Really, all we asked was this. You gave us a discussion paper from your House leader. Obviously, that's important. Your House leader is important. What the House leader does is important. When the House leader tables a document and says these are some of the things we're looking at doing, that's important. That's not white noise. That is about as real as it gets: the parliamentary leader of the government in the House tabling something. And then a member of this committee a couple of hours later tables a motion. Okay. Before I even get into the details, let's just say that it was not what it is here, but something else. It was a discussion paper followed by a notice of motion coming to the committee, which tells you that it means it's probably going to be debated fairly soon, otherwise why go to the trouble of doing a notice of motion now. Instead, you'd wait till it's closer to when you're going to do it. All we asked earlier today was could we please just not have this discussion until after we've had a chance to take it to our caucus? Could we do that? No, no, no was the response. I still haven't heard a good explanation why the government thinks it's okay to force members to take positions on motions and policy, and deny us the opportunity to consult with our own caucus first. You can't defend that. You can't defend that on any subject matter, let alone the rules of engagement.
So right from the get-go to the current moment, to the time we took about an hour or so ago, we keep trying to find some way to get some kind of fairness here. The only thing, Chair, that's giving us some hope that we're going to get our say is that we've got the right to filibuster when we have to. Does that mean that we can stop the government? No. At the end of the day, they're going to win. Every vote we have, they win, 10 times out of 10, so the most we can do is to delay things long enough to try to get the attention of the public and say, folks, notwithstanding the usual when we're raising flags you ought to pay attention to, this is really, really serious, and we're prepared to run the risk of being accused of being obstructionists to give you the opportunity to see what's going on. And then when you look at it, make your judgment. If they think we're being obstructionist, then I'm going to get the emails. I'm going to hear from them. I have a hunch that's not what's going to come in the next few days and weeks as this plays itself out. Why? Because the unfairness is so blatant. The heavy-handedness is so blatant, the ham-fisted nature of it.
So here we are, it's close to 10:30 at night, and we have wasted I can't imagine how much money supporting this. It takes a lot of people and a lot of labour to keep a committee like this going, from our own staff, our personal staff, to the committee staff, to the support staff, to the technicians, to our interpreters, to our security people, to the buses that have to keep running. All these things are happening because the government has decided that the opposition has too much power around here, and that we're going to fix that. That's why we're here. I'm sitting here doing the best I can to represent my caucus without even being given and afforded the opportunity to talk to them, and it's tomorrow morning.
Believe me, anybody looking at this, a reasonable person looking at this, would say, at the very least, why couldn't they take it to their colleagues again and ask what they think about it? What was the reason for that again? And so far the only answer I've heard—and I invite the government to jump in if it has have a really good answer, because I'd love to hear it—is that the government is wedded to June 2 as its deadline. Well, la-di-da, what the hell does that mean to us?