Mr. Speaker, I take peculiar pleasure in speaking to this motion. This is quite incredible because it pertains to one of my direct ancestors. I refer to one Thomas Percy who, on November 4, 1605, was chased by the soldiers of James I because he had been involved in the gunpowder plot.
Thomas Percy joined up with Guy Fawkes and they rented a building next to the Houses of Parliament, spent six months burrowing through the wall into the cellar under the House of Lords. They filled it with 20 barrels of gun powder and intended to blow up the entire House of Lords, the privy council, James I, and hopefully get his successor as well.
The plot failed, as members know, and my ancestor was pursued on the road to Dover and was captured at an inn where the king's
men rode up in the rain. Thomas Percy and other members of the conspiracy had laid their gunpowder out to dry in front of the fireplace and a spark ignited it. There was an explosion and the king's men successfully captured my ancestor, Thomas Percy. He was hanged, drawn and quartered, all in the name of trying to obtain parliamentary privilege for members of Parliament.
This issue of privilege goes back for centuries in parliamentary tradition. In fact, the English civil war was fought over this issue. It is not just a matter of summoning documents, it is also a fundamental issue of free speech and the ability of MPs to have freedom from arbitrary arrest or interference by the crown, by the state. James I, who was the target of the gunpowder plot, on several occasions arrested members of Parliament. This led directly to the English civil war which, I am happy to report, parliamentarians won against the royalists. This is one reason why we have privileges entrenched in the Canadian Parliament today.
I should say that privilege, the right to speak freely in the House of Commons, the right to order documents, the right to have true witness from those we call before us, is something that has been fought long and hard for in the British tradition.
However, we Canadians were fortunate because in 1867 we adopted these privileges in the Constitution Act without a war, without bloodshed and they became an essential part of our parliamentary tradition and an essential part of the way the House of Commons functions. If we cannot have immunity from arrest, if we cannot have freedom of speech and if we cannot summon the evidence that we must have in order to make our decisions clearly, then this Parliament cannot function adequately and serve the people who elected it.
I come to Motion No. 42 from the member for Scarborough-Rouge River. He raises the question of whether we have left behind the sense of privilege. Is there something the matter? Are we getting the return on the sense of privilege as it pertains to the summoning of documents and questioning of witnesses? I suggest we are not.
Indeed, what was conferred on us by the Constitution Act of 1867 we are losing through a process of neglect. As MPs we have over many decades failed to establish our need and our right to have the proper documents and the proper testimony from witnesses who come before us.
Indeed, I regret to say that when I was elected as an MP for the first time in 1993, veteran MPs who had been in the House previously told me that there was not much point in taking part in standing committees because it was all by rote. It was all decided by the government in power. It was all decided by parliamentary secretaries who sat in the standing committees.
There has been criticism in the House about the performance of standing committees. Nevertheless I have been very satisfied, for the most part, that MPs who are willing to speak out in standing committees, whether they are opposition MPs or government MPs, can be heard and can make a difference.
It is true-and this is where the motion of the member for Scarborough-Rouge River is so very important-that the one place where we hit a log jam is the repeated instances where officials called before the committee have refused to testify or have refused to give an answer.
The motion is long overdue. It merely reminds Parliament of a privilege it has had for centuries, centuries of parliamentary tradition that should require proper testimony and evidence before the committee.
I remind the House of something that we implement very rarely. Parliament has the option of compelling testimony under oath. This is one occasion on which we can bring people before us. If they fail to satisfy us, they are actually subject to a penalty equivalent to perjury.
In conclusion, looking down the centuries I must say that we in Parliament should remember the origins of privilege in the British tradition which wars were fought over. We should remember that every one of us on all sides of the House have a fundamental obligation to defend the rights of every MP to obtain good information and adequate testimony both in committees and in any other location on Parliament Hill.