Mr. Speaker, I agree with your analysis that committees have consistently been the masters of their own destiny and I think that is the way this place has always run.
There are a couple of things you may want to know about what happened today in committee. Eventually the members of the Bloc Quebecois stormed out of the meeting and things ran much smoother after that. But before that you should know that there was an agreement among the parties, an informal agreement as has been mentioned. I thought it was all agreed to. As usually happens in a committee where members take turns going from the government side back and forth and so on, I stood up on my first intervention and said we may want to have these witnesses back if we are not satisfied with the conclusions we reached today and so on.
The Bloc Quebecois House leader came in about three-quarters of the way through the meeting, not having taken part in the earlier discussions whatsoever. He decided he did not like the rules of the game and decided he wanted to change them.
The committee then moved to formalize and sustain the ruling of the chair. There was a motion, do we sustain the ruling of the chair. That motion passed easily, of course. The Bloc stormed out and so on.
Perhaps it was a Freudian slip earlier that this was not a gag order on the Bloc, this whole thing is a gag.