is the indication that the government has a process for this right now that it is being conducted by the public service in house. I think that is wrong. The review and the design of that legislation should be such that it is done by an all cabinet committee and in public. It is wrong to do that in the privacy of back offices because it relates to reference of the rules that we play by here.

I urge you to look at this issue very carefully, Mr. Speaker, as I am sure you will. I urge you to take it one step beyond the narrow focus you would put on the interpretation of the points raised by the member and to look at the position that every member of the House is in when we try to carry out the functions we are here to carry out, which is to hold the government to account.

[World Alzheimer's Day, September 22nd, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday was World Alzheimer's Day. In Canada, there are more than 230,000 people suffering from this disease and over 100,000 new cases are expected this year.

The federal government and, I am sure, all members of the House, wish to congratulate the Alzheimer Society of Canada on all the support it provides to those with this terrible disease.

I would like to thank all those who have donated their time and energy in the fight against this disease.

[Competition Act, May 16th, 2000]

Madam Speaker, there has been a lot said on this bill, on the need for it and what it will do for consumers. I will spend the last bit of time reflecting on the responsibilities all of us have in the House to protect and work on behalf of the people we represent.

The member has acted in the finest traditions of the House to bring forward a grievance that a great many Canadians have. He has not just raised the question, he has gone beyond that and devised a solution to the problem, a solution that all members of the House can support. It is a great credit to the member and it is a great credit to the members of this institution that we were able to take a stand together on behalf of the consumers.

[Competition Act, May 16th, 2000]

Madam Speaker, it gives me great pleasure to rise today to speak to this bill.

I am here partly at the request of the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Industry, as well as the Minister of Industry, who want to add their support to the very hard work that has been done by the member for Sarnia—Lambton.

This is the House of Commons. This is the place in Canada where we who represent people from all parts of this country give voice to their concerns, and through that I think establish a body of rights for them. They do not have lots of lobbyists running around the Hill trying to influence various bits of legislation. They do not have people who are paid to come in and watch what is going on here all the time and try to influence things on their behalf. They have us, the members. It is our job.

What this hon. member has done is picked up on an issue that offended a very large number of Canadians. He has worked hard to get it past all of the resistance, to get it past all of those people who did not want to see their ability to impose things upon citizens affected in any way. He has done that.

I shall not go through all of the problems the hon. member has had along the way to this point, but he has never given up. He fought the bill through the House and he earned the respect and the support of members of the House. He fought the bill in the other place and he has brought it back to the House with the support of the departments.

I want to share with the House some of the things that other people are saying about the member. This is a quote from an article which appeared on December 17 in the National Post :

Bank mergers were squelched last summer because of concerns over how the super-banks would treat customers. So why would Ottawa want to make it easier for the banks to sell Canadians services they don't want? Mr. Gallaway's bill should pass as is.

The competition commissioner stated:

I don't see how negative optioning could ever be pro-competitive. The basic, underlying concept of a competitive market is that consumers have a choice and exercise that choice, and they exercise it knowingly. If you have a negative option, you don't even know this has happened. You never get a choice.

That is taken from testimony before the Standing Committee on Industry in November and it comes from Konrad von Finckenstein, the Commissioner of the Competition Bureau of Canada. The commissioner is recognizing on behalf of Canadians the problem that exists, the problem that the member is trying to solve.

Let us continue with the testimony before the committee:

The Bureau feels that negative option marketing cannot be seen as a competitive technique that would be good for consumers. The Bureau believes that consumers should have the opportunity to make an informed choice when buying new services. We have never had and we do not yet have any objection to Mr. Gallaway's bill, which would apply to banks, the cable industry and broadcasting.

That statement was made by Johanne D'Auray, the Deputy Commissioner of the Competition Bureau of Canada, in testimony before the Standing Committee on Industry on February 17 of this year.

What does the consumers' association have to say? In testimony in December 1999 the Consumers' Association of Canada said that it believed support for Bill C-276 is a vote to restore to Canadian consumers the right to choose. That came from Mrs. Gail Lacombe, the president and chief executive officer of the Consumers' Association of Canada.

It is that right, the right to choose the services that we want, the right to choose the things that we will purchase, that is embodied in the bill. It is sad in a way that we even have to have this sort of legislation. It is sad that we would ever question a person's right to make an informed choice about the kind of purchases they will make and their right to know what kind of charges will be imposed upon them before they agree to it. It is astounding in a way.

It is interesting, but I do not think that some of the negative option marketing has been a stunning success. Representatives of Rogers Cable indicated that before the committee. In their testimony they indicated that they would never again do it because they have had such a negative reaction from consumers.

It is astounding to me that in the past we have never had protection to prevent companies, particularly companies that had monthly billing practices, from altering the amount of money we were being charged without our ever knowing what it was for unless we took the time to look at it. They did not ask us as to whether we wanted to purchase those new services or not.

This bill represents the kind of work all of us like to see done in the House. It started with a member having a concern brought to his attention by people who lived in his riding. He came back and met with other members from all sides of the House. This bill has had support from all sides because they shared the concern. He worked diligently to produce a piece of legislation that would provide the protection that consumers were requesting.

Madam Speaker, perhaps you could give me a bit of advice. I understand there is a desire for the mover of the bill to have the right of reply.