Excellent. Thank you very much, Mr. Therrien.
It's truly a pleasure for me to be able not only to discuss the motion before us, but also to recall the history of how our Parliament has evolved. Not only do we have a piece of paper to guide us, but the entire history of its development.
Let's get back to what we can already do to manage prorogation more effectively. We said that the government, through the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons or someone else, once the Prime Minister had decided to prorogue Parliament, had to provide an explanation within 30 to 60 days, as I recall. In any event, a report had to be written.
As I pointed out in a in another speech, I found the report really thorough. I was able to go through it and saw that the report had been tabled in the House as required. It explained the reasons for the prorogation to the House.
Don't forget that the confidence vote had already been held. When the throne speech was delivered was when the opposition parties had the opportunity to indicate that they were dissatisfied and did not have confidence in our government. The vote was held, and the report tabled and released.
However, some people were not satisfied with this process. So here we are at the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, looking at a motion introduced by Ms. Vecchio requesting further discussion and a review of all the reasons for prorogation, completely ignoring all the debate on the amendment put forward by Mr. Turnbull, which in my view was altogether reasonable. Using the original motion as a starting point, Mr. Turnbull made suggestions that would keep the essentials and make them acceptable to all members of the committee.
I am disappointed that the opposition parties did not agree to this amendment. We could have come to an agreement. We could have addressed the key components of what my opposition colleagues wanted to examine. We could have moved on to what is important, by which I mean the fact that we are still in a pandemic management situation.
If the opposition parties had voted against the throne speech in September, elections would have been triggered without any proper safety measures in place to manage the serious circumstances we were facing in 2020.
The situation is is still serious, even though the vaccination rate has risen to over 50%, and we are very happy about that. In Quebec, vaccination is going well and people are pleased about it. I spoke with my neighbours and some people who were walking, properly distanced, in the street this weekend and I did some cycling. I found that people were satisfied with the progress, but didn't want to do anything foolish. In fact, no one wants to go backwards.
I'm back here after spending a nice weekend celebrating our historical heritage in very pleasant weather. It was a harbinger of things to come. But back here we find ourselves exactly where we were a few months ago, studying the same motion from Ms. Vecchio. I'm going to keep my comments about the motion for later, because I have a lot to do. I already spoke about paragraph (a) of the motion. Having looked at the contents of the other paragraphs, I can tell you that I'll have a lot to say about each of them. As I just mentioned, I'm going to keep it all to myself for now.
That concludes my remarks.