Mr. Speaker, I notice that today we are not starting with Private Members' Business but with orders of the day. I would just like to point out, and ask for guidance from the Chair, that this is, by my reckoning, the sixth time that the member for Pickering—Ajax—Uxbridge has not been available to move ahead with his private member's bill, which means that we will have no Private Members' Business today.
I do not mind if the member for Pickering—Ajax—Uxbridge cannot be here because of an illness, is sometimes unavoidably away or whatever it might be, but when it gets to the stage where we have gone through this six times, it means that someone else's private member's bill does not come forward today because a swap could not be made or whatever.
No doubt, Mr. Speaker, you and the clerks have attempted to get us Private Members' Business today, but it does seem, in my opinion, to be very unfortunate when someone abuses the goodwill of the House and the goodwill of the Chair by continually putting this bill off and not dealing with it.
I would love to debate it, get on with it and have a vote on it, but it appears that there is some sort of strategy, that none of us are aware of, of putting it off indefinitely. This is the sixth time now and today we have no Private Members' Business. The private members in the House deserve better than that.
I would ask the member to reconsider what he has been doing here with this bill. I would also ask the Chair to consider his options as to what can be done to expedite this. It is not right, when we have such little time for Private Members' Business, that even that little time is not available to us.