Thank you, Mr. Chair.
My advice would have been that, given that this initial recommendation was overruled by members of the committee, and of course you may recall the chair ruled that my concerns were legitimate, the chair then ruled, and he did so on the advice of legal counsel. At that point his ruling was challenged and he.... What happens at that point is that debate ceases, there's a vote, and that's that. There's no further debate or discussion, though that's a process that, I must say, bears some resemblance to what seems to be going on here.
We could deal with this in three minutes, as long as you accept what we've put on the table, with no amendments, no consideration of doing things differently from how we want. If you want anything other than our force majeure, you're out of luck.
That's basically what was done then. This, as I've complained on a number of occasions, seems to be a method of operating that has been adopted in recent months, I guess in the past year, by the Liberals in particular--sometimes with the assistance of the other parties--to simply constantly challenge the chair and use this as, effectively, a way of suspending all the rules we have here for the protection of the right of dissent of minority opinion, of amendment, of fair play, essentially. Obviously that is most regrettable, as I say, and most uncharacteristic for this committee, which was until recently, I thought, a model of decorum and reasonable behaviour. It was an island of sanity, if you like, in the midst of other committees that were behaving, I thought, less well.
I was a member of another committee. In fact, I was a member of the ethics committee before the summer. Compared with their behaviour and some of the antics that were got up to in that committee, we seemed to be eminently reasonable, moderate, practical, and well mannered. That has unfortunately slipped away, though not entirely. I think on the whole, the people I deal with are good, reasonable people in and of themselves, but the practices, certainly, that they've engaged in are not, I think, practices that become them as members, or are not up to the standards we have reason to expect from members of this committee, based on past performance. That's what is really unfortunate.
I would have recommended dealing with this subject matter, seeing that we are in a position in which we have to deal with it, given that the opposition is unwilling to withdraw the original motion, given the fact that—