The member for Vancouver Quadra understands the real problem and its significance. He first said that, given the fact that our colleague issued a communiqué on October 26 outside Parliament, outside the House, he was no longer entitled to his privileges, and that this matter must therefore settled in court.
For the information of the member for Vancouver Quadra, who may not have followed all the news-and I am not criticizing him for that-the matter was brought before the courts twice, once in Quebec and once in Ontario, in proceedings against our colleague from Charlesbourg. In both cases, the action was dismissed. In one case, the judge even said that he considered our colleague's communiqué as a job offer. The issue, therefore, is clear. Taking this to a civil court of law would not be very successful.
If civil proceedings do not work, and if the House is not concerned-since he said in his last answer to our Reform Party colleague whose riding I forgot that the House of Commons is the wrong place to debate the question, having even told him to go to the justice committee or introduce a bill-I hope the member for Vancouver Quadra will not disappoint me tomorrow-since the government has announced that it would gag the House-and will in fact oppose the Reform Party's motion and, consequently, of course, also oppose his party's amendment, which was cooked up on the sly with the Reform Party's complicity. It is not something to brag about, but I knew he was intelligent enough to avoid voting on this amendment.
Now, I think it is also important to realize that the Reform Party's motion is flawed. We were just told that the real intent of the motion was to give a new definition of the word "sedition". As I had some time this afternoon in the House, listening to all the high flown rhetoric, I checked in the dictionaries we have here.
First, I discovered there were two meanings to the word "sedition". There is plain sedition and military sedition. Those are two very different things.