Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley.
I am very pleased to speak to this motion. I have to say that a couple of years ago I did not think I would be speaking to a motion like this one. I acknowledge that the NDP has put forward a rather unusual motion today, but also let it be said that these are very unusual times in which we find ourselves. We are in a minority Parliament and a very strange and rather unique situation in terms of what is going on. I would like to focus my comments on why I think this motion is so important at this particular time.
The motion is very straightforward. It calls on the House to give an opinion that the Prime Minister should ask the Governor General to dissolve the 38th Parliament and set a general election date for February 16, 2006. That is pretty straightforward.
However, while listening to the debate today I heard the government House leader hide behind rules and claim that there were constitutional problems with this motion. He said that it was an attempt to change long-standing practices, that it was about playing political games, that it did not fit the constitutional requirements of Parliament, and so on. I then heard the member for Victoria a little while ago say that it was a delayed confidence motion.
In actual fact, this motion is none of those things. It is not a confidence motion. It is a motion which seeks to break an impasse in an environment that has been created in the House where the priorities of Canadians are not being met. In listening to the debate today and the member for Toronto—Danforth, the leader of the NDP, speak to this motion, I felt very proud that the NDP put forward this compromise suggestion.
Let us face it. What is the reality? The Conservatives have been very clear that their preference for a number of months, since the spring, has been to force an election. The NDP was not in that position. We were of a different perspective. Members of the NDP felt very strongly that we wanted to do everything we could to make this minority Parliament work. That is why we set about our work very diligently. We kept in focus the priorities and needs of Canadians and made that our purpose for being here.
We accomplished a hell of a lot of things in the House, such as Bill C-48, the NDP budget. We got the Liberals to do things in that budget that they otherwise would never have done. We got them to put money into housing, infrastructure and the retrofit of low income Canadians' homes. We got them to move on their commitments to foreign aid. It was a significant accomplishment. We went about our work with purpose and diligence because we knew why we were here.
We were also very clear that this Parliament had to function. It is clear that the Liberal Party itself created the crisis of corruption. Nobody else created it but the Liberals through the way they have conducted themselves, as Justice Gomery has pointed out, in a culture of entitlement for so many years. When that crisis happened, it became very clear that either there was going to be due diligence in making this Parliament work and we would move forward, or things were going to come to an end.
As is well known, the NDP made a second attempt to put forward some very significant proposals to stop the privatization of health care. This is something that deeply concerns people in this country. It has been brewing for years, again a problem that has been manufactured by the very same Liberal government that is now the subject of so much corruption. It too created the problem of privatization by not enforcing the Canada Health Act. The Liberals allowed the provinces to allow privatization to go ahead.
It was the NDP that took up that issue and gave some proposals to the Minister of Health to stop the privatization of our health care system. We want to maintain medicare and accessibility for all Canadians and to ensure that there is not a two tier system wherein people who have money somehow jump to the front of the line and get through the door first.
Regrettably, the Liberal government chose not to deal with those proposals. It basically said that maybe in 10 years it would be willing to look at ways to ensure that public funds only stayed with a public system after it dealt with the $41 billion. That is like saying there is a crisis now, but maybe we will think about it in 10 years' time. That was completely unsatisfactory in terms of any resolution to the crisis in our public health care system. We had many discussions in our caucus. We felt that the response from the Liberal government on that score was completely unacceptable to us.
We are now faced with a situation where the government has come to the end of its credibility. That has been there for a long time, but it has come to the end of its ability to be productive on anything. This Parliament has become a very fractious place. Even so, the leader of the NDP offered a compromise, a common sense approach that would ensure that the criteria the government has laid out in terms of continuing business to the end of the session before Christmas could happen.
We have devised a proposal as embodied in this motion that would allow an election to be held without conflicting with the very special time people need with their families and their local communities over the Christmas period. We have devised a proposal that would allow this House to keep working and to pass legislation. In fact, not only would that happen, it would happen because the three opposition parties agreed to compromise and brought that forward.
That is why we are here today with this motion. I would say categorically it is not a confidence motion. It is a proposal to meet the needs of Canadians to ensure that we have an election at a time that is better for Canadians and in a way that would allow this House to continue doing its business. It would also ensure that the first ministers conference, the aboriginal conference, went ahead and was not interrupted or somehow impeded.
That has been very carefully and thoughtfully laid out. I have to say it may not be surprising but it is very disappointing to see the response from the Liberal members in this House today. Basically, without care or without thought, they are rejecting this and are covering themselves in very technical terms.
I heard the government House leader say earlier today that this motion was about tearing down the House. I thought that was so absurd. This motion is actually the direct opposite of that. This motion is about trying to do things in an orderly way to preserve Parliament in order to deal with its business in the coming weeks. This would include dealing with the estimates that would come up on December 8, ensuring that an election was not held over the Christmas period and ensuring that people did indeed have the second Gomery report, which is a very critical factor for people in terms of determining what they would do in that election.
All those tests have been met. Every issue the Liberals brought forward as an excuse as to why they could not have an election has been answered as a result of this motion and the proposals from the three opposition parties.
Having said that, and having now heard Liberal members one after the other tell us why they just cannot accept this, we can come to no other conclusion but that they are desperate to play this out and to move through the Christmas period and get into a period where they can go around in a freeloading, free expense pre-election campaign with no accountability present in this House. That is really what this choice is about.
I would defend this motion by saying it is a principled motion with integrity to do the right thing.
The government is choosing a course of action that only benefits its own political agenda. It is about the Liberals manipulating the political agenda to get themselves into the spring when they think they can be in a better situation to go into an election.
It is not a surprise to us that they would take that kind of route. That is what we have come to expect in terms of how the Liberals have done business over the past dozen years. In fact, it is the very reason we are in this incredible environment of dealing with corruption in Canadian politics and in the Liberal Party. It is because of the way they operate.
We have this motion before us today. The Prime Minister has a choice to make. He can accept this compromise and work with the other parties in the House to do something that is reasonable for Canadians, or the Liberals can be hell bent on their own partisan agenda to engineer it as they want to engineer it, but everybody can see that and everybody can see exactly what is taking place.