Mr. Chair, I would suggest that this is out of order, for two reasons.
In terms of what the House has already considered, the House considered yesterday a substantially similar motion, and Parliament, the House of Commons, decided not to proceed with that motion. As you know, this is a very rare occurrence, Mr. Chair. Ultimately, when a bill is defeated, you can't, the next day, suggest at a committee that the bill be considered. In this case, it was an opposition motion, and it was defeated. Now the Conservatives are proposing substantially the same motion today at committee.
This is something that doesn't have precedent, Mr. Chair. It's shameless that, when Parliament decides something, members of the committee would try to come back with what is substantially the same consideration. It is true that if this was three or four years from now, you could say, “Well, things have substantially changed since Parliament considered this issue, so we should have more discussion and debate on the issue.” In this case, it was yesterday; it was last night, 14 hours ago, when Parliament decided that the motion was inadequate.
I moved an amendment on behalf of the NDP, as you'll recall, Mr. Chair, talking about cracking down on organized crime, cracking down on money laundering, and restoring the cuts to the crime prevention programs that the Harper government put in place. The Conservatives rejected that, so the motion that was offered yesterday in the House was profoundly weak and contained a lot of disinformation. That's why Parliament defeated it. We can't come back the next day and consider substantially the same motion.
As you note, Mr. Chair, the intention would be to “recommend to the House”. The House made the decision yesterday. The intent of the motion today is to recommend to the House the same thing. There is an issue of repetition that is, in all our procedural manuals, something that is very clearly prohibited. You can't keep bringing up the same issue in the same form.
Second, I would suggest that, because it recommends to the House, it is trying to do indirectly what is prohibited directly. In other words, it's trying to use a committee to reconsider something that was considered yesterday by the House of Commons.