Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, for the opportunity to speak.
I have a lot to talk about when it comes to this motion specifically, and I have quite a bit to offer. I'm really interested in hearing what some of the other members have to say before commenting on that. I guess I'll defer talking about that until a little later.
What I really want to talk about right now, Mr. Chair, was what we just witnessed, and that was a successful challenge of a ruling from a chair. To start with, I believe that you handled that in an extremely fair way. You pointed out the problems with the ruling, which no doubt came from discussions that you had off-line with clerks and people who understand the rules even better than somebody like you who has been around for a long time. I mean that will all due respect.
The reality of the situation is that you didn't just make a ruling. You also provided an avenue for how the motion could be corrected. I find it extremely troublesome that we are now on to the second time in a committee that members of the opposition, not happy with an outcome, decide to challenge the chair. It does a massive disgrace to the institution that we have, the procedures that we have and the parliamentary establishment from where we've come.
I saw Mr. Julian shaking his head the entire time that you were making that ruling. Then, when Mr. Julian went to speak, he didn't once address a procedural problem with your ruling. In fact, he just went on to say why the motion was important to pass. That's fair enough.
Mr. Chair, you gave an avenue as to how we could get in order and put the motion in order. Mr. Julian should have taken the lead of Ms. Blaney in the PROC committee, the other time that a challenge occurred, where she too had a difficult problem in terms of wanting to see the motion passed, but she understood that the content of it was out of order. It's unfortunate, Mr. Chair, that Mr. Julian could not bring himself to see the same way Ms. Blaney did.