Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
In my engagement in the last few minutes that remain here, I want to just remind you or reiterate in summary--because we've had some good debates, some good points made, from Standing Orders that are pretty clear, and there's no vagueness or ambiguity about it--that I support you in terms of your considered and very good judgments along the way here.
I just want to say it's one thing to overrule a chair, and some of us have been involved in those settings in committees and so on, because his judgment is off or maybe the Standing Order is vague, as sometimes is the case. But just because you have the numbers, that's a clear abuse of democracy.
So I bring this back to the Standing Orders, and I cite them for the record as we close here. Standing Order 116 is very, very explicit; there's no vagueness or lack of clarity about this one. Mr. Cullen has really assumed that it would be an abusive process, real chaos if we were to follow this kind of a mode in the future. It says here, and it goes on to say:
In a standing, special or legislative committee, the Standing Orders shall apply so far as may be applicable, except the Standing Orders as to the election of a Speaker, seconding of motions, limiting the number of times of speaking and the length of speeches.
In fact, there could have been more speakers on this.
The Chair [...] shall maintain order in the committee, deciding all questions of order subject to an appeal to the committee; but disorder in a committee can only be censured by the House, on receiving a report thereof.
Particularly, then, I will move on to a very weighty volume here called the House of Commons Procedures and Practice, by Marleau and Montpetit. Specifically where you based your judgment, on page 456 here, it says very, very pointedly--and it's footnoted as well--that “The previous question cannot be moved in a Committee of the Whole nor in any committee of the House.” This, in fact, is where we went wrong here today, where your ruling was correct--absolutely and to the nth degree. “The previous question cannot be moved in a Committee of the Whole nor in any committee of the House.”
I ask all the members to consider this: why do we have any of these volumes? We might as well pitch them all out and just start like the wild west, a total recipe for anarchy and chaos. As I said, it's one thing when it's vague and ambiguous. Mr. McGuinty knows that, and it'll come back to bite Mr. Cullen sometime too. When you have very clear instructions here in any of these procedure books and you're going to totally ignore them and fly in the face of that when there's nothing imprecise about it, then it's ludicrous.
If you have any books like these on your shelf, Mr. Cullen, Mr. McGuinty, or anybody else opposite, or any of us here, for that matter, you might as well pitch them in the garbage as you walk to your office later on in the day.