Mr. Speaker, there are three things that are very important here.
One is that the justice committee, and in particular the chair of the justice committee to whom some of this seems to be addressed in the person of myself, has every intention of following the order of the House that we received in our committee through our clerk.
Number two, we take very seriously the issue of impaired driving in this country. I have confirmed to at least one justice critic in the last 24 hours the significance of that review and the fact that I am looking forward to undertaking it.
Number three, had the Reform House leader referred to the proceedings of the committee in preparing for today, and he may have, I do not know, he would have found that we even talked at some point about how extensive this review would be.
Having said that, Mr. Speaker, it is important for you to know that when we received the order of reference from Journals branch the order of reference was not time dated. There was no reference in that order to May 15.
As a result of that, apparently the member who is interested in this motion in the first place wrote to me. We have heard part of the letter. The rest of the letter indicates an undertaking, as I recall from writing the letter which I do not have here, that we would deal with this issue as soon as we possibly could.
It is important however for the House to know that this schedule is not drawn up in a vacuum. This schedule is drawn up after consultation not just with a steering committee but with all members of the committee who represent all parties. I point out that the Reform Party has three members on that committee, none of whom has ever suggested that this is of the highest priority to them.
There is a problem here and that is assuming the order we received from the House was not time dated, and I believe that to be the case, then what do we put aside in order to accommodate the interest of a member of Parliament who is not a member of the committee and who does not attend our committee proceedings? Do we tell victims of crime on whose work we are operating that their work is less important than the work of this member? Do we tell persons with disabilities that we are sorry, we cannot work on the amendments to the human rights code right now because we have to do work that has come to us from outside our committee? Do we tell the victims of crime, the police community and others that we are sorry that we cannot do our work to establish a DNA data bank because one member of the Reform Party has another agenda?
This is a terrible situation in which our committee is put. I see you signalling me, Mr. Speaker, but there is a lot more at operation here than would be suggested.
Let me say this, Sir. We have never sought to defy, directly or indirectly or inadvertently, an order of this House. The order we have does not—