Mr. Speaker, I am sure my hon. friends will agree with the advice I received earlier today that I should rest my voice today. I am unable to do so, unfortunately, because we have so many procedural motions being brought forward. Members would not be that surprised, Mr. Speaker, if, as these went on and on, and we had more of these, that your patience for the length of the interventions might diminish.
However, in this particular instance the hon. leader of the Alliance has brought forward another attempt to derail the Kyoto debate. What he has talked about, referring to Erskine May, is in fact what in the British House is called the Ponsonby procedure. This procedure has been followed in the United Kingdom since the 1920s, but it has never been adopted in Canada. That is the point. He is trying to suggest that the procedure here is quite different from what it is. It is not the practice in the House to follow the Ponsonby procedure that was adopted in Britain. If he had done his homework, he would have known this.
He has tried to ignore a few facts. In today's issue of the Hill Times there is an article on page 2 by Paco Francoli about this matter. He suggests that the Leader of the Opposition had left out some key facts in his argument. The article says:
To build his case, he invoked Maurice Copithorne, a law professor at the University of British Columbia...stating that governments “would normally only ratify a treaty after any enabling legislation has been passed.” But in a telephone interview last Thursday, Mr. Copithorne, although admitting that the current practice is “to submit legislation where it's required before ratification”, said the trend doesn't apply when it comes to environmental treaties which are phased in over a number of years, as is the case with Kyoto whose targets won't be met until 2012.
Does he mean to tell me that he has not read this article or that he is simply ignoring the facts that are readily available to him and ignoring the statements of the very authorities that he is quoting in these spurious points of order.