Mr. Speaker, I want to use this opportunity to raise with my colleagues something that has troubled me concerning the Library of Parliament, a tool that is essential to us.
I had raised the question with the member for Ottawa West--Nepean as the spokesperson for the Board of Internal Economy back in May and requested an opportunity to respond to the question because I was not satisfied. I will break this into two parts, the issue itself and then the matter of accountability and the difficulty I and other colleagues will find ourselves in in trying to make the library accountable.
The difficulty is that the Library of Parliament issued a request for proposal for a news gathering service. One company that wanted to respond to the request for proposal uses a different system than the system that was specified in the request for proposal. It tried to get the library to correct that by calling for a generic system as opposed to a specific system on which the computer system was based. The library proceeded nonetheless.
The company appealed to the Canadian International Trade Tribunal. Through a series of protracted discussions and so forth, at the end of the day, the tribunal ruled that the library was in error, that the library had to correct its request for proposal or start over. This was a rather lengthy effort.
The library concluded by saying it was cancelling the request, that it did not need the service any more because it had fixed the problem. This begs the question as to why it was not fixed in the first place. The response it gave for cancelling the request for proposal and not issuing another one as per the CITT ruling was that it had used up all its money in defending itself at the CITT.
I have a problem with that. This was not a one year project; it was an ongoing one. Perhaps it could have delayed it, as I hope is the intent of the Library of Parliament, but not cancelled it outright, never to revisit it and never call for a proposal for implementing the system that might be required.
I have some problems with the rationale the Library of Parliament is using. The biggest problem I have is the total lack of accountability of the Library of Parliament to the House.
The Library of Parliament is accountable to the Speakers, the Speaker of the House and the Speaker in the Senate, yet members in the House cannot ask questions of the Speaker. We have to go to the Board of Internal Economy, yet we are told that the Board of Internal Economy is not responsible for the Library of Parliament.
Once, I managed to ask a question of the representative of the Board of Internal Economy in the House on the basis that the library offers services to the members, I am not sure that the Speaker would again allow me to do that.
We cannot ask a question of the Speaker. The library is not accountable to the Board of Internal Economy. The joint Senate and House of Commons committee on the library has not met. It has not even been struck. Therefore, I cannot ask a question of the chair of that committee in the House. There is no accountability. We are now almost into November. We have been sitting for a month and a half now and that committee has yet to be struck.
At some point the rules of the House are going to have to be changed so that the Library of Parliament is accountable to the members of the House. Then we can get information about the library without having to go through the hoops and a system that does not seem to work.