Excellent, Madam Chair. I don't know if there's parliamentary language about bullying. The only thing we have as parliamentarians is our integrity, and in coming to committee we're expected to do the work of this committee. But instead we have been sidetracked by the personal vendettas of Mr. Del Mastro again and again. I don't see parliamentarians other than him engaging in such activities, and it's poisoned the well of our committee.
I point to O'Brien and Bosc on page 150. It indicates that the House hasn't given the committee the power to punish any misconduct, breach of privilege, or contempt directly, and that committees cannot decide these matters; they can only report them to the House. Only the House can decide if an offence has been committed, and Speakers have consistently ruled that, except in the most extreme situations, they will only hear questions of privilege arising from committee proceedings upon the presentation of a report from the committee that deals directly with the matter, not as a question of privilege raised by an individual member.
The report that we are supposed to prepare, now that a summons has been issued for a member to come before us who is not employed by the House at all, is asking the Speaker to intervene in a matter that the Speaker has already ruled on. I think this is where we are going to start to look once again like our committee is being dragged down the road of embarrassment.
If Mr. Del Mastro had been on time this morning, he would have managed to pull all this in camera and the public wouldn't have known. As parliamentarians, we would have had to—