Thank you, Mr. Chairman, through you to Mr. Hill.
I think what prompted me to kind of deviate from my script and throw in the business of the House being leery of imposing restrictions on anything that would lessen a committee being master of its own proceedings is really my ongoing fear of the law of unintended consequences. I agree with the way you describe the dilemma. I had discussions with my colleagues, and certainly my colleagues from committees, who understandably enough are committee crusaders and are sort of whacking me over the head to explain that committees are masters of their own procedures. That's always been the case, and so it should remain.
My difficulty, philosophically, is that you can't have a creature of the House that somehow or other.... It seems to me that a member's duty to the House as a whole to vote in the chamber has to supersede his duty as a committee member. When those two are in conflict, as they were in the case that Mr. Rajotte brought before the House, it really does create quite a dilemma.
Again, fast forwarding, I can foresee a situation such as you were describing, where you have a potentially very divisive or very controversial issue before a committee, and the way to get the committee to shut down is to provoke a vote in the House on something like, “That the member be now heard”, so the tail is wagging the dog and you are handling what's going on in committee by provoking something in the House. It's that kind of disequilibrium that I would be worried about.
Now, that being said, we were suggesting that there might be a way--and the reason we are suggesting it at the beginning of a Parliament, when the committee sets down its housekeeping rules, is that this is really before controversy tends to engulf committees and when people are planning their work, in perhaps a more cool-headed moment--to say this committee will suspend its hearings to answer any division bells and then will resume sitting. But if, from the whips' perspective, they feel it's a bit chaotic to have every committee looking to do that as a housekeeping measure, that could be put into the Standing Orders, and there what you're saying is that you'll suspend hearings so as to avoid that particular unintended consequence.
That's really all I'm flagging, because one of the things I've found over the years here is that you really have to be very cautious of producing rules to deal with specific irritants, because if you press down here, it pops up there.