Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend in particular for the final offer he made. I hesitate to negotiate in public what we often try to spend our time at House leaders' meetings doing, as brief as that time sometimes is.

Opposition members have consistently gone to the government with bills that we were interested in supporting, even in an effort to, as my friend says, work hard for Canadians, limit the amount of debate. A bill I mentioned earlier talks about the allowance of civil marriages, so-called gay marriages, a law that was passed by Parliament and opposed by the member's party, allowing for the closure of a loophole in the law to permit those who are married to also seek divorce, which seems a reasonable thing to do.

All we have asked for, in the expediency of the passage of Bill C-32, is one vote, which takes about seven minutes, on average, in this place. We allowed the government to introduce a motion, if it saw fit, to allow one speaker per party. Doing the quick math on that, that would be about an hour and a half. We could see a bill that has been sitting for about 18 months, give or take, to pass completely in this place in an hour and a half, two hours at the outside if we did something slowly. The government has refused it every single time.

The government then claims it has great urgency in the world and that there are other bills to pass that opposition parties have offered to the government. We just passed a technical amendments bill recently and there is an instruments bill that we are looking to pass as well. There has been progress, but what we have seen time and again is an attitude in breaking the historical—and he cannot answer this one, by the way, Mr. Speaker. A majority government, within two years, used time allocation to shut down debate, something Conservatives used to rile against when Liberals did it. The Conservatives have used that same tactic more than any other government in any four or five-year mandate in Canadian history. The Conservatives did it in two and are now turning the bully into the victim and saying that they are somehow victimized by the will of the minority.

Nathan Cullen

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