Mr. Chairman, the parliamentary secretary's response to Mr. Bevington's question is a clear indication of why we would have to have somebody before the committee who actually knew what this meant.
My sense of what Mr. Bevington is saying is divided into two parts. I am sure--the parliamentary secretary has already said so--he is not in a position to be able to answer this. We're talking about the minister's authority and the minister's responsibility. Under our system of government, the responsibility is always vested in the government. It cannot be delegated to anybody else. Someone else can have delegated authority to execute a decision, but the responsibility for that decision is always resident in the executive, in the minister.
So under this clause--and this is, I think, why Mr. Bevington may have difficulty with it, and why I have difficulty with it--we're not even empowered to ask the minister to delegate his responsibility, because he can't do it. If that interpretation is correct, then I think we need to maybe have the law clerk of the House before us to tell us whether this would be acceptable. If in fact we can do that and the parliamentary secretary's interpretation that everything always stays with the minister anyway, no matter what...then we can deal with the clause as we ought to, in a thoughtful, deliberate fashion.
Under the circumstances, the answer I've heard makes it as difficult for me as it makes it for Mr. Bevington to say that we can authorize the minister to eliminate or to delegate his responsibility. He can't. He can delegate his authority. That's why we have a bureaucracy. That's why the deputy minister exists. That's why everybody below the deputy minister exists, to execute the authority of the minister.
I'm not sure we even need this, especially given that Monsieur Laframboise has already proposed an amendment that you say we must deal with after we deal with this one. Mr. Laframboise's proposal--even though it's not yet on the table, but you have said we have to refer to it later--addresses that issue.
I wonder if you would revisit your decision and make a decision as to whether, for the sake of clarity and moving along, we could ask the government member to withdraw amendment G-7.1--which I guess would now have to be numbered differently--in respect of the Bloc's amendment to clause 8. At the very least, you would clarify that constitutional issue that's raised by the words “responsibility and authority”.