Thank you, Mr. Chair.
If I offended Mr. Julian I want to take the opportunity to say I can understand how he would be offended by that. There's probably a little bit of truth to what I'm saying that's getting to him and he feels the need to lash out against that. I understand that, but Mr. Julian perhaps should have consulted a little bit more and thought about this a little bit, or, when it was his turn to speak to it, he could have actually taken the time to tell us why he thought it was procedurally incorrect. He didn't. All he did was tell us why the motion was so important to pass.
That's why I started this off with my introductory comment by saying that you did an incredible job as a chair of not only ruling it out of order.... You could have just left it there, but you provided a path and an avenue to make this motion in order. Rather than take you up on that offer, which would have been extremely easy to do, the opposition members of this committee chose to instead use it as an opportunity to overturn your ruling.
In my opinion, that shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the importance of the chair's position and what the chair is supposed to do. Much like the Speaker, they're getting their information and they're making a ruling based on where, procedurally, things are deemed to be correct and incorrect. Ms. Blaney was able to see that in the PROC committee. She did take a lot of heat for that in the media. I imagine that Mr. Julian was concerned about the same thing. He was worried that even if it was procedurally correct, if he went down this road he'd end up looking like he was trying to support a cover-up or something like that. I understand politically why he did it. It makes perfect sense.
It's extremely disappointing to see that not just Mr. Julian—I know I'm picking on him a little bit now and I don't want to hurt his feelings as I clearly did a few minutes ago—but all members of opposing parties here would use the opportunity to challenge the chair to advance a political objective. That's exactly what they did and it's extremely discouraging to see that.
As most members know, I've only been a member of Parliament for about six years now. Before that I was involved with our city council here in Kingston. I was a city councillor and I was the mayor. At times I was in the position of having to vote on a challenge of the chair and on the receiving end of being challenged. I can honestly say that I cannot remember a time when there was a challenge that was successful. At the end of the day most members understood that the chair's job is to use the information and the advice that they receive from their clerks in order to make the best decision on behalf of the committee.
What we see today is that all members of the opposition, despite the fact that the chair laid out the reasons very clearly and the chair provided an avenue and a path to make it procedurally correct, still voted to dismiss the chair's ruling because they're motivated purely from a political agenda.
I don't know if we're going to see more of this, quite frankly. I don't know if it is indicative of parliamentary process that this happens quite a bit. This is my first time being in a minority Parliament situation, where I'm actually getting to see this unfold, but I can say that in all my years of being involved in politics and sitting around not-for-profit boards, committees and council tables, I've never seen people use a challenge of the chair in such a politically motivated way, especially when you have a chair who takes the opportunity to not only explain in detail but also provide avenues and paths to get out of this later on.
Like I said at the outset—and I have a lot more to say on this—there's a great deal to be discussed in this. I will definitely come back to it.
At this time I really want to address this point. I really find it discouraging to see members do this, especially after being on the PROC committee. There I witnessed the NDP standing up for parliamentary procedure the way that chairs are supposed to engage and the way that procedure is supposed to be interpreted, not using procedure for political motives.