It's all based on going to precedents. He never stands up and says we're doing this because it's what I want—never. He always makes a link, regardless of who is in the chair, to either a standing order or—in the absence of a standing order—a practice of the House, which is our version of a convention. The Standing Orders take priority. They sweep away practices if they contradict them, but with practices otherwise governing the way he behaves.
No actual rule requires the Speaker to vote the way he does when he breaks a tie. I would be astonished at a Speaker who breaks a tie in a manner different from that. Indeed, I think it would be the end of that person's career as Speaker. I think they would bring down condemnation on themselves for having failed to represent the practices of the House.
Here we are with a unifying theme. I get the idea behind this. I don't know how a Speaker steps in and effectively separates a bill into two parts on his or her own without engaging effectively in a discussion of what the unifying themes are. I guess the Speaker could rely on an advisory group, but where does he get that advisory group? How is it constituted? The normal way is that it would be some kind of committee. That means the committee is set up, a committee like this one. Actually it would be this committee or something parallel to it, which is a replica in miniature of the House. The government members don't divide the bill. The opposition members say yes, divide the bill. They might very well say, “We see different unifying themes here.”
If you get a bill that says “a bill to protect animals from abuse and make certain changes to the Elections Act”, that's got two unifying themes that are nice and clear. But in all fairness, that particular unifying theme, that kind of omnibus bill, you don't see. You see something more like this. The omnibus is appropriate. You see a budget bill. Within the budget bill, you see a bunch of stuff that is not really about the allocation of funds and could have been put outside. But you've got a whole bunch of these things, so how would you as a Speaker go along and pare off the bits that are not about taxes, revenues, tax credits, and the allocation of funds, that become stand-alones? I really don't know how you would do that.
Maybe, at a technical level, the clerks who design legislation at the Library of Parliament, the Justice Department, and the PCO, could do that stuff. But for the Speaker, it's not his area of expertise. It could by chance be someone who formerly filled one of those roles, where he could have expertise added to him, but that's....
Do you start to see what I'm saying when I note there's a lot of stuff here? We are being presented with the entire smorgasbord on a cruise ship and told, it's your job to eat this before you're allowed to leave the room, and you've got to leave the room by half an hour from now or something like that.