Mr. Speaker, the hon. House leader for the New Democrats raises two propositions, one in which he alleges that the ordinary rules of behaviour have somehow been modified for the purpose of this debate. That is factually incorrect. The hon. member has been around here so long that he has been here even longer than I and that is a long time. Of course there is another hon. member near him who has been here even longer. They will both remember, of course, that an opposition motion being amended is not something new. It is something that has been done for 50 years. To say that it has been suspended is wrong.
What the opposition, cleverly or otherwise, discovered a few years ago was to find a way of making a minor amendment to its motion to prevent someone else from offering one later. I have offered a subamendment today which I believe is acceptable. If the Speaker decides that it is not, I will certainly accept that. I hope the hon. member does the same.
Insofar as the ethics counsellor being, as I believe the hon. member said, an officer of the House, I do not believe that particular feature was ever in the red book. There was a reference to reporting directly to parliament, which he does in relation to one part of his work. He reports to the Prime Minister on the part dealing with ministers. For the part dealing with backbench MPs, all of us collectively have not yet put in place a system regarding the code of conduct for other MPs, so it does not apply there.