All right.
I come back to the issue of consultation and secrecy, but actually, before I do that, Mr. Chair, with your permission, I actually meant to raise this as a separate point of order. I hope you'll indulge me.
The issue of adjournment in these kinds of proceedings is, of course, a bit touchy in this committee. There's an interesting history, and as we are engaging in essentially the same process once again, I'll just suggest that what we do with respect to determining how to adjourn and the search for implied consent will have more weight with those who are trying to figure out how to revise House of Commons Procedure and Practice—What is it right now? It's Bosc and Gagnon—than will what has happened elsewhere.
So I would like to make the suggestion that the practice of looking around the room and seeing if there is consent, and taking one's time in doing this, as you just did, ought to govern us just as much when the—I don't know how to put this any different way—party of which the chair is a member would like proceedings to wrap up as it does when the party of which the chair is not a member would like things to wrap up. There was an inconsistency last time. I think the process of looking around the room, seeking consent, and taking at least several seconds to do that is appropriate.
I can't remember how much time you took. Maybe it was 10 seconds. That, I think, is a reasonable thing to do, to see about consent. Consent implies “I'm looking to see if there's a consensus”, and not “I'm looking to see if there's a majority.” That could be dealt with by means of someone moving adjournment. That's where you establish majority and so that's why I asked Mr. Richards if he was going to move adjournment. We then would have found out where the majority sits. There would have been a vote.
In the absence of a vote, presumably the assumption is that any one member can deny a consensus, and everything we do is structured around that basic assumption that you have to move to an actual vote in one form or another in order to establish that the majority is in charge. I'm just saying that so that we can make sure we're consistent, should we be here for some length of time, in the way in which we wrap up these proceedings, when the government decides that they would like the proceedings to be wrapped up.
Let me now turn to the issues of this very expansive definition of secrecy and of privacy in particular. I find that there are certain buzzwords that point to salutary and widely accepted concepts but in a fuzzy way that permits the same word to have different meanings at different times, based on the convenience of the speaker—I don't mean the Speaker of the House; I mean the person then holding the floor—around terms like privacy and dignity. These are terms that, when narrowly constructed, have unanimous support of everybody, the vast majority of Canadians. When very, very broadly constructed, they are used as a way of withholding information, disclosure, access, democracy, and so on. We saw the term “privacy” being used today for that purpose. The implication of Mr. Bittle's words was that—