Mr. Speaker, let me deal with the issues that were raised during the intervention by the official opposition whip. She tried to defend this action undertaken by the opposition by stating that during the break week she made a telephone call to try to reach me.
Again, I have had the great pleasure of being elected to represent the people of Prince George—Peace River on five separate occasions now. My riding is huge. It encompasses over a quarter of a million square kilometres up in northeastern British Columbia. It runs from the central part of the province all the way to the Yukon. I can tell members that because of my role as whip, and my constituents understand this, when I have a break week I am on the dead run from one end of the riding to the other. I try to get to as many events as I can because of the distance my riding is from Ottawa.
I know that she tried to reach me. During that week, I was unreachable by cellphone in many cases. The Rocky Mountains cut my riding in half. There are more regions of my riding that do not have cellphone coverage than regions that do. I was in I think five different cities and towns on five different days. I guess that is, by way of an excuse, my reason for not returning her call, but the pertinent point here is that she had already moved her motion prior to that.
On the Thursday prior to the break week, she moved her motion to shove this thing through without even consulting with the government, after having agreed to the process of extending it to November 21. That is the point. Yes, we did debate it at some length, and the motion was held over during the break week, but she moved the motion on Thursday, October 5. She still has not offered any credible reason for doing that when all four political parties had agreed to a process of dealing with it. That was our understanding. A senior staffer for the New Democratic Party contacted our senior House leader's staff to try to set up a meeting for the break week, asking when they were going to get together to discuss this.
It is not like there was no communication. At any point in time prior to her moving this motion to ram ahead with these provisional Standing Orders, she could have called. She could have called before the House even rose for the break week before she moved her motion. This was the point that I and many colleagues made at that meeting of the procedure and House affairs committee.
She went on to say in her intervention just now that perhaps we could have reached consensus. We did reach consensus. That is the whole point. We had reached consensus at the House leaders' meeting on how to deal with this issue. It was only the subsequent action of the official opposition on reneging on its word, going back on its word and breaking the trust that has to exist between House leaders and whips, that brought us to this position today.