Mr. Speaker, the incident in question occurred at the Standing Committee on Ethics. We have heard from the member from Alberta who has indicated that his rights and privileges as a member of Parliament were impeded by the actions of a chair who was willing to ignore the rules and overturn the ability of members to speak their minds and carry out their duties.
The member from Alberta explained earlier on that the chair prohibited him from speaking, but it was much worse than just speaking. The chair refused to even entertain amendments to the motion that was before the committee.
Amendments are not only permitted but they are a regular, run-of-the-mill component of committee and parliamentary debate. I have almost never seen a document go through this place without being amended, but the chair of the ethics committee took the position that amendments were not allowed if they changed the motion.
If you look up the definition of an amendment, Mr. Speaker, without changing a motion, an amendment is not an amendment. An amendment by its very nature is a change. To amend is to change. The two words are synonymous.
In particular, the chair indicated that the motion, which sought to investigate the electoral practices of the Conservative Party, was allowed but that any amendment that would expand the motion to investigate the financial practices of his party or any opposition party was not allowed. He said that this was because his committee, the committee on ethics, was not allowed to study the actions of parties. However, the motion in question states explicitly that it wants to study the actions of the Conservative Party. It does not say that it wants to investigate the actions of Conservative public office holders but rather of the Conservative Party of Canada.
For the ethics committee chair to suggest that only one party can be investigated by his committee, infringes on the privileges of members of all political parties in this House. The privilege to which I speak now is the right to be treated equally, regardless of party affiliation. The chair of the committee indicated that only one party could be investigated and that all the other parties would be exempt from any scrutiny whatsoever.
It would have been unfair if committee members from the opposition had amassed their votes and suppressed the right of Conservative members to investigate the financial practices of all parties. That would have been unfair and wrong. However, the committee chair went even further than that when he said that it was not only the right of committee members to vote down such an inquiry of their finances, but that it was completely out of order for such an amendment to even be considered.
In other words, he structured the entire meeting in a way that would allow a motion to survive and pass only if it focused exclusively its scrutiny on the Conservative Party. In essence this is a partisan--