Mr. Speaker, it is a point of distress to us that when a member of the opposition puts forward a motion of the day, as the Conservatives have done today, the government can hijack the purpose of that motion that we are debating by basically negating it. We have had such absurd cases where the government has actually moved an amendment as to say “delete all the words after the word `that' and substitute therefor”.
According to Beauchesne's citation 567, “the object of an amendment”—and this would certainly apply to a subamendment—“may be either to modify a question in such a way as to increase its acceptability—to the House”. I am just citing parts of it. What we are doing here is we are talking about increasing the acceptability of this particular motion to the House, the government's amendment having hijacked the thing.