Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to our witnesses for appearing today. At the outset, I would have to agree with Mr. Marleau's comment. Proceed with caution, I heard you say at the outset of your remarks, and then you laid out the two tools the Speakers do have. One is do not recognize a member, and the other is you recognize them, you name them, and eject them from the House.
I'm a little concerned with one of the clauses in these amendments in this proposal we're considering from the 1992 report, in that, “A Member who has been suspended from the service of the House shall be suspended...shall forfeit the right of access to the Chamber”.
My concern with regard to that is it's very dangerous, and I'm specifically addressing this to Mr. Marleau as a renowned co-author of a book on procedure and process in the House of Commons. My concern is, in the last minority Parliament we ended up with a tie vote on a confidence measure where the Speaker had to, and rightly so, vote for the status quo, which is his role, and he maintained the government. The Speaker could find himself--especially in a minority situation, I would suggest--in a situation where if he were to impose that type of sanction to effectively disenfranchise a member, if he did it on the part of one opposition member, it's conceivable in that particular situation that the government would be maintained, or arguably, if it were a government member who was the problem and lost the right to vote in the chamber, then the government would fall, and it would be determined by the Speaker.
I would ask you to comment on that. When you say proceed with caution, I would think this is the one area you're getting at, if I could use that term and ask for your comments on that particular scenario. We were in that situation in the last Parliament and could easily be in it in this Parliament.