Thank you, Mr. Chair.
The subcommittee tells us that it considered the third criterion in declaring this bill non-votable. Something seems illogical to me. There has already been a bill on replacement workers before the House, but the Speaker rejected amendments made by a colleague on the grounds that they exceeded the scope of the bill. We were therefore not able to vote on the amendments because they exceeded the scope of the bill under consideration. Therefore, if we wanted to deal with these amendments on essential services, we needed to draft a new bill.
We had no choice, because the Speaker had ruled. Since we were not able to vote on the amendments to the bill, we put forward a new one. So a new bill was presented, and now we are using the committee's criteria to say that it cannot be votable. Basically, if we go by what is happening, we will never be able to vote on essential services. But the third criterion reads as follows:
Bills and motions must not concern questions that are substantially the same as ones already voted on by the House of Commons in the current session [...]
I repeat “must not concern questions that are substantially the same”. That is the crux of the discussion. Some, probably at the subcommittee, say that given that the general objective of the bill is about replacement workers—and here again, it is about replacement workers—it is the same thing and we cannot vote. Except that there was one very important element, essential services, where we were not able to vote in the House, because the Speaker ruled that this exceeded the scope of the bill.
Since we as MPs were not able to vote on the principle of essential services, and since the new bill includes the concept of essential services, we have to be able to express our opinion on the concept. In that context, I do not understand the subcommittee's decision when it declared that the bill was not votable.