Mr. Speaker, the hon. member has brought forward a very important subject. No, I will not support the Alliance motion because it does not do that either.
Last week in the House of Commons the chief whip of the Alliance Party asked, should there be a deployment, whether the Prime Minister would immediately permit the next sitting day of Parliament to be an opposition day so it could choose a topic, presumably on the topic of deployment. However neither the Prime Minister nor I as House leader choose which party has the opposition day so I cannot say it would be the official opposition. It would be nice to have that authority but that is not the way parliamentary procedure works.
In any case, coming back to the essential point, the Prime Minister said yes to that request. The chief opposition whip said that he would withdraw his motion but to this date has failed to do so.