I am now prepared to rule on the point of order raised earlier today by the hon. deputy leader of the government in the House concerning the admissibility of the amendment to the motion to concur in the second report of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts. I would like to thank the hon. minister for raising this matter, and the hon. member for Mississauga South and the hon. House leader of the official opposition for their contributions to this discussion.
I need not remind the House that the Chair took under advisement on May 2, 2005 a similar point of order and I hope to return to the House shortly with a ruling on that matter, in fact later this day. However, while there are similarities in the two cases, I believe they differ in one important respect, and that is the matter of relevance.
As hon. members know, it is well established in our practice that an amendment must be relevant to the motion it seeks to amend. I refer the House to page 453 of Marleau and Montpetit. In the case before us, the second report seems to me to be very narrow in that it only discusses the payment of legal fees of public servants called to testify before the committee during its hearings on specific chapters of the report of the Auditor General of Canada.
It is true that the hearings deal mainly with chapter 3: the Sponsorship Program; chapter 4, Advertising Activities; and chapter 5, Management of Public Opinion Research.
However, the report does not focus on the subject matter of the hearings; rather, it addresses providing assistance to witnesses testifying before the committee. In short, the report addresses process, not substance.
Now the amendment that is being proposed does not address the same issues but goes far beyond the ambit of the second report. It reaches back into the subject matter of the committee's hearings, a quite different subject than the process under which it will manage those hearings and deal with the witnesses it invites to testify.
Accordingly, the Chair concludes that the amendment to the motion for concurrence in the second report of the public accounts committee is not in order because it is not relevant to the main motion it seeks to amend. Consequently, the subamendment cannot be proposed by the hon. deputy government House leader either because it is amending an amendment that is out of order.
Debate therefore may resume on the main motion.