Mr. Speaker, I want to take this opportunity to congratulate you on your election as Speaker of the House of Commons. I am satisfied, based on what you said concerning a government motion, that we will have a very good Speaker of the House.
I would like to put a question to my colleague in the Canadian Alliance. I am finding that, at the moment, the members of the Liberal Party are arrogantly trying to cloud the issue, instead of debating the text of the motion taken from their 1993 red book. Our Liberal colleague who asked a question before me surprisingly spoke of pensions, after the Canadian Alliance members accepted pensions.
We are talking about an ethics counsellor. We are not concerned with the person who is the ethics counsellor, but rather the rules that should be set in order to give this counsellor real powers under the authority of parliament or of the leaders of the political parties. At the moment, the Prime Minister makes the appointment, with his rules, and is the one to whom the counsellor is accountable.
I would like to ask my colleague in the Canadian Alliance how his party's motion, a verbatim copy of the 1993 Liberal Party red book, should be understood and accepted so that we may proceed with real parliamentary reform?