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Mr. Speaker, omnibus budget bills are undemocratic and unfair, contain wedge issues and make a member of Parliament's job impossible to complete. On Monday night, the House was forced to cast a single yea or nay vote on Bill C-59, the government's latest omnibus budget bill. The bill is 157 pages long, divided into three parts, and part 3 is further divided into 20 divisions. This allows for a wide range of disparate topics to be covered, some supportable, many not.

I support most of the tax credits and actual budgetary items. However, I strongly oppose retroactively amending the access act to allow for the premature destruction of records. I supported ending the long gun registry, but to retroactively change the law dealing with the records while the abolition bill was being debated is a dangerous, undemocratic precedent.

In any functioning parliamentary system, this omnibus bill would be divided and there were would be separate votes on each part and on every division within each part. It is simply impossible to cast a single yea or nay on an entire disparate package.

If the government will not respect Parliament enough to allow us to do our jobs, then the Speaker must intervene to defend parliamentary privilege. That is how a functioning parliamentary democracy would proceed.

Brent Rathgeber

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