Thank you, Chair.
I'm going to try to stay on exclusively procedural grounds. I know there's a variety of opinion on the substance of this type of legislation and its purpose.
There are three issues of procedure that I think are very important, and Mr. Hill brings up, properly, one of those.
Procedural fairness and natural justice, first of all, require that someone has an opportunity to do two things, at least: one is to know the case against that person, and by way of a decision, there's an administrative hearing or another type of hearing; and the other is that they have a chance to answer the case. We seem to have got ourselves into a position here where we're denying that procedural fairness.
It goes to a conversation we had, I believe—and I'll be quickly corrected if I'm not right—in open session last week, about what should be in camera and what shouldn't be and what should the penalties be, as Mr. Hill and Mr. Lukiwski mentioned earlier, for breaching that confidence of in camera meetings. And I think we came to some agreement that, first of all, we should limit the situations where we are in camera to where it's really necessary and not just get into the habit of going in camera because it's just easier, or whatever, or it's the way it's been done in the past. So on the one hand and against clear criteria, limit why we go in camera and then go very harshly on the people who breach that confidentiality, having decided it in a very reasoned and restrictive way.
We have a situation now where we get to the second procedural problem, which is that there is an opportunity for a member to challenge the decision of a subcommittee before the full committee, which is what we're doing today, but that person was never--nor even are we, in the fullness of our size--able to know the reasons for the decision that is being appealed to us. That's a second illogic here. There's the procedural unfairness, but there's also an illogic to it.
The third is the illogic I mentioned previously, which I won't dwell on, but I think that as members of the committee and looking at the Standing Orders, we should try to deal with a situation, if it's in the future, if it's not now, where you have an amendment ruled out of order because it's beyond the scope and yet it's before the subcommittee, unacceptable in the form of a bill because it's substantially beyond the scope. There just seems to be something there that's inconsistent, to me.
So whether it's for now and on this issue or for the future, I think we have some procedural work to do. I'm grateful for Mr. Hill's description of the evolution of private members' bills and I'm grateful that we've evolved this far, but I think we have to be careful in a real, legitimate concern not to take up the time of the House improperly or unnecessarily and still deal with some of these procedural issues.
I think Mr. Silva is caught in this procedural illogic at the moment. I'm not sure how we solve that now other than just voting on the issue, but those are my feelings of the general procedure we're in.