Mr. Speaker, I will reply to the point of order.
To help you with your deliberation as to the validity of the amendment that I just moved, I would submit to you, Mr. Speaker, that the wording of the amendment is not that different from the wording of the amendment that you ruled in order on Thursday, May 5. I will read that amendment for the hon. member since he wants to contest this:
That the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “that” and substituting the following:
The 3rd report of the Standing Committee on Finance, presented on December 20, 2004, be not now concurred in,
But that it be recommitted to the Standing Committee on Finance with instruction that it amend the same so as to recommend that the government resign over refusing to accept some of the committee's key recommendations and to implement the budgetary changes that Canadians need.
Mr. Speaker, you said during your ruling on May 5:
Indeed, in reviewing the precedent from June 22, 1926, which was referred to by the official opposition House leader and the hon. member for Glengarry--Prescott--Russell, and which can be found in the Journals at pages 461 and 462 for 1926, an amendment containing assertions clearly damaging to the government of the day was successfully moved to a motion for concurrence in the report of a special committee. I find this example to be not markedly different from the one the House is faced with now.
That is important because the 1926 motion was considered a motion of censure which, as you know, Mr. Speaker, is another way of saying a motion of confidence. If the amendment to the third report of the finance committee is “not markedly different”, your words, Mr. Speaker, from the 1926 motion, then the government's claim that it is not a matter of confidence is false. That would also apply to this amendment to the first report of the public accounts committee. It reads:
That the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “That” and substituting the following:
The First Report of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts, presented on October 28, 2004, be not now concurred in, but that it be recommitted to the Standing Committee on Public Accounts with instruction that it amend the same so as to recommend that the Government resign because of its failure to address the deficiencies in governance of the public service addressed in the report.
The similarities to the amendment to the third report of the finance committee is obvious. They are both motions that express a loss of confidence in the government. If the majority of members vote for such a motion, then obviously the majority would like this government to resign. It is only worded to send a report back to committee because this is the only vehicle available to the opposition to get an expression of confidence on the floor of the House of Commons.
Citation 168 of Beauchesne's sixth edition states:
--matters of confidence should at all times be clearly subject to political determination...and should not be prescribed in the rules.
Of course the matter of confidence is not part of our rules, so how can the government claim that any amendment to a concurrence motion is not a matter of confidence if there are no rules to govern it?
If our practice is that a matter of confidence is a political determination, then I would argue that if all members who voted for this amendment were to claim that they considered it a matter of confidence, then that would be political determination. They have determined that the government should resign.
On another issue, the member for Glengarry--Prescott--Russell seems to be making the statement that somehow it is not contained in the committee response. The argument that the government response is anything to do with the admissibility of the amendment, I would submit, is ridiculous. Governments are notorious for ignoring the recommendations of reports from committees. Just because the government does not talk about a specific aspect of a report does not preclude an amendment from addressing that aspect. After all, it is an amendment to the report, not the response.