Thank you, Chair.
What's happened here today?
We're in the parliamentary committee, the Standing Committee on Health. I'm the vice-chair of that, and, as a member of Parliament, I sit on this committee. There are other members on this committee, some Liberal members and then there are also members from the NDP, the Bloc and the Conservatives. Because we're in a minority Parliament, the parties that aren't in government—the NDP, the Bloc and the Conservatives—have the majority of votes on this committee. That means that, when we work together as opposition parties, we can pass things, even though the Liberals are in government.
When the Liberals know that the opposition parties have worked together, and they don't want to work with us to do something, what happens is that they do something called a filibuster. That means that, rather than letting a motion come to a vote, they just put up speakers and talk the clock out.
Now, I have to explain something that's really important. Anybody watching this right now is watching me in my headset in my living room here. That's because Parliament isn't meeting in the actual House of Commons because of COVID. We're meeting in something called “hybrid sittings”. How this impacts and benefits the Liberals when they filibuster is that, as opposed to when we regularly meet in the House of Commons, we could continually meet and, in these filibusters, eventually somebody tires out. The Liberals have the benefit of knowing that we need to have translation and IT services online for the meeting to continue. All the Liberals have to do to stop a motion from passing is talk the clock to a certain point when these resources aren't available. And today—