Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak to Motion No. 10.

Part of the presentation that I was going to make was toward the end of my speech. However, based on the comment that was just made, I would like to bring it forward first. The comments were made by the critic for finance, the former opposition House leader, about how when we all agreed, we could not seem to get anything done.

I would like to use today as a perfect example of why we are doing this. Vanessa's law was being debated in the House. Every person in the House agrees with it, in all the speeches we have heard from the Liberals, from the official opposition and from our side. We wanted to bring it to a vote today. We wanted the debate to collapse so we could have the opportunity to vote on it after question period tomorrow, based on the rules we have.

What happened today is exactly the problem with this place. The New Democratic Party put up speaker after speaker saying the same thing. They all agreed that they were supportive of the bill. This bill is not at third reading. We are not yet making it law in the House and sending it to the Senate for it to review the bill and give it royal assent. This was just to send it to committee.

We have spent hours and hours on a bill that absolutely everyone in the House agrees with. The NDP members said that they were interested in going to committee because they may have some amendments, which is fair and we should have done that.

I was prepared, when the debate collapsed, to move that the vote would happen tomorrow. I sat ready to go in front of the Speaker at the time to make that happen, but there was speaker after speaker. Then they complain that we do not put enough people up. It is because we have said what we had to say on the Conservative side. We know where we stand and we want things to move along.

I checked my notes to see how far we had gone on government bills since we had taken office and since our last throne speech. We have passed, all the way through all stages and received royal assent on, nine bills. We are praising that we got nine through, but do members think the general public thinks that is a good use of our time and their taxpayer dollars, paying us to be here every day, saying the same thing over and over again? No.

There are items like Vanessa's law today that we could have passed quickly, got to committee and got back from committee. Even if there were amendments, we have report stage to deal with those. They come back for report stage. We deal with them. There is a debate and a discussion.

Let us face it. We call it debate, but it is mostly speeches and a short question and answer period after. That is really where there is some debate on our positions on the different issues.

Members cannot come to the House and claim that we are not doing enough and that we are delaying. In the same sentence, in the same presentation, those members complain about us using time allocation. They complain when we say that this is enough time on a particular item. Then they complain when we add more time for items to be discussed. They cannot have it both ways.

I know the New Democrats think they can have both ways. They think the taxpayer pays for everything and that everything is glorious. However, that is not the reality of the situation.

We have only passed nine bills into legislation. We have 18 government bills still on the order paper. We have 18 government bills that we want—

Mike Wallace

Transcript

Government Orders

Discussions (0)