Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order to complain about a situation and to clarify another, as I indicated earlier.
Yesterday I put a question to the Prime Minister in the House which included conditions, in my opinion, in my text and in the way I asked it and which hinted conditionally at an infringement of the criminal code.
On reading Hansard , I realized that the last part of the sentence did not reflect my thinking. It was not what I had intended to say, and I wanted the sentence to be in the conditional, since I was questioning the Deputy Prime Minister on a hypothesis.
That said, I asked the people at Hansard , as is a regular practice, to correct a part of the sentence I did not consider represented reality, which was not at all the intent of my remarks.
I was given no explanation. This morning I realized they had rejected my correction, and yet, I regularly saw as House leader that substantial corrections had been made to the answers given by the Prime Minister or the Minister of Human Resources Development, for example, to such a point that it was even impossible to raise a question from the blues since Hansard was so different.
At the time it was explained that the changes in Hansard were made more to have the record reflect what the person speaking wished to say, what had actually been perceived here in the House of Commons.
I will say simply that I find it unfortunate I was denied the opportunity to correct Hansard . In this regard, obviously, I have no problem, as you discussed with me, with removing the last part of the sentence of my question since it did not really reflect what I had intended to say, which I had asked, before you spoke to me to have corrected.
It is therefore fitting, both for the Prime Minister and for myself, that this sentence be withdrawn from Hansard . Since you allowed the question yesterday in the belief that it was in the conditional, I too thought I had put it in the conditional, but I realized that it had been put in an affirmative style.
In this context I think you will be satisfied at my requesting the end of the sentence be removed so that my question concludes with “acted in his own interest”.
I do not think the rest is in the context in which I wanted to ask my question.