Evidence of meeting #76 for Public Safety and National Security in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was chair.
A video is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
Chair, I think the way to have an orderly and well-structured committee is to recognize the clear rules that come from our traditions in Parliament—
Liberal
Chris Bittle Liberal St. Catharines, ON
This is not related to the debate. I think Mr. Genuis is again trying to come back on your ruling. He is doing indirectly what he can't do directly and needs to move on. Or perhaps you should exercise your discretion as chair, if he's not going to be relevant to the topic at hand, to move on with the speakers list.
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
May I address the point of order, Chair?
Liberal
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
May I address the point of order, Chair?
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ron McKinnon
—you are off topic. I would ask you to get back on topic.
If you wish to address the point of order, carry on, on this point of order.
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
Chair, have you invited me to comment on the point of order or to return to my comments? I wasn't clear.
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
Okay. Thank you, Chair.
The rules of the committee very clearly provide to members to comment on matters that are presently being debated, and I think every one of the speeches before me has commented at some length on the context of the situation the committee finds itself in. I intend to be more brief in commenting on that context than others have been, but it would be unfortunate to find that rules were being selectively enforced in a different way for some members as opposed to others.
That concludes my comment on the point of order. I'll now proceed to make further comments on the substantive matter at hand, Chair.
There ought to be clear and consistent enforcement of the rules of the committee. Those rules come from the rule book, from our long-standing traditions, and all members should be committed to the clear—
Conservative
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
—if they wish the committee to function well.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ron McKinnon
Order.
Mr. Genuis, please come to order. I called your name several times. You must have heard it.
I would ask you to confine your remarks to the matter at hand and not to question the rules and how they're being enforced. If you wish to bring that up as a separate matter at some other time.... We are engaged right now in a debate on the motion put forward by Mr. Julian and the amendment proposed by Mr. Shipley. Please try to confine your remarks to those matters.
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
Thank you, Chair. I will move on at this point, because I think you've actually made my argument for me better than I could have myself.
On the issue of the witnesses present, as well, I just want to touch on that, though. This is the reality—
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ron McKinnon
Mr. Genuis, we've dealt with that. Let's move on.
The witnesses have been invited. We have asked the committee if it's okay to release them. We're not able to do so at this time—
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
Chair, every other member who has spoken as part of this debate has addressed this matter. I haven't even finished a sentence on the matter and you're interrupting me and preventing me from doing so.
Again, the selective application of the rules by a member of the Liberal caucus is transparent. It's not in your interest to show such flagrant disregard for the consistency of the rules of the committee. It just undermines your credibility before this committee in the public mind. I know that it might seem convenient in the moment not to enforce the rules—
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
—but my suggestion to you is that the institution depends on your willingness to do so—
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ron McKinnon
Order.
Mr. Genuis, please stop. You can have personal grievances with how I manage the meeting, but please, let's get back on topic here. We're debating Mr. Julian's motion subject to Mr. Shipley's amendment. Let's stick to that topic.
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
I will, Chair. I do want to say, with respect to you, that it is not a personal grievance. It is a concern for the integrity of our processes that should rise above individuals' opinions of one another or the parties they are a part of.
Now, I do hope that I will be able to say something regarding the presence of the witnesses here in due course, and the rules, of course, would allow me to do so under normal circumstances.
The motion that Mr. Julian has brought before the committee identifies many individuals who should appear before the committee: the Minister of Public Safety; the commissioner of Correctional Service Canada; the deputy minister of public safety; the correctional investigator; the federal ombudsman for victims of crime; Tim Danson; a representative or representatives of the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers; and a representative or representatives of the Union of Safety and Justice Employees.
By my count, that is eight individuals and/or entities. In some cases, the entities will send multiple people to the same meeting, naturally, as happens. The proposal is that all of those people would appear in one three-hour meeting. I would submit to this committee that these are good names and organizations to hear from with respect to the matter of the transfer of Paul Bernardo from maximum- to medium-security prison, but I would respectfully suggest that hearing from all those people in the course of one three-hour meeting is fundamentally not an adequate way of dealing with the subject matter.
It requires a number of things to be in place. For one, it requires all of these people to be available on the same day. If we hear, for instance, that the union is not available on a given day but is available on a different day, and that the minister is available on the day the union is not available but not available on other days, then the committee will be in the position of needing to schedule that one meeting—and one meeting only, as authorized by this motion—at a time when either the minister or the union is not available, when it would obviously, logically, make much more sense to have those meetings take place on different days and to allow the committee to be more flexible in response to the availability of the various people we wish to hear from.
The—
