Ed Komarnicki

[Civil Marriage Act, June 27th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I am not even sure the last question deserves an answer. However, it annoys me that bills as important as Bill C-48 and Bill C-38 would come to the House without notice and be voted on while I was having dinner. I came back to the House. I have been in the House more often than that member.

The government ought to be responsible and take its duty seriously. Bill C-48 has no plan, it has nothing. How many housing units were build by the government in 11 years? There were very little for the money spent. The Liberals spent $1 billion with not a house being built.

There are more people living in poverty today than 11 years ago. There are more people homeless on the street while the government has been in office. That is something to be noted.

[Civil Marriage Act, June 27th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, it is quite interesting that this member would be concerned about how much it costs to operate this House. This bill needs to be opposed and the costs should be put in the background.

Where was this member when this House was being filibustered by his own party for days on end, when they took away supply days because they were not prepared to face a confidence motion? The Liberals went for a week or more trying to skirt that issue, filibustering on their own committee reports.

What was that costing per hour, and what was the purpose of that, except to cling to power at all costs? What about spending $4.6 billion? We will wait to see what the cost will be for the little side deal that was made to invoke closure over the last little while. There may be some consideration coming out sooner. They blow billions of dollars and they are afraid to keep this House open a little longer so they can hear responsible arguments on Bill C-38.

As far as the committee is concerned, what happened to the Prime Minister's promise to keep the committee going? We would not have to be sitting here if the Prime Minister had kept his promise to have broad consultations in committee, allow the committee to have more hearings, and allow positive injections. The reason we are still sitting is because of the member opposite who voted for this House to be extended without notice.

What happened when the Liberals took away our supply day motions, and when they lost the confidence of this House indirectly? They had a constitutional obligation to bring the issue of confidence before this House, but they used a week because it was not convenient for the Prime Minister. He flew around the country and gave out goodies, spent money, and used the machinery of power and government jets when he had no authority and no constitutional basis to do that. He did that simply to cling to power illegitimately and to legitimize government, and that was wrong.

As far as marriage is concerned, if the hon. member would listen very closely, it is the potential to procreate, and one lady and one man have the potential to procreate naturally, biologically, and not otherwise. That is the phrase “potential to procreate”. I would say that there is more to this issue than a few dollars and the machinations of clinging to power at all costs.

We should not be here at all. This bill should be in committee. This bill should not be here. We are in a democracy and ought to be experiencing it, but senior parliamentarians fail to see that and they ought to know better, but they do not.

[Civil Marriage Act, June 27th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I will be taking a different tack tonight. I will look at the process that has led us to be facing Bill C-38 at report stage and closure.

I must say, in respect of the bill itself, that marriage essentially is the union of two people, a man and a woman, who consummate the relationship with sexual relations with the potential to procreate. Marriage has well been said to be something more than a contract, either religious or civil, to be an institution, and it should remain that way. For the Liberal Party, it is more about politics, power and arrogance than it is about the essence of Bill C-38.

The government was prepared to make deals to keep its own members on side by promising broad committee hearings and not introducing the bill past report stage and third reading until fall. Then, when the Liberals were able to make a bigger deal, they decided to proceed to ram the bill through both stages. There will be a price for such an action and the Prime Minister and his enforcers shall pay the ultimate price at the ballot box.

Surely, the public at large will not let them get away with this. For those in the Liberal Party who oppose Bill C-38, the marriage bill, but voted with the government in a sneak manoeuvre to pass Bill C-48, the NDP budget bill, without notice, can certainly talk the talk, but they fall far short of walking the walk.

Let me speak briefly about procedures being used in this House that preclude the giving of notice. I could hardly believe that in a democracy, in a free and democratic country like Canada, the governing party would resort to procedures that would achieve their end by means of subterfuge and subtleness.

Surely, on an important issue like the NDP budget and Bill C-38, the government should at the very least provide notice of its intention and face the issue fair and square, so that the representatives of the people of Canada can make their views known.

Instead, what did the Liberals did? According to a Canadian Press report of June 25, by 8:30 p.m. Thursday last week, the Liberals were hiding out in the government lobby with one MP stating that the Liberals were going to bushwhack the Conservatives. I am sorry for the confused logic. It is really an affront and it is a bushwhacking of democracy.

I left the House at around 9:00 p.m. to have supper with my wife. Before I was finished supper, and without notice, Bill C-48 was up for a vote. Something as important as a budget vote was being snuck through the House. In all of my life, I have never heard or seen anything like it. The Liberals could not hijack democracy without the complicity of the NDP and the Bloc.

It is understandable that the NDP would engage in a procedure such as this as the leader himself asked if putting aside corruption, would the Minister of Finance change the budget? The NDP were prepared to make a deal regardless of the tactics or the manners of the government.

However, the Bloc, who opposed the NDP budget, Bill C-48, had nothing to gain or lose by the vote being taken on Thursday or on Monday, when we had a full contingent of our members in the House. To agree to Bill C-48 being placed before the House without notice was either intentional mischief or done for consideration of some kind. I can see no other rational conclusion. In either case, such actions are odious and any trust on my part from here on in will have to be earned.

All these steps were taken to force Bill C-38 to remain on its own, undressed, in full view of closure motions, limits on debate, and the concurrence of three parties to shove it through. Then on a foundation that it accepts important and significant matters, the government disposes it without notice given to the representatives of the people of Canada. That is wrong.

Any debate in this circumstance, in this context, is a farce and simply a matter of the government trying to appear magnanimous when it knows full well, it is about to drop the hammer to close matters off, as we just witnessed in this House tonight. I find this offensive. The fix, as they say, is in.

Indeed, this type of conduct may be what is necessary to awaken a sleeping giant. Those who agree with Bill C-38 and whose views will be made known in the ballot box in the next election will find out who is the ultimate judge in this particular case.

The Saskatoon Star Phoenix , on June 25, stated with reference to the government's conduct that “Thursday was the third time such a stunt was used in Canada's history”, and a stunt it was. I doubt it was ever used in such an important and significant a situation as a budget bill and a bill that redefines the definition of marriage. Obviously, it has never been done in this context. This is an all-time first and an all-time low in terms of its use in the history of this great country we call Canada.

Let us have a look at what brought us here today. Last week on Thursday morning, under Standing Order 57, a minister of the Crown served notice that debate with respect to extending the sitting of this House should not be further adjourned, with the provision that no member shall be allowed to rise to speak after 8:00 p.m., when a vote was held with respect to this motion. To put it simply, it was a closure notice with a time limit on speeches on an important issue such as we face here today. That was wrong and the government will pay the price for that.

Let us have a look at the motion itself, and I spoke to it the other day. The motion was prefaced by saying “notwithstanding any Standing Order or usual practice”. In other words, it was overriding anything that could stand in the way of the motion by way of Standing Order or usual practices. We put those aside. What does the motion go on to say? Essentially, that the sitting would continue until a minister of the Crown proposed, without notice, a motion to adjourn.

In other words, a minister could unilaterally have this House adjourn at any time without notice. It has come to this. What if anything or is there anything the government might not do to achieve its end? This seemed to me to be a heavy-handed approach and something one would not expect in this country.

This stunt, as referred to in the Star Phoenix , took place when the NDP, the Liberals, and the Bloc agreed that the Minister could propose to pass Bill C-48 without notice, without debate or amendment.

The government dispensed with the Standing Orders and usual practices to its advantage in circumstances that the Standing Orders were never intended to be used. It is in these circumstances, with this play of characters in office, that Bill C-38 finds itself.

What hope is there for those who oppose its passage? The hope is in the ballot box where they will have an opportunity to remove these characters from office.

The government tried to tie Bill C-48 to this bill in case it needed to apply to the Speaker for extension of the sittings, but then decoupled it when they and the sneaky, no-notice NDP budget Bill C-48 was voted in, in the middle of the night last Thursday.

Father Raymond J. de Souza said, “When holding unto office becomes the beginning and end of all activity, there are no more politics, just the machinations of power”. He went on to say that the corruption of our politics is now complete.

He refers to an article in the Toronto Sun that states, “--the time has come to cool the fury in Parliament, to ease the pressure on the Prime Minister to resort to seedy vote buying”. He says that Canada's largest circulation newspaper and ardent supporter of the Liberal Party concludes that the Prime Minister is engaged in seedy behaviour but excuses it on the grounds that otherwise he would be defeated by the opposition. It is all about power and if a little seedy vote buying is necessary, so be it.

He says what is cynicism in politics? It is the belief that politics is not about the common good, nor what one sincerely believes is right for the country, but only what is personally advantageous to the office holder. It is a Prime Minister's Chief of Staff discussing how one could go about trading offices for votes without officially trading offices for votes.

The mockery of the process of Bill C-38 in committee has caused the Liberal member for London—Fanshawe, to his credit, to leave the party and sit as an independent. Why? Because he knew what the Prime Minister promised, he would not deliver.

He observed what we did, the tricky procedural moves in committee such as removing Liberal MPs in exchange for others who would vote in correct ways, having members leave a meeting to cause it to adjourn for lack of quorum, calling witnesses in batches of four on very short notice, limiting witnesses to be called, and heavily stacking the Liberal committee members and the witnesses in favour of same sex marriage. Is this evidence of the Prime Minister's solemn word for full, fair and meaningful public hearings? Of course not.

The committee was asked to work to an unnecessary and premature deadline to report to the House. The member went on to state that witnesses were being given inadequate notice to appear at committee hearing and some have been rudely treated when they have attended. He said that the process as it was unfolding was unfair and perfunctory at best, and that it was not what he agreed to as a proper democratic consultation on such a major piece of legislation as the proposed definition of marriage. He added that in his view, the government had no democratic mandate from the people of Canada to redefine marriage.

I wish to conclude with Chantal Hébert's comments in the Toronto Star which could well be prophetic. She said:

Given the lengths to which [the Prime Minister] and his team have gone just to prolong the life of their minority government for a few more months, one has to wonder how many more ethical niceties they would dispense with--

Having heard [the Prime Minister's] chief-of-staff Tim Murphy nod and wink and dress up the Liberal window with future government considerations, can anyone doubt that this is an administration that is just as likely to live and die by the rule that the end justifies the means?

The democratic deficit [the Prime Minister] so likes to wax lyrical about has been compounded into an ethical one. And past sins of omission and/or commission have been overshadowed by current, in-your-face transgressions...It is a malaise that permeates the upper reaches of the government.

So much for the loyalty of the country. Anything the Prime Minister said suggesting that he encouraged a full debate on Bill C-38 in these sittings was, simply put, hogwash. The price the Prime Minister will pay will be paid at the ballot box. He cannot get away with such treachery as we witnessed in the House for this long. The voters will see to it. Marriage should be defined as the union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others with no exceptions, no amendments, period.

[Extension of Sitting Period, June 23rd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the member opposite spent $250 million per vote to stay in power, to cling to power. It is nothing more or less than that.

As far as the corporate portion of it, I will refer to his own finance minister when Bill C-43 was before the House. This is not what we are debating today. We are debating a motion that is closing debate upon whether we should extend this House or not, which is a slap in the face for democracy. There is nothing that urgent or is of the public interest to the degree where we should try to ram through the two bills, Bill C-48 and Bill C-38, when there is absolutely no reason for it.

Bill C-48 will not be implemented until August 2006. Where is the urgency in that? The only urgency is that the Liberals are trying to tie that bill into somehow justifying a public interest, when they really want to ram through Bill C-38, the same sex marriage bill, which nobody in Canada wants in particular. They simply want to live up to their deal with the NDP, a deal cooked up in the middle of the night to stay in power.

Let me read the response that was made by the finance minister. He said, “You can't do anything to this budget”, when the NDP leader went fishing. The NDP leader then asked if he would change his mind. The finance minister replied that he would make technical changes but nothing substantive.

The NDP went fishing a little further and asked the finance minister if he would consider doing something further. They talked about the corporate tax break that would create jobs and allow for investment.

Here is what the finance minister said:

Mr. Speaker, that is really like asking whether I would be prepared to buy a pig in a poke. Quite frankly, no minister of finance, acting responsibly, would answer that type of question.

If the hon. gentleman has a serious proposition, please bring it forward and I will give it the consideration it deserves. I would point out to him, however, that the changes in corporate taxation are intended to ensure that jobs, jobs, jobs stay in Canada.

What do they have against jobs? No one has anything against jobs, jobs, jobs.

[Extension of Sitting Period, June 23rd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I was speaking about farmers and what you have done for farmers or failed to do for farmers. You were prepared to pay--

[Extension of Sitting Period, June 23rd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I do not know where that member has been. If he had been listening, a number of suggestions have come from this party that make good sense.

First, a good fiscal and prudent government has a plan, knows where it is going and is not throwing money around recklessly. An hon. member from this party suggested yesterday that if they throw more money at it, they have a bigger heart than somebody else but they do not care where it goes.

Let me ask one question. The farmers in Saskatchewan are going through one of the greatest crises. Despite what the government has failed to do, they have done reasonably well. They are staying alive by working two jobs. The wife works, the husband works and the children work. That is the only way they can survive because the government has neglected them.

Our party has said we would put together a program that would look after our farmers. Where were farmers in Bill C-43? There was hardly a passing mention. When they were in a crisis with the BSE and the border was closed, they were looking for some direction from the government. What did the government do? It hoped against hope that the border would open, somehow magically on its own, without any steps on its part.

The government cooked up this deal with the NDP, for one purpose and one purpose only, and that was to stay in power. There is no foresight or vision in Bill C-48. The Liberals asked the NDP members what it would take to buy their votes. The cost per vote was $250 million. Is that called vision? Is that called policy? No. Where was the agricultural crisis when that deal was being made? Where does the NDP stand with respect to the farmers of Saskatchewan, Alberta and Manitoba? Are their concerns not important?

The government is not governed by philosophy or principle. It is governed by what it takes to stay in power, to cling to power, and that is the end. Whatever the means might be, whatever the money may be, it will use it. Those who do it in the cover of darkness will be charged criminally. Here, what the government is doing is in the openness of day, in the presence of the House, using great sums of money to stay in power.

The farmers of Saskatchewan could have done better. There were 46 auction sales in March of this year in my constituency. Farmers are going out of business. A fifth generation farmer who has five daughters has sold his farm. He has not passed it on to his children because of the losses he suffered in his cattle business over the last two years, $100,000 a year.

The government does not have the fortitude to stand up for them, to say that it will be with the farmers because this crisis is not of their own doing. This crisis is of a doing that is bigger than Saskatchewan and bigger than Manitoba. Where was the government? It was cooking up a deal with the NDP to preserve its own hide while the farmers of Saskatchewan were working 12 hours a day. Everyone in the family had to work in order to survive.

We would do things differently. We would ensure they were protected. They would be backstopped. In fact, when the BSE crisis was going on, where was the government? It should have been making some motions before the United States department of agriculture, saying scientifically that there was no reason for the border to be closed. Why was the government not presenting that evidence to the USDA? Why did the minister not insist that the USDA put those reasons in its decision? Because of the lack of those reasons and due diligence of the government, the judge in Montana was able to make the decision he did. There was nothing to prevent an injunction from being granted.

That group was playing politics when it should have been doing due diligence and doing its homework to ensure the border was open. If it failed to do that, it should have put some money into the secondary industry, in slaughterhouses and in marketing and processing. We would do that and we would see that it was done. Two years have passed. I would ask the member to come to my constituency to see whether anything is going forward, whether any money has been placed in it. There is nothing. That would change under our party.

We talk about housing and homelessness. A report states that there are more homeless today on the streets than there were when that government took office. It spent $1 billion and it did not build one affordable housing unit with that $1 billion. According to the minister, it went to protective care, nothing on which one could put their finger. How many more houses are there since it started?

We would take some dollars and put them into something we could see, something that is not wasteful. What money it has put in is $60,000 to $80,000 a unit, when it should be far less.

When the minister was asked for instance about the housing budget, he was prepared to spend the $2.6 billion without regard to the fact that this was a provincial responsibility. Whether the provinces went ahead or not, he was going to do it anyway. He had not spent yet the $700 million that was in the coffers from previous budgets. We think at least he would have that money properly spent before he would be ready to spend this. Anybody can spend money.

If we give someone $2.5 billion and tell them to spend it, they will. Will they achieve a proper balance? Will they achieve what is necessary with those funds? That is another question.

[Extension of Sitting Period, June 23rd, 2005]

Do I not have 20 minutes, Mr. Speaker? One minute? Okay. I want to look at temporary resident permits. There were 72 of 74 granted to Liberal MPs in the last weeks of the campaign. What is that?

Chantal Hébert said:

Having listened to [the Minister of Health's] overtures to [the member for Newton--North Delta], would anyone vouch that the health minister is made of more principled material than Alfonso Gagliano? Or that he and his colleagues are operating under a stricter moral code than members of past cabinets? Having heard [the Prime Minister's]chief-of-staff Tim Murphy nod and wink and dress up the Liberal window with future government considerations, can anyone doubt that this is an administration that is just as likely to live and die by the rule that the end justifies the means?

That is the problem with the government. That is the problem with where we are going. There should not be closure on debate when something so fundamental as whether or not the moral fibre of this nation should be changed by a bill that will probably be subject to, and suffer, closure as well. We are living in a democratic country. Our system intends members to speak and debate, and make their point of view known and to represent their constituents and not to be short changed on that.

How is it that the government was prepared to filibuster its own legislation, put material that was irrelevant before the House to prevent a confidence motion, and waste days and days on end in May and now says we cannot debate a motion past 8 o'clock today? How can that be in this country? How can that be that we are prevented from debating in this House? I fail to understand that.

[Extension of Sitting Period, June 23rd, 2005]

We need a principled government that raises the principle above itself. Subjecting oneself to principle shows good leadership. It shows good leadership because one is prepared, at personal sacrifice, to see the good of the country, and that is what is lacking here. It is the good of the party and clinging to power that is more important over there.

Chantal Hébert said there was one thing that Gomery could not do in his report and that was to make up for the poor quality of the moral fibre of a government. When the moral fibre of the government is gone, our nation is gone too. Only one thing will cure that and that is the replacement of the government. We will see to it and so will the people of Canada in due course.

She went on to say:

Given the lengths to which [the Prime Minister] and his team have gone just to prolong the life of their minority government for a few more months, one has to wonder how many more ethical niceties they would dispense with if, like Jean Chrétien, they, too, were faced with the implosion of the Canadian federation.

What if there was a real crisis? What if there was a real test? What if there was a real cost? What would they do? Would they stand in the face of that?

[Extension of Sitting Period, June 23rd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, as we look at the Standing Orders presently, there is no question that the calendar of this House is a fairly significant event that is agreed to, according to the Standing Orders, by the House leaders.

According to the Standing Orders, during the adjourned period when members of Parliament are in their constituencies, the House does not get called back unless there is need for royal assent on something that is of some urgency. If that is the case, the House can be called back for a short period.

The Standing Order 28(4) reads:

The House shall meet at the specified time for those purposes only; and immediately thereafter the Speaker shall adjourn the House to the time to which it had formerly been adjourned.

When we have a calendar it ought to be respected and, if it needs to be interrupted, then after the particular business is done the House needs to go back into adjournment. There needs to be a reason for the House to reconvene that is of substance.

This House could probably be guided by Standing Order 28(3) which talks about the Speaker utilizing his or her discretion to recall the House. It states:

Whenever the House stands adjourned, if the Speaker is satisfied, after consultation with the Government, that the public interest requires that the House should meet at an earlier time, the Speaker may give notice that being so satisfied the House shall meet....

Therefore there needs to be some evidence that would satisfy the Speaker. There has to be some public interest that requires an interruption of the House calendar.

I would think this House would at least have to satisfy those same principles before this House could put forward a motion that would require this House to extend itself for a further period. What is the public interest?

We have heard discussion about Bill C-48. It does not get implemented until next year. In fact, when we look at the budget implementation portion of it, it talks about the moneys actually being requisitioned or looked at in the next year. What is the urgency? This is not in the public interest. This could be debated in the fall sitting. In fact one could argue that perhaps there is something to Bill C-43 passing.

Bill C-43 has cleared this particular House and is now in the Senate chamber for approval. We have a senator saying that the Conservative senators were prepared to expedite the passage of Bill C-43, the budget legislation bill, which includes the Atlantic accord, but that the Liberal senators were refusing to pass it. He also said that they agreed to waive certain procedural steps in order to speed the passage of Bill C-43.

He goes on to say:

Two other government bills are receiving clause-by-clause consideration immediately following testimony by witnesses in Senate Committees today. The Liberal government will not permit the same procedure to be followed for Bill C-43, thus putting the bill at risk should Bill C-48, the NDP budget bill, be defeated in the House of Commons in the next few days.

We just received notice that those two bills are here for royal assent.

How is it that the Liberal government, on one hand, says that it wants the bill to go forward so the funds can start rolling on that particular bill, but on the other hand, refuses to have it passed expeditiously, as it could have? I think it is playing games with this House.

Let us look at the marriage bill, Bill C-38. Is there a public interest to have it passed or at least a public interest sufficient to call the House back to order when it ought to be adjourned? What is the public interest in that bill? In fact, a large percentage of the Canadian public do not want that bill to pass. Therefore it is definitely not in the public interest to call Parliament back for that purpose and that purpose alone.

What has the government done? It has attempted to lump and link Bill C-48 with Bill C-38, the marriage bill, in an attempt to justify, on some kind of national basis, that it is in the public interest to reconvene the House. However this is not in the public interest. It is all subterfuge. It is all playing with the rules to get their ends.

The House leader stated earlier in the press that he was prepared to not have Bill C-38 pass if Bill C-48 passed, but then he changed his mind, dug in his heels and decided to connect the two and call Parliament back for that purpose.

What is the rush? Bill C-38 is fundamentally changing the definition of marriage. It is fundamentally changing society as we know it. It deserves the time that is needed to discuss it and the public need an opportunity to participate. What we had at report stage was a sham.

During question period today the member for London—Fanshawe asked whether limiting the witnesses at the committee was really doing the job it ought to be doing. Is it appropriate to give witnesses 24 hours or 48 hours notice to appear? Is changing members of the committee appropriate? Is setting up a separate committee to ram through the committee hearings appropriate? Those hearings should have been the widest possible hearings across the country in every city with every member of the public having an opportunity to address the government before that bill completed report stage.

However the Liberals are ramming it through, despite the concerns of Canadians, despite public interest and despite our nation's interest, because they want to. They have confused national agenda and public interest with their own interest. They have confused the House of Commons calendar, which should not be interfered with easily, with their own ends and their own desires.

I think it is appalling. It is appalling to democracy and it is appalling to this institution for the government to go further and put a motion in the House that would limit debate on whether the hours and sittings of this House should be extended. How can it be in this free and democratic country that we cannot have every member in the House speak to whether the preconditions exist for the House to be extended?

We have to justify the pre-conditions of the House. That is why the Standing Order is there. That is why there are safeguards. We cannot, just on a notion, say that we will pass a motion that will change the Standing Orders and call the House back because we want to. There must be some basis for that and that basis is the public interest, because that is the basis, Mr. Speaker, that you might have to contend with.

The Liberals chose not to allow every member in the House to speak. Since when does a government decide that closure is the way to go on an issue so important as whether or not this House should sit in the summer to deal with the marriage bill, Bill C-38.

This is not a national crisis. This is not a national public interest that requires us to do it. The Prime Minister and the government confuse their own interests with the interests of the nation.

When the Prime Minister appeared on television I thought he was going to speak to something that was of national interest or of some national crisis, or even perhaps proroguing Parliament or calling an election.

What was the purpose of that particular television address? At great expense to this nation and every taxpayer of Canada, the purpose of that television appearance was to protect the hide of the Prime Minister and his government because they were on the ropes of losing in a possible election. He used the media and the resources of government to bolster public opinion and that is shameful.

Even the NDP leader acknowledged that. In question period he said, “First, let me add my voice to those who are concerned about the televised address this evening. This is a Liberal crisis; it is definitely not a national crisis.” The government is confusing its own interests with those of the nation.

In the next question, the hon. leader went fishing to see if he could change the government's budget. He said, “Putting aside the issue of corruption, let me see if I can be bought”. How could he do that? He was speaking about the sponsorship scandal and the things that have happened. People were paid for doing little or nothing with Canadian taxpayer dollars for which many people worked very hard to put in the coffers of the government. Some people work 12 hours a day, six days a week, only to lose half of their money to the government to spend on projects and programs.

However we find the government using and abusing those funds to pay ad agencies for little or no work and then having some of that money filter back to the party to fund an election. It was buying votes at $250 million per member to get another party's support to cling to power and giving people positions to cross the floor. Those are the kinds of things that should not happen in the House but it gets worse than that.

The House raised a motion of confidence, if not directly, certainly indirectly. At that point, constitutionally, the Prime Minister and his government had an obligation to Canadians and to the House to raise the issue of confidence themselves and they did not have confidence. They did not have confidence for a week.

The House should have been closed shut. There should not have been one order of business happening until that issue of confidence was settled. For that week we were without a government because it should not have been exercising the powers of government, the levers of government, the position of government to advance its own interests.

However all the while we had ministers and the Prime Minister travelling across Canada signing deals, committing money, spending money, campaigning at public expense and doing the kinds of things that would be shameful in a third world country that is run by a dictatorship.

We should have closed the House down and went to the wall to prevent that from happening because it was an injustice. It was illegitimately trying to legitimize government. It waited until it had the numbers and then it put forward an issue of confidence, and that is wrong.

What is wrong with the government is that it confuses its own interests with the interests of Canada.

We expect far better. We expect to have a government with vision. We expect to have a government that is prepared to take a loss, prepared to sacrifice on behalf of the country and one that puts the country's interest above its own, above its own greed and its own temptations, not a government that tries to shove a bill through the House when the public of Canada does not want it.

We need a government with backbone and a government with the courage to lose if it has to. An election should have been called and that confidence vote should have been respected. The public would have made a decision on Bill C-38.

Now the Liberals are trying to ram it through. It would not surprise me if they would put closure on Bill C-38 and Bill C-48 to get their will, despite the will of the people of Canada. That is wrong and the people of Canada will pass judgment. Believe me, it will not end in this session and it will not end in the summer.

I am prepared to stay here in July, all of August and into September to preserve the democratic right of the people of the country to express their views through members of Parliament on Bill C-38 because what is happening here is wrong.

One could ask whether I was looking at this objectively. I would like to make reference to an article in the Toronto Sun . Chantal Hébert said, “One thing we have learned from the tape affair is that precious little stands between the Prime Minister and a repeat of the sponsorship scandal. It is a culture that's wrong. It is what permeates government that's wrong. It is the thing that says the end justifies the means. It doesn't matter how we get there, it just matters that we get there. Our objective is to stay in power and we'll do whatever we have to, twist and bend every rule we have to stay in power”.

Supply day motions happen once a week every week and it was during that time that a confidence motion could have been put by any one of the parties, including our party. The Liberals took those supply days away and the ability to make a confidence motion until the end of May.

Why was that? To me, that was something I expected to happen every week. It was tradition. It was something the House had as a constitutional kind of arrangement that happened week after week. The Liberals took it away for the sole purpose of preventing confidence because they knew they would lose. They then put them at the end of May. Why? So any election would take place in the middle of summer.

They wanted to have the opportunity to continue to buy, pay, promise, and get to the position where they could win and then call it. There is something fundamentally wrong with that. There is something very wrong with that. That is why the country is going astray. It needs some direction. It needs some commitment. It needs someone with some backbone who says there is a right, there is a wrong, that this is right and we will do it, regardless of whether it costs us or not, and not what we see here.

[Extension of Sitting Period, June 23rd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, this is what I would call a travesty of democracy. This has been my first term and we are coming to something so significant as to whether or not there is a basis to extend this Parliament. To limit debate on whether that motion should come to the floor on a basis like that is very fundamental, and to try to stop debate on that issue is remarkable, to say the least.

Mr. Speaker, you could only have a further sitting of this House if it were a matter of public interest. Public interest would demand something fairly significant and it would not be Bill C-38, because certainly the nation does not want that bill to pass. The government, under the pretense of trying to make it of public interest, has linked it to Bill C-48, when it had every opportunity to deal with that in this session. There is nothing in Bill C-48 that requires it to be dealt with at this time or requires this sitting of the House to be extended. There is absolutely nothing.

It is the arrogance of this government to try to ram through this House what the public does not want, what is not in the national interest and which has no public interest to it. I ask why the House leader, under these circumstances, would try to limit debate in a democracy that is free, in a democracy where opinion--