Yes. I think I did say to you that things really went a little differently when the motion came out a couple of hours later, again, in the absence of any discussion.
Remember how we got here. I've said this much publicly because it's as far as I can go. I can't go any further. When we were in camera doing the work of the Chief Electoral Officer, and Mr. Simms' motion was there in front of us, and the government said it wanted to move a motion to go public.... We were in camera. I said, can you give us a heads-up as to what's going on? No.
So now we're going out in public. We know this motion is there. All of a sudden, we figure it out that it does look as though this is some kind of an attack. Sure enough, the motion is coming just like that. When we, the official opposition, did put the amendment that it only be by consensus, the next thing we know, you go to the nuclear option and we go from a filibuster contained to a committee twice a week for a total of four hours into 24 hours seven days a week on the brink of a constituency week. That is not the same approach or the same feelings Mr. LeBlanc left us with by the time he was done.
Yes, you could call it transparency. You could have held it off to the Monday and made it all a sneak attack, but you had to cover it with some kind of what could be looked at as fair play. That way you could point to a procedure and say that you were fair-minded, you did this and this, and you.... Boy, to then link that document with the process you've all but foisted on us and say, “aren't we great for transparency?” is a bit of a stretch.
Again, if it had been just a discussion paper, had it come up at the meeting.... Was it a Tuesday? I'm trying to remember. I think it was a Tuesday, the first committee meeting back from the constituency week, and had you said, “look, you know that discussion paper...”. Or normally what would happen is that, in many cases, Mr. Chan, who often takes the lead on some of the issues for the government, would quickly be coming before the meeting—or even contacting Tyler—and asking if it could be arranged for him to talk to Dave for 10 minutes before the meeting starts, and the same thing with Mr. Richards. That's pretty common. Arnold would do that regularly.
It's to give us a heads-up so that we wouldn't get our backs up and suddenly go, “wait a minute. What's this?”, and start building up whatever defensive walls we have, recognizing that in a battle, we are the weaker partner. We are the weaker participants. It did matter.
What really threw me was when Mr. Chan would not give me the reason why we were going to go public. I'm never opposed to going public unless it's on personnel matters, or all the legal reasons why we should, and what we've agreed on with our own motion here. But when you won't tell us why, and we know there's a discussion paper that was dropped out there and there's a motion that dictates how the report is going to be reviewed and done and puts a deadline on it, and you refuse to even give a simple indication in camera that “we're going to deal with Scotty's motion, Dave”, or just.... There was nothing.
He was just looking at me. He was feeling a little bit embarrassed, I think, and would not or could not say a word about why he was making this motion. Let me tell you this. Any time the government makes a motion and doesn't give you the reason why it's making a motion, there's a good reason for the opposition to suddenly get suspicious. Otherwise, they're not doing their job right.