Evidence of meeting #39 for Health in the 43rd Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was witnesses.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ron McKinnon
Thank you.
Very well, we will suspend for three minutes.
We are suspended.
Conservative
Michelle Rempel Conservative Calgary Nose Hill, AB
I challenge your ruling, I challenge your ruling.
Liberal
Conservative
Michelle Rempel Conservative Calgary Nose Hill, AB
Thank you.
The motion that I moved today, Chair, was really important, because it would set the direction of the health committee for the next several weeks, and I don't think the Liberals want Canadians to see this.
The motion would bring departmental officials, the minister, people in front of committee to look at these really important issues—on drug prices, on COVID-19. What they did today, instead of letting this motion pass, was put up speakers so that resources will run out.
Can you believe that? It's just not right. I thought this motion was really.... It was built in a collaborative way; it allows the various parties to invite the witnesses that they want; there's no partisan language in it. In fact, I can post it later so that people can look at it.
At the end of the day, if this motion had passed today, what it would mean is that we would have a meeting on Monday on this drug price issue. Because they are filibustering this meeting, however, that meeting is lost.
What the Liberals want to have happen, Chair, is to have the subcommittee meet on Monday. They're trying to use procedure to block this motion. They want to have a subcommittee meeting, which takes a meeting off the table. Then the subcommittee would have to approve this motion, and then it would have to go to another meeting of the full committee, and then these meetings would be scheduled.
We are thus losing weeks and meetings, rather than just dealing with it today. That's why the filibuster is happening.
This is all really technical procedure, but at the end of the day, by passing this motion today we could have had meetings on the drug price issue and the COVID-19 stuff next week. It would have been done right away, but now we don't know when it is going to happen.
What we need to do, then, is force the Liberals to have a meeting on Monday so that this gets passed.
This sort of thing is so frustrating for us, because we could have passed this motion today. The Liberals so far haven't raised any substantive objections to the motion and haven't proposed amendments to the motion. That's typically what happens in debate on a motion. They would say, “Well, I don't like this part of it. Could we do that?”
We've had no debate on that today, if anybody wants to look back, Chair, and see the debate on this motion. There have been no amendments raised by the Liberals on this issue.
I think they talked about Minecraft for awhile, actually. They read something about Minecraft. It's really interesting.
I need, then, to look at other options, because we're going to run out of resources.
There's a bunch of Liberal hands up. Can you believe that Parliament is shut down because we don't have IT resources or translation resources?
Thank you to the translators, by the way.
Usually, in regular times—you can see how COVID affects Parliament—these filibuster things get out.
I need, then, to look at other options. In order to do these other options so as not lose all these meetings that we have, I have to do something procedurally here right now so that I can use another tactic to get a meeting on Monday.
Mr. Chair, all this said, I want to thank my colleagues, particularly from the Bloc and the NDP. Mr. Thériault has been fighting really hard on the drug price issues; so has my colleague, Mr. Don Davies from the NDP. Particularly on COVID, though, I think this committee has been a really good example of how opposition parties can work together in a minority parliament to hold the government to account.
With that, Mr. Chair, with the intent of making sure that we can get a meeting on Monday and make sure that the Liberals can't use procedure to make sure that it doesn't happen, I move to adjourn the meeting.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ron McKinnon
The motion to adjourn is in order.
Let me first ask, do we have agreement to adjourn the meeting?
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ron McKinnon
I'll ask the clerk to conduct a vote.
(Motion agreed to: yeas 6; nays 5)
Thank you, Mr. Clerk.
Liberal
Jennifer O'Connell Liberal Pickering—Uxbridge, ON
It's shameful that the member opposite just shut down Parliament.
Conservative
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ron McKinnon
Excuse me. The meeting is still under way.
Thank you to the clerk, to all of the staff and to the interpreters, who have borne with us through all of this. To all the members, thank you for the passionate debate that we've had here today.
With that, we are, in fact, adjourned.
