Mr. Speaker, my office received an e-mail yesterday at 4:56 p.m. The e-mail was marked “importance high” at 4:56 p.m. and referred to a briefing being given by the environment minister with respect to the Kyoto plan or lack of plan, but we will not go there.
This is an important issue for the House. Yet the briefing notice was given at 4:56 p.m. when no member's office would have been able to receive it unless someone was sitting on top of the computer at that time. If the e-mail is sent at 4:56 p.m., sometimes it does not get in for a few minutes.
It gets worse. In addition to the notice of the briefing being sent at 4:56 p.m., the briefing was for 8:30 a.m., when again most members would not have been able to make arrangements to attend, but for those very few who were fortunate enough to have somebody sitting on top of a computer around 5 p.m. last night and fortunate enough to get notice in time to get to an 8:30 a.m. meeting.
What happened? I will tell the House what happened. Government members were in fact meeting with the minister about the Kyoto plan, but the opposition members were shuffled off to some bureaucrats.
Surely it is incumbent upon the government to treat all members of parliament with equity and with fairness. What occurred is clearly unacceptable, both in terms of ignoring proper procedure and giving proper notice and ignoring the parity and equity of members of the House to receive the same information from the minister. There is no reason at all why the minister should exclude opposition members from a briefing that he had with some other members of parliament.
I would ask the Speaker to chastise the government and ask that this not happen again.