Yes, prima facie. Thank you.
If the Speaker finds a prima facie case, if it looks as though there's enough evidence that there may be something there, it comes to us. Again, for whatever we've been working on, we have to shift gears, because now we're dealing with a colleague, and we always think “that could be me”, don't we? You're trying to be fair-minded and still trying to hold people to account, and then suddenly you get something else thrown at you.
As much as possible, it's a busy committee and it's a nimble committee. We deal with a whole lot of issues. For the most part, we very rarely get like this. Up until now, you could say “never”. For everything that has been thrown at us, no matter how many gears we had to shift, or how many times we were asked to do two or three things at once, we always accepted it as collectively our responsibility and said, “Let's get at 'er.” We would put together a work plan and go to work.
Not now: we can go on making suggestions about how to get off this dime, but that only works if there's a government that wants to get off the dime. Right now, it looks as though the government is more interested in winning at any price, that the Liberal government is so bloody-minded that they want more control. Let's understand, too, that nine times out of ten, more control means that some right that we had somewhere along the line is about to be extinguished, whether it's a time frame, whether it's a “duty to” or a responsibility, or whether it's our ability at committee to speak until we're done.
That's the price to be paid for the government to get what they want. In real negotiations, we'd be tabling a few things that we want. Rather than the nonsense that somehow we should be grateful that maybe the government is only going to take half a loaf from us in terms of the rights we now have rather than the whole loaf, and we should be happy for that, we would rather look at it and say that if they want to take half a loaf away from us, we want to have another half a loaf added, and they can give up some rights.
I think they call that give-and-take. That's what that means. You give a little. We give a little. You have an objective, and we have an objective. Maybe both of us don't like those objectives and we can't come to agreement, but put them together, and maybe we can find a way that we can live with what you want by doing it this way, and you can live with what we want by doing it that way. Lo and behold, we work together and we get a report that we can all agree on.
You know what hasn't been mentioned and needs to be? That's what Canadians want more than anything. We all know how difficult that is in a system designed to be adversarial. Canadians wonder why we can't all work together. Our process, our whole system, is structured around “us” and “them”, “them” being the government that has the power, and “us” over here who don't. To work together only happens when we sincerely want it to happen.
I come back to where Ruby was. There's always the ability—and we've done it—to enter into a process where we really don't know how we're going to resolve the things we don't agree on, but there's enough goodwill, and enough trust and respect, as my friend Mr. Doherty has said, that we're willing to engage in that process, and we'll see where we are on the rest of it.
But that ship has sailed on this one, and now, we in the opposition seem to be the only ones who are trying to find a resolution rather than a victory, because as long as the government indicates that it is going to vote against Mr. Reid's motion, that means that from the get-go the government believes and will reserve the right to use their majority to create a report that only they support. That's what that means.
I can tell you that I spent most of my time here.... When I got here, we were still under a minority Liberal government, but most of the time, prior to this Parliament, I've been here under former prime minister Harper. Instead of this being something extraordinary and unusual, people are asking what's going on with this government: where did all the sunny ways, transparency, and respect go? Instead, this feels like a regular Wednesday in the last regime.