Imagine pulling an all-nighter of constant voting and debate on mundane and minor budgetary issues, all while dancing around one, big elephant in the room, the reason everyone is there at midnight in the first place.

Such was the case for Souris Moose Mountain Dr. Robert Kitchen as he participated in the latest Conservative filibuster on Parliament Hill on June 14-15.

"The day before, we had a motion that the Conservatives put forward, and we were doing a debate on the carbon tax," said Kitchen.

Already scheduled for that evening was a round of voting on estimates in a variety of budgetary matters, over 200 individual votes. Often, those votes can be lumped together into one. However, to prove their point, the Opposition threatened to force the assembly to proceed to vote on each individual piece, unless their motion requesting estimates on the household costs of carbon tax was supported by the other side.

"The night went on, they did not support our issue on the carbon tax, and so we did a vote, one by one throughout the evening."

Kitchen went on to explain that each vote takes about 15 minutes to complete, thus taking the MPs in the House on a marathon ride. This time round, the filibuster lasted around 12 hours.

The previous filibuster back in March saw 21 hours spent on around 260 votes.