Madam Chair, I think Monsieur Therrien put it quite well.
The nature of some of the responses that were offered by the government House leader essentially highlighted the fact that the Prime Minister is the main decision-maker. Anyway, I won't try to quote him, because I don't have the quotations in front of me. He said things at various times in his testimony, however, that suggested it really was the Prime Minister, at the end of the day, who made these calls.
Nobody knows the mind of the Prime Minister but the Prime Minister. That's why it's important to have him here. One important function of Parliament is to be able to question people, whether it's in question period or at committee. It's a very different kind of questioning that takes place. That's why it was not acceptable that Stephen Harper wouldn't meet with the press gallery. You get different kinds of answers and different kinds of interactions when you have live questioning as opposed to written responses. It's why Order Paper questions are not an adequate substitute for question period. It's why writing the Prime Minister a letter, I don't think, is a substitute, really, for having him here at committee.
I think it's important that the committee establish—this is not news to the committee—the right precedent for this kind of study, if this is indeed a mechanism that's going to persist in our parliamentary culture. If it's the best we can do to try to mitigate political abuse of prorogation, I think it's important that we get the mechanism right. I would thus like to see the Prime Minister here at committee.
What I think is clear from Ms. Vecchio's comments, which I think put it quite well this morning—or this afternoon, I guess, depending where you are in the country—is that the amendment itself that Mr. Turnbull has proposed is not doing the work of a compromise allowing the committee to move forward. I think that has been made clear by the length of the proceedings since its introduction.
What I am hearing is maybe a little bit of movement or willingness to have a conversation. Whatever that conversation is going to issue in will likely be a compromise that does not look like Mr. Turnbull's amendment.
What I would propose, then, is that we have a vote on Mr. Turnbull's amendment, which does not close the debate on the motion overall. What it would do is clear the floor and make it possible for somebody else, at some future point, hopefully after some productive conversation, to propose another amendment that might serve the purpose that Mr. Turnbull had in mind when he presented his originally.
This would allow us to at least have one vote, dispense with one item, and as I say, open the floor to other ideas that might come out of what I think is maybe the most productive conversation we've had at this committee in several months.
That would be my proposal. Maybe we could have a vote on the amendment, clear that, and then allow for this seemingly more productive conversation to take place. Then we could try to move to a solution that much more quickly, if one emerges out of that conversation.