What a bunch of lemmings, as my colleague from Ottawa Centre says.
I know, Mr. Speaker, you follow Parliament carefully. You are a scholar of parliamentary procedure and history. Have you ever, in all your life, heard of moving closure at committee to the point where speeches are only limited to three minutes? That was a first. I have never heard of such a thing. I myself suffered closure at committee one time to 10 minutes per speech, and the hue and cry across the land among scholars and academics was horrific, that people were being silenced to only 10 minute speeches per amendment. My colleague from Burnaby—New Westminster was silenced to three minutes per amendment.
He introduced 98 amendments in a diligent and valiant attempt to do due diligence on this bill. He introduced those amendments to try to salvage this train wreck of a bill, but that was not good enough. When he started to exercise his rights, his democratic parliamentary privilege to speak to these amendments, to convince his fellow colleagues, they said that it was not good enough and they silenced him to one minute speeches per motion.
That set a record in draconian, bad behaviour at committees. Nobody has ever heard of that. That was history making. That will go down in the books as the most draconian, Fascist move in parliament history in committees.
That was not good enough. When they were too annoyed and did not want to hear a one minute speech to introduce complex amendments to an enormously complex bill that was costing us $1 billion, they decided to silence him even further and say that there were no comments allowed.
Have we ever heard of muzzling someone to that degree? We might as well tie people up. We might as well handcuff them too. We might as well put duct tape on their mouths and hold them in the basement until the Conservatives can ram this piece of legislation through, because that is how draconian this is.
No one has ever heard of this, Mr. Speaker, and I ask you--