Someone is saying “a dictatorship”. Do you know what this is, Mr. Speaker? This is merely the latest example of the Liberals' arrogance that they cannot come to terms with the fact that they lost the election. They cannot come to terms with that. Their arrogance is such that they and the other two parties are going to determine who the Conservatives have as chairs.
If we allowed this to stand, they could remove every single one of our chairs. We could play musical chairs until the cows came home, but what would it accomplish, other than allowing the opposition to determine who our chair is? The fact of the matter is there are many opposition members sitting on many standing committees that personally I and some of my colleagues take exception to some of the antics they pull on any given day.
If I were given my choice, I might even suggest that it might be nice to have certain members removed from committees, but it is not my choice of who the opposition parties choose to have on a specific standing committee. In fact, we have a long-standing tradition that when an opposition party, when any party wants to make a change in its membership on a standing committee what happens by the rules of the House is all four whips sign.
I do not ask the hon. member that serves as the whip for the official opposition to justify to me why they want to remove one member and put another member on that committee. I do not do that. It is not my place to do that. It is the Liberals' business who they have on a certain committee and it is the Liberals' business who they choose to let their name stand as vice-chair of a certain committee. I do not try and tell them and dictate and say, “Well, I don't like that person's attitude. I don't like what they said the other day. I don't like what they did last week, so we are going to vote them off the island and we are going to have someone else serve as vice-chair”. It is the Liberals' business who they have as vice-chair. I do not pretend for a minute that I should be able to dictate to them who that person is.
As the government House leader has said, I would suggest very strongly that the leader of the official opposition does not understand the rules very clearly when he thinks that this is a question of privilege. It is not a prima facie question of privilege. Mr. Speaker, I would ask you to rule in that way.