Mr. Speaker, you have heard two sides of the story. I believe that when you check Beauchesne's you will find that both the House leader for the government and the House leader for the official opposition have quoted that portion of Beauchesne's accurately.
Mr. Speaker, I would ask you in your ruling to consider two things. First, the ruling which was read from Beauchesne's referred to activity in 1968, times almost in another era. Nowadays when ministers are assigned responsibilities by the prime minister they are assigned extensive responsibilities, in some cases in provincial arenas.
For example, Mr. Speaker, I would ask you to consider the case of the infrastructure program where no infrastructure money, billions of dollars, can be approved without the minister in charge of a province signing off for it. In other words, it is not fair in today's reality to say to the official opposition you cannot ask questions about that person's provincial responsibilities when billions of dollars of taxpayer moneys are signed off by the appropriate provincial minister.
I have dealt in my province with the minister of fisheries, who has dealt with transit bus funding in my riding. They may be totally unrelated but I have asked questions in written form and I would hope I could ask in the House of Commons if that minister is responsible for signing off or not signing off for this kind of money.
I believe it is the privilege of an opposition party to ask questions germane to that minister's provincial responsibilities.
Mr. Speaker, I would ask that you take into account the different era we are working in today. I am not sure if the proceedings of the House were even televised in 1968. They probably were not. It is now a different era. We have a different political reality. I would ask you to consider today's reality as you read Beauchesne's.
My second point is that if the government has the right, and I think it does and should, to assign questions to different ministers, I would ask for a bit of tit for tat. I am not sure if that is in Beauchesne's. It seems to me that the government has the privilege of assigning to anyone in its cabinet the answering of any question under any jurisdiction on any issue of the day. We have seen it happen when we asked a question of the defence minister and the defence minister did not want to answer it so the government gave it to someone else on the other end of the row. When that happens that means the jurisdiction is totally different from the main jurisdiction of that minister.
If they are allowed to just pick and choose who they want to answer a question, often for political reasons, then I think we should have the privilege on this side of the House to direct our questions to whomever we wish on that side.
They may not choose to answer. That is their privilege, but we certainly should have the privilege to direct our questions to whomever we want on that side.