Mr. Speaker, I rise on the same point of privilege. You indicated that you were going to hear a point of order and that point of order would have been from me. It was basically about the same matter.
I think there are really two questions here. There is the question of the leaking of the government's response prior to the tabling of it in the House of Commons, which I think is reprehensible, shows contempt for parliament, and flies in the face of what I hoped was a growing consensus that there would not be the leaking of documents either in the form of committee reports or in this case in the form of government responses to committee reports.
My initial intention was to rise on a point of order having to do with the fact that the government, the minister's staff and others, whoever, were distributing copies of the government's response to journalists. They had them available outside, I am told, and we in the House could not get a copy until an hour after it was tabled. What kind of system is this where members of parliament are deliberately in a premeditated way kept from having copies of a report that is being made available to the media by the government?
If the government had not made it available and we all had to wait an hour, that is fair ball. We all could have commented in the dark. But the fact is that the government itself was distributing copies of the government's response to the committee report and did not have the decency to put some in the opposition lobby so that opposition members could see it. We asked our people to try to get a copy of the report, but oh no, we would have to wait to get it from the House; we would not get it from the government.
This is at the same time as we have to listen to this sort of pious rhetoric day after day about how government members want to take parliament into their confidence, they want to have another take note debate, they want to show respect for parliament and on and on. We just have to give them a little opening and their real attitude toward parliament shows up like a blinding light. That is the fact that they hold this place in contempt and have actually brought shame on themselves, not on parliament, by the way they conducted themselves yesterday.