Thank you very much. I thought that would be a safe place to start, Chair, to pick up with the compliments to the chair on his fine job. That's been proven again this morning by the way you are handling this business, giving the caucuses an opportunity to see if we can find a way procedurally out of this to allow us to give due regard to the matter in front of us, but also to recognize that other important work needs to be done.
I did give those words of praise a little bit tongue in cheek, but I did mean them sincerely, and I do mean it that this morning is another example of good chairing as far as I'm concerned.
On the matter at hand, we appreciate very much the clerk doing the homework for us. Unfortunately the answers lead to us realizing the worst-case scenario, that indeed this is not some minor, little matter. This is indeed going to deny rights to independent members of parliament that they currently enjoy.
I have to say again how unacceptable it is that something that's this big a change is being done in such a ham-fisted manner.
I understand that it's just not as simple as coming in here and doing a strategic strike on certain members' rights. It's happening at other committees with the same motion, so clearly there's a concerted effort on the part of the government to ensure that the rights currently enjoyed by independent members are snuffed out. And so it does speak to how much respect the government really has for independent members of Parliament and Parliament itself. To bring it in this fashion and to be willing to hold....
The only reason we didn't hold up the important work at the last meeting was that there was a mechanism available, and luckily we had enough goodwill between the House leaders and whips that we were able to get that report to Parliament and other important business going, but this government was prepared to hold that up to ram this through. That's what's starting us on a wrong foot before we even get to the substantive matters.
I want to remind colleagues that the response we just got from the clerk was as a result of a very legitimate, intelligent, obvious question from Mr. Julian, which was whether, if we make this change, there will be other unintended consequences—or in the case of the government, intended consequences perhaps.
Then we asked further about it, when the clerk responded that it was certainly a valid but complex question. Given the importance of what clerks tell us at committees and how that affects the work we do, and being a responsible clerk to arguably the most important committee we have, she wanted to make sure that the advice given would be dead on accurate and said that it would take at least 48 hours to get that information.
So the next common sense thing happened, and that was a motion to table. We have a very important matter in front of us. We've asked for information at the first review of this motion. The clerk has advised that it takes 48 hours to get us that information. The government didn't offer it up by way of saying they already had that; they sat there dead quiet. So we moved a motion saying let's table this for two days to get us to where we are today, and in the meantime at that meeting we would get on. This committee had important work.
Some of the work of this committee is indeed allowing and making possible the work of other groups and other committees. This kind of thing matters.