Mr. Speaker, the member for Winnipeg North was going to speak, but he is on a panel doing important opposition business, so I will take a few moments to talk about this omnibus bill, which would bring in previous legislation. Some is government legislation and some is private members' bills.

I think my colleague from Cape Breton—Canso, who spoke earlier, really hit on a serious point that we hoped it would be different in this Parliament. That is especially how the chamber works and how committees work.

As I have said in some of my responses to the throne speech and in talking with people in my riding today, I have been a member of this place for somewhere close to 20 years. It will be 20 years next week. I have seen about a dozen speeches from the throne, and I have never seen one with less vision, more misrepresentation of the historical facts, and such a small-minded strategy moving forward as we have seen in this one. I would hope that this chamber has bigger ideas than we have seen in the throne speech. Some of them can come from other bills coming forward. Some can come forward from committees, if we are allowed to operate the way we should.

I would like to talk a little bit about committees in the last session. What we saw was opposition members putting forward amendments that were voted down. Opposition members would put forward a motion to do a study. I do not know about all committees, but I attended four different committees, and in all of them, government members sitting on the committee asked the committee to go in camera, and the motion, surprisingly, was voted down. I guess I cannot say in this place who voted which way, but I think the House can detect that. The government members put the meeting in camera and there was a vote, and the motion was lost. That issue was not discussed, even though it was an issue Canadians were concerned about.

I would actually plead with the backbench members on the government side to change that in this Parliament. Allow Parliament to work the way it is supposed to, where we have pros and cons to ideas, where we debate the ideas, and where we take things that one does not agree with but that we allow to come forward for debate. That is how this place is supposed to work. I think a lot of the members opposite on the government side would like to see that happen.

The parliamentary secretary on the trade committee I was on last session challenged me, just like the member for Burlington did earlier. He challenged me and said that was the way the Liberals used to do it. No, it is not. The parliamentary secretary of trade in the last session was an opposition member when I happened to chair the fisheries committee. I went back and looked at the record. There were 32 motions put to committee. None of them were debated in camera, not one. Of those, 21 motions were from opposition members. They were critical of government policy, and the government of the day allowed the debate to occur. In fact, many of them passed. That is what this place is supposed to be. It is supposed to be a place of debate, ideas, and big vision.

The government opposite just wants to manage it a little bit. Look at the throne speech again. As my colleague said, it is going to unbundle some of the TV channels. Whether they are Vision TV or whatever they might be, the government is going to unbundle them.

I have to say something that one of my constituents said to me today. My constituent has an unemployed youth, 23 years old, who should be out in the workforce.

The government is not doing anything about the highest rate of unemployment among youth we have ever seen in this country, but by golly, as my constituent said, it would give us a little cheaper TV and a little cheaper cellphone so that he can stay home and sit on the couch, and we lose the potential of that youth out there working. The government should be working on the big issues, not trying to sell a new little consumer product for some cellphone company. That is not a vision.

I bring those points up because I am worried. I am worried that what we are going to get in the second session of this Parliament is more of the same, where the government limits debate. It votes down motions coming from citizens, motions that would build a better Canada. They at least should be discussed. If today's performance in question period is how we are going to continue, it was a continuation of the same. I quite honestly sat here pretty disgusted. I can see why Canadians are disgusted. We never had an answer to one question put to the government.

We know that the Prime Minister kind of chickened out and left the country. Obviously, he does not want to be here to answer questions on the Senate scandal, so he used the excuse of going over to sign the CETA deal. He could have signed that tomorrow or Friday. He could have stayed here and answered questions in the first session of this Parliament. He could have done that. He is going to talk about 80,000 jobs created by CETA, but Conservatives cannot prove it. Let them talk. Their record on trade is that they are the first government in 30 years that has had a deficit in trade on an annual basis. Let us look at the numbers. Since December 2011, the government that fails to answer questions every day in the House of Commons has had a deficit every month since December 2011.

In the throne speech, the Conservatives talked about bringing in prosperity through trade. They have been an absolute and utter failure every step of the way on trade thus far. My colleague, the trade critic, said earlier in question period that we know that they are going to sell out the dairy industry. We do not know what they are going to do in terms of adding extra costs for all Canadians on pharmaceutical products. We know that the Europeans are going to have two years of extra patent time for drugs. Is the deal good for Canadians? We do not know. As everything else the government does, it has done it in secret.

Conservatives now lock committees down in secret. They are negotiating the CETA agreement in secret, and we have a whole cabinet that fails to answer questions. They operate like the opposition is supposed to. They fail to answer questions, and in the process, they undermine democracy. This omnibus bill is certainly not going to do anything to--

Wayne Easter

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