Thank you, Madam Chair.
To the parliamentary secretary to the Prime Minister, we'll get to that. We know the rules regarding committees. You like to select which ones you like to use, so I'll get to that in a minute.
The House of Commons Standing Orders are categorical on this issue. Standing Order 10 states:
The Speaker shall preserve order and decorum, and shall decide questions of order. In deciding a point of order or practice, the Speaker shall state the Standing Order or other authority applicable to the case. No debate shall be permitted on any such decision, and no such decision shall be subject to an appeal to the House.
Furthermore, O'Brien and Bosc state the following on pages 1046 to 1047:
The Speaker of the House is regularly asked to rule on the procedural admissibility of matters before the House. Rulings from the Speaker constitute precedents for future Speakers of the House. The matter before the House may pertain to the proceedings of one or more committees. If the Speaker rules on a matter of that nature, the committees affected will be required to comply with any provisos in the ruling.
So we've just read the ruling out and it's out of respect for the ruling of the Speaker that this question of privilege is now closed. The issue could be no clearer. The Speaker has ruled. We must comply. Anything else would be contrary to the standing order and a challenge to the ruling of the Speaker.
O'Brien and Bosc are clear that committees derive their authority from the House itself. On page 973, they say:
The House delegates certain powers to the committees it creates in order that they can carry out their duties and fulfill their mandates. Committees have no powers other than those delegated to them in this way, and cannot assume other powers on their own initiative....[C]ommittees can invoke these powers only within and for the purposes of the mandate that the House (and the Senate, in the case of joint committees) has entrusted to them.
Page 1044 states the following:
Committee procedure includes all of the rules and practices governing the proceedings of parliamentary committees. The primary sources are the Constitution and Acts of Parliament; orders of reference, instructions and Standing Orders of the House of Commons; rulings by the Speaker of the House and committee Chairs; and, finally, practice.
For the sake of emphasis, I'd like to repeat that the primary sources are the Constitution and acts of Parliament, orders of reference, instructions and Standing Orders of the House of Commons, and rulings by the Speaker.
O'Brien and Bosc also state the following on pages 1047 to 1048:
The idea that committees are “masters of their proceedings” or “masters of their procedures” is frequently evoked in committee debates or the House.
As the parliamentary secretary to the Prime Minister just mentioned, “The concept refers to the freedom committees normally have—”