My suggestion was that she respond to the clerk, because it's a matter for the whole committee to deal with. I find—and you must too—that she's a very businesslike person. I think she'll deal with this in a businesslike manner.
I do want to deal with something else that just occurred to me as I was reading through it. Early on, when this debate started, I engaged in an extemporaneous rant, if that is the right word, vis-à-vis Minister Chagger's paper and Mr. Simms' motion to this committee. I argued at the time that it seemed improbable that Mr. Simms had read the paper and proposed his motion within an hour—or an hour and 18 minutes, whatever the time was—between Minister Chagger's paper being made public and Mr. Simms' motion being submitted to the committee.
He subsequently, in the context of a debate in the House, corrected a misapprehension that I had at the time. He said that he seen the paper a number of days in advance. I think he said it was three days or around that period of time; it was less than a week but certainly more than 48 hours. It was somewhere in that range. At the time, I just absorbed that information, but the little bell that it should have set off was only triggered as I was reading this letter earlier. I realized that Mr. Simms' motion therefore was presumably prepared based upon his reading of the House leader's discussion paper before he was aware that Minister Gould would be asking us to undertake these matters.
Of course, both the discussion paper and Mr. Simms' motion were introduced on March 10. Minister Gould was before this committee on March 9. It occurs to me that therefore he would have seen the discussion paper on March 7, say, and possibly could have written up his motion without an awareness of the conflicts. That may explain why we find a situation for which I mentioned the analogy of the left and right hand not knowing what the other is doing, but certainly the situation of two ministers asking for outcomes that are ultimately not both achievable at the same time, and both for the same use of the committee's time. We should always try to look for the most innocent available explanation for something. That is one that occurs to me and may explain this problem.
I wanted to outline all of this in more detail because it's my view that the Standing Orders are a matter of critical importance, but they are a matter that (a) can wait and (b) can be subdivided into subsidiary components to be dealt with one at a time, which I think it is not only the businesslike way of dealing with them, but quite literally the only way of dealing with them that will not produce a real dog's breakfast.
Moving from the basic agenda discussion, I want to go to something that the House leader, Minister Chagger, said last week and then repeated over the course of the weekend. I made it the subject of a question in question period. Given that we on the opposition side were talking about the need for a consensus before moving forward, she said, well, effectively, that means that if the opposition, one or the other parties, doesn't like it, we can't move forward with standing order changes, which is exactly what it means. She said that represents effectively a veto. Here I think I'm getting her quote exactly right: we cannot let the opposition have “a veto” over our campaign promises.
I want to discuss that. It gets into something that has always interested me, and that should be of interest to all of us, and that is mandate theory, classical mandate theory. What is the mandate of a government? What is a government legitimately able to do following an election?
There are different theories about this, sometimes expressed like this: what is a member of Parliament legitimately able to do? It's in the famous speech by Edmund Burke to the electors of Bristol when he was the member of Parliament for Bristol. He indicated that he thought what they should be doing is choosing the person who they thought had the best judgment and then relying upon that judgment, even when that judgment on individual issues conflicted with their own.