Mr. BOURASSA:

Now that a majority of

this house has sustained the freedom of speech and the liberty of individual members under the rules of the house, and voted that those rules shall be respected by all, I intend to devote a few moments not exactly to the consideration of the motion of the hon. Minister of Finance, but to exercise-

Mr. SPEAKER:

Order. I would ask the

Sergeant at Arms to exercise the rights of the house.

Mr. HENRI BOURASSA (Labelle):

I propose to exercise the oldest privilege pertaining to a representative of the people, a privilege which, in the wording used yesterday by the Prime Minister, has behind it the sanction of centuries of tradition in the British parliament, and that is, that whenever the Minister of Finance or any adviser of the crown moves to go into supply, or into committee of ways and means, every free elected representative of the people has the right to express his views and the views of the people who have sent him here. In this I am sure the distinguished leader of the opposition, divided as we may be on many questions of public interest, will stand upon his long knowledge of British public affairs and his parliamentary culture, and admit that in so doing I am not only claiming my right, but asserting a right of every member of this house to whatever party he belongs.

May I say-and here I address myself quite sincerely to all the members of this house, no matter to what party they belong-that it was neither to my taste nor to my comfort that I prevented the house from concluding its business last night upon the proposals of the Minister of Finance? I did it for two reasons. One, because I wanted this house to have an opportunity of realizing the consequences of the rules of debate that it has established. Those rules are supposed to be for the common good of the country, of the House of Commons, of every party within the house, and of every freely elected member. When the revision of the rules was under discussion, my excellent and intimate friend the Minister of Justice (Mr. Lapointe) stated most positively, in the name of the government, that he accepted the rule for the adjournment of the house at eleven o'clock every night, provided it was connected with the adoption of the rule debarring any hon. member, with the exception of the leader of the government and the leader of the opposition, from speaking more than forty minutes. Although I did not believe that those rules would work for the benefit of the country, or that they would attain the avowed and sincere object of abridging debate, I did exactly what the Minister of Justice did; I accepted the one rule because the other \ as accepted and in the belief that both would be enforced.

What I wanted to emphasize before this house and before the country last night is this. If the forty-minute rule is to be enforced rigidly, as it has been since the beginning of the session, the other rule should also be enforced rigidly. It should not be relaxed for the comfort or at the wish of either the

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government or the opposition. I did not desire last night to embarrass the government or the opposition, neither did I wish to cause discomfort to any hon. member. I took my stand to exemplify the conjunction of those two rules, and to have it laid down in practice that they must be applied, whether they are agreeable or disagreeable to this member or that member, to this party or that party. In doing this, I believe-I may be mistaken- that I have helped the house to vindicate the primary right of every hon. member, and the house itself to observe its own regulations.

This brings me to the other consideration which induced me last night to prevent the final decision of the house upon the budget proposals. Yesterday afternoon we listened to two very interesting speeches from the leaders of the two great "historical" parties. These parties, according to the letter of this book-Beauchesne's Parliamentary Rules and Forms-are the only acknowledged parties in this house. I want to be absolutely fair and as nice as I can afford to be. Both leaders availed themselves of the privilege accorded them to speak as long as they wished upon a measure which has been treated in detail by some forty members on one side and by some sixty members on the other, all of Whom have more or less upheld the same views and propounded the same policy. Under the forty-minute rule, the leader of a small group like our Progressive friends, the leader of a still smaller group such as our three Labour friends, and the unfortunate individual who, if you like, represents an eccentric brand of people, but people who are British subjects just as much as any other class of people in this country of ours, people who have elected me freely to this house under the same constitution and to express their views with the same freedom as may be enjoyed by the Prime Minister of Canada or by the leader of the opposition-under this rule each one of us is limited to forty minutes in which to expound doctrines or opinions with which you, Mr. Speaker, or the members of the government, or the members of the opposition, may not agree, but which I think you and they desire to listen to with the sense of British fair play and patience which we exercised in listening to the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition.

But that is not the main point. Upon the subamendment presented by the member for East Lambton (Mr. Fansher), because of my determination to respect the longstanding traditions of the British parliamentary system, I refrained altogether from dwelling upon a matter which was brought up by the hon. member for Southeast Grey (Miss Macphail)

and discussed at length by the Prime Minister last night; I mean, the evolution of our system of government and parliamentary representation. I refrained, because I considered that in discussing the subamendment it was not quite proper to dwell upon this question, which relates to the general policy of the country. But now that the amendment and the subamendment have been disposed of, I owe it not to myself-I am but an insignificant individual-but I owe it to the thousands of people in the province of Quebec, and even in Ontario and in the other provinces, who have done me the favour of expressing some degree of confidence in me in the last twenty years, to say what I think of the opinion which the Prime Minister expressed yesterday on the question of party evolution. The Prime Minister knows that I am a personal friend of his. The Prime Minister knows, and no one better, that no party call or allegiance brought me back to public life when, he being loaded from one end of the country to the other with Ihe accusation of being untrue to Canada and to the British Empire, and of harbouring American tendencies, I stood by him, because I felt that he was on the point of resurrecting the old "Canada first" spirit of which his illustrious grandfather was one of the creators, and of which his excellent father was one of the upholders. I sustained him freely in the province of Quebec and elsewhere during the elections of 1925 and 1926. The province of Quebec sent a solid delegation to support the government, and the Prime Minister knows, or ought to know, that that was not due to party allegiance, but to the free and voluntary determination of a growing number of men and women in my province who have ceased to believe in the gospel of party, and who vote for one party or the other according to circumstances and to their own convictions.

Of course, when the trial came in those days that were fought out during the session of 1926-and they have already been referred to in this debate-great respect was paid to every form of independent influence and support that could be given to the government. But since the general election of 1926 returned the government with a clear majority, it seems to me that the thermometer of sympathy and of expressed admiration for independence of thought and action of such people, in the province of Quebec or elsewhere, has somewhat come down. Therefore I simply wanted to choose this occasion to tell the Prime Minister and his friends that those men and women, free of their will, free

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of their convictions, who voted to support him in the fall of 1925 and the fall of 1926 because they thought that the Liberal party stood for freedopi of conviction, for freedom of speech, and for freedom of action, will be just as prepared to vote against that party the moment they find that such appeal to their sense of honour

and sense of citizenship was misdirected.

I have always believed, in matters of political as well as individual hygiene, that an ounce of prevention is far better than a pound of cure. In the past I was forced, wrongly perhaps, certainly against my taste and personal affiliations, to fight against the Liberal party, thereby assisting the Conservatives-Heaven knows there was no co-operation-in gaining ground in the province of Quebec. Now for my own sake as well as for the sake of my good Liberal friends I do not want those days to return. I had enough of them, as I believe my good1 Liberal friends had also.

While no doubt there is much in what was said by the Prime Minister and, before him, by the Minister of Railways (Mr. Dunning) as to the inconvenience of group representation, at the same time, as I have suggested privately to friends on both sides of the house, I believe that if parliamentary government is to ensure to Canada what it ensured to England in days gone by, and what it still preserves to the people of Great Britain, there must be found some combination between the principle of free representation of all classes and groups, call them what you will, the free representation of all currents of opinion, of all interests, great or small, in every part of the Dominion, and the principle of stability of government for which the Prime Minister rightly stands and for which I stand just as firmly. But is it true, as was suggested yesterday, that the two party system is indispensable to proper parliamentary government?-that it is impossible to have stability of government without the house and the country being divided into two camps? I pay tribute to the Prime Minister's wide knowledge of history, his broad mind, and all the fine marks of scholarship which I have admired in him ever since he came back to this country as a young man; and I have followed his career with considerable interest. I was surprised, therefore, to hear the right hon. gentleman express the opinion that the two party system or, as he put it, the system of government now in vogue in Canada, has stood the test of the centuries in England. It is the very opposite. Study the glorious history of British parliamentary institutions, from the early days of the Witenagemot, transplanted to England from the soil of Saxony, down to the great revolution of 1646 and later to the less bloody though more significant revolution of 1688, and you will discover that in all this time the principle of class representation or, if you prefer the expression, the recognition of the needs of all classes, was vindicated by the free action of a free parliament long before there was any such thing as a two party system or before any cabinet existed. Not a revolutionary, not a jurist, but a conservative-minded man like Lecky pointed out some thirty years ago that in the evolution of representative government in Great Britain, from the days when the armed and privileged leaders of the masses, the noblemen, wrested from a tyrannical king, first, the primary rights of the aristocracy, and then those of society at large, as an annex to the aristocracy, until the time of the triumph-I will not qualify it-of so-called democracy, the distribution of power has been continually maintained in the balancing of political influence among certain classes of the people or among the people as a whole, but that in our days that balance is threatened by the usurpation of all powers by the cabinet.

One of the things by which I have been brought, French as I am by origin, to a sincere though not servile admiration for the British system of government, is precisely the fact that there is no finality in that system. Every nationality within the empire, whether English, Scottish, Irish, French, Dutch, or Italian in origin, which voluntarily acknowledges the king as the emblem, if you will, of the sovereignty of its nationhood, can commune with men of English extraction in the gradual evolution of government, and can bring its contribution to that system. I admire the British system for the very reason that it is at once broad and supple enough to survive all reforms, and to adapt itself to the genius of every race within the British commonwealth, without fear of any of its basic principles being destroyed. As the descendant, either of those Normans Who introduced into England some of the features of that form of government, or of four generations of Canadians who have lived under British institutions and helped in moulding the form of government in this country, I cannot endorse the words of the Prime Minister that the present system, under Mr. Baldwin or under any other gentleman who may be at the head of affairs in London or Ottawa, has reached the point of perfection. There is ample room for improvement.

The Budget-Mr. Bourassa

Not only is the two-party system a modern excrescence of British parliamentary institutions, but it is one that cannot last. Indeed, it has ceased to be in England. Under what conditions was it born? Every schoolboy who has studied the history of Britain knows that the tw'o-party system of government had its origin in the transmission of - sovereignty from a Scottish royalty to a German dynasty imported from Hanover and enthroned in the seat of the Stuarts. These Hanovers were good fellows enough but they did not speak a word of English; they could not communicate with the British people. A man of genius, though not afflicted with too many scruples, Robert Walpole, created a new system in order to strengthen the Hanoverian dynasty and to discourage effectually the champions of the alleged rights of the Stuarts. Finding that he had to encounter the opposition and ill will of the Tory aristocracy, still firmly entrenched within the precincts of the House of Lords; finding also that he could not depend even upon the Whig lords to assert the rights of the people as against the rights of the lords, Walpole purchased a majority in the House of Commons and thereby brought about the real cleavage between the Lords and the Commons, at the same time laying and strengthening the foundation of the two-party system. The Tories and the Whigs were the successors of the old Jacobites and of the Independents or Covenanters. It is therefore no exaggeration to state that the two-party system was bom in iniquity, as the result of a long civil war which had torn asunder the basis of government and social law in England.

Mr. GARLAND (Bow River):

And it has remained that way ever since.

Mr. BOURASSA:

But thanks to the

extraordinary genius of the British race, and to borrow the words of one of their greatest statesmen, a genius which is perhaps the more powerful because it is bound up with some degree of stupidity, the British people gradually adapted themselves to that system of government. They soon found out, however, that the two party system produced those things which were so deprecated two years ago and which have been deprecated ever since by opponents of the group system in this country; it produced corruption and logrolling-to use modern phraseology-as

between the two parties in the house and as between the organizers and vote catchers of the two parties among the people.

I pass over the period of the great crisis which accompanied and followed the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars, and come

to the time when affairs came back to their proper level in England. A new power had arisen, which has made itself felt ever since the world over; that is the power of the rising masses, the tillers of the soil and the toilers of the factories, who in their turn asked for a place in the sun and for a share of the liberty wrested by the nobility from the crown and by the high middle classes from the nobility. Ever since that time the two party system has failed to exist in its integrity in England.

Then how can the Prime Minister or any hon. member of this house fail to acknowledge the tremendous services which have been rendered to modern England by the newly arisen parties? If to-day, after centuries of religious and civil intolerance equal to that which existed in France or in any other country, England is held as the classical land of liberty, it is due of course to some extent to the commonsense of the British people, but it must be also acknowledged that it is due to the struggle which was made by the representatives of the Irish nation who, from the time O'Connell broke the doors of the House of Commons and refused to take an oath which meant abjuration of his faith, forced upon the conscience of the British people religious tolerance and respect for all creeds. If to-day the toiling classes of England, after having been deprived of their elementary rights for centuries by the Anglo-Norman nobility, can have a pride in their British citizenship, it is due to a certain extent to the commonsense of the Liberal party of England, but where would the Liberal inheritors of the old Whiggish party be today if it had not been for the struggle which was made by the representatives of the working classes? If to-day English labour has the right to share in English citizenship, in English nobility and in English monarchy, is it not, because of the fact that such men as John Burns, Kier Hardie, and Ramsay MacDonald, he the most illustrious of all living statesmen in England, supported by the growing strength of those who once and for so long were the subdued classes, have proven to the world that a labourer or a farmer may at times produce a political thought and a political strength which the time-serving politicians and classical parties have been unable to do.

Mr. Speaker, I do not want to delay the house at greater length; one reason why I have spoken, and the minor reason, was to show the house the result of those rules which were adopted in a somewhat hasty manner.

I have asserted myself, not for my own sake,

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as I have already said, but rather to my extreme discomfort. I do not like to be disagreeable to my fellow members when I can avoid it, even to my good friend from Frontenac (Mr. Edwards) who, by the way, is my best friend in this house, because every time he vituperates against me he brings more votes to me in my constituency. I like to be as nice as possible to all,-but I claim that every time even the humblest member of this house,-and I am one of the humblest individuals,-calls for the application of the rules indiscriminately as between parties and leaders, that man is working for the good of the house at large and for the good of every party in the house.

My second reason for speaking to-day is because, with the ideas, the principles and the ideals to which I have devoted my life at the expense of all political honours and comforts, and with all the friendship I have for the Prime Minister, I could not let pass that assertion of the tumbling-down party system of government, the complete failure of which both parties may delay for a certain time, but which they cannot stop. Something else will take its place. I do not find fault with the arguments brought forward by the Prime Minister or the Minister of Railways; although perhaps out of place and time, I believe they were valuable contributions, to what- should be one of the chief concerns of all people in different parts of this country. Last summer, from Halifax to Vancouver, I expressed the hope that every individual in every community in this federation of ours would devote more time and study to these great problems, because if there is one feature of our social and political state in which we have fallen far below the great traditions of the British nation, it is in the disinterestedness of many of our people. I might even call it the social aloofness with which all too many of our professional and business men, our farmers and our labourers look upon the great problems of the nation; it is the facility with which all classes and groups, if you wish to so call them, disassociate themselves from the general interests and the future of this country, relying upon this man or that man, this group or that group, this leader or that leader, to settle the affairs of state for them. Sir, if we want to preserve in Canada the essential characteristics of a nation, with the great moral and political inheritance we have received from the two great countries which have contributed the most of our population, and if at the same time we want to look to the future with optimism, strength of will and the determination of purpose which is characteristic of a young and growing nation,

we must be at once Liberal and Conservative, but we must have also an eye to the aspirations of all groups; racial groups if you like, provincial groups, or class groups, who find rightly or wrongly that the Liberal gospel or the Conservative doctrine is not sufficient to meet their desires.

I venture to predict that the first of the leaders of these great parties who understands the situation and leaves the narrow trail of party shibboleths, party traditions, party slavery and party narrowness of mind, to associate himself and his party with the growing aspirations of all Canadians, east and west, of old French or English stock, or those newcomers to whom we owe a duty to welcome as brothers in this great- family, will become in very truth the leader of the nation. The party and leader, I repeat, that will not go counter to these groups or classes, but will be prepared to receive the expressions of opinion of all and give them a sympathetic hearing without asking them to pass under the yoke of party allegiance or so-called party co-operation, will be the party and the leader of to-morrow. That leader will be the man of to-morrow and the leader of Canada, because he will have shown himself capable of understanding the hopes of this young giant nation that refuses to be shackled by the shibboleths and traditions of old countries, respectable though they may be, which do not fit our present state of mind, and which will not harmonize with it in the future.

Mr. MACKENZIE KING:

Before my hon. friend takes his seat I wish to correct what appears from his remarks to be a false impression he has gathered as to the purport of what I said last evening. I was not attacking group government in what I said, and I was not seeking to emphasize the importance of the old political parties. What I was baking exception to was a theory of representation put forward by the hon. member for Southeast Grey (Miss Macphail) to the effect that a member is elected to parliament as a representative of a class. To make my meaning perfectly -clear, my hon. friend in order to take the same position would have to stand in this house to-day and declare that he is here to represent the journalists of Canada because he is a journalist and belongs to that class. His whole speech this 'afternoon has been an assertion of the position I was taking last night, namely, that an hon. member is not here to represent a particular class whether it be agricultural, professional, labour or other, but is here to represent all of the people regardless of the particular class to which he may belong.

The Budget-Division

Mr. BOURASSA:

I take advantage of the five minutes left to me to tell the Prime Minister that I could not read over his speech of last night, because owing to the incorporation of so much printed matter in it, Hansard was not distributed until five minutes before the house convened'. I agree largely with what the Prime Minister has just stated, but I claim that he has not put the question fully and completely. Every member of this house is bound, of course, to do justice to all classes; but the representative of a rural community is naturally obliged, because of the character of his constituency, to give more attention to rural interests. The representative of a labour community too, such as my hon. friend from Hochelaga (Mr. St. Pere), is bound to pay more attention to the interests of the people who send him here. As a matter of fact, we have, as representatives of constituencies, to take into account the desire of the particular classes who make up the majority of these constituencies. As to what the Prime Minister has said with respect to representation of a class, I have always opposed, for example, the idea of calling one of the members of the government, Minister of Labour.

Mr. KAISER:

Mr. Speaker, when is it considered that a member's speech is concluded? My understanding is that when a man resumes his seat his speech is over.

Mr. SPEAKER:

My hon. friend's theory is correct. In the present instance, however, when the hon. member for Labelle sat down the Prime Minister explained to the hon. member that the latter had probably misunderstood the speech he had made the previous night. According to my understanding the hon. member for Labelle made an explanation upon this point. In any event the hon. member's time has expired.

Mr. GUTHRIE:

I was paired with the hon. member for Chicoutimi (Mr. Dubuc). Had 1 voted I would have voted against the subamendment, for the main amendment and against the motion.

Mr. VENIOT:

I was paired with the hon. member for York-Sunbury (Mr. Hanson). Had I voted I would have voted for the motion.

Mr. MALONEY:

I was paired with the hon. member for St. Ann (Mr. Guerin). Had I voted I would have voted against the motion.

Mr. CANTLEY:

I was paired with the hon. member for Cartier (Mr. Jacobs). Had I voted I would have voted against the motion.

Mr. IRVINE:

I was paired with the hon. member for South Winnipeg (Mr. McDiarmid). Had I voted I would have voted against the motion.

Mr. MERCIER (St. Henri):

I was paired with the hon. member for West Hamilton (Mr. Bell). Had I voted I would have voted for the motion.

Mr. BELL (St. Antoine):

I was paired with the hon. member for Beauhamois (Mr. Raymond). Had I voted I would have voted against the motion.

Mr. MACDONALD (Richmond-West Cape Breton):

I was paired with the hon. member for St. Boniface (Mr. Howden). Had I voted I would have voted against the motion.