Mr. Speaker, I rise as well to support the Leader of the Opposition on the question of privilege he has raised. The fact is that the position taken by the government today breaches the privileges of all parliamentarians.
I have been a member of this House since 1997. How many times, Mr. Speaker, has a member risen on a point of order or a question of privilege relating to parliamentary committees? Your decisions held that a committee is the master of its own house.
How many times have we raised a question of privilege in this House and you, Mr. Speaker, have come back saying that parliamentary committees were their own masters?
If we are master of our own house, does that mean that the chair of a committee can go against the decision of a majority of the committee? The government, with its chair, decided to refuse to hold meetings to discuss the court challenges program. The chair, on his own, refused to hold meetings, when the Government of Canada had paid to have witnesses from Winnipeg appear before the committee. That was paid for by the taxpayers. The Government of Canada paid for witnesses to come from Montreal to testify before the Standing Committee on Official Languages.
I can understand that a chair would have the power to cancel a meeting. For example, if he receives a call informing him that the witnesses are not available, that they missed the plane and there are no witnesses, I can understand that a chair would be given the power to cancel a meeting, but not when he says that it is because of partisanship. Have the Conservatives forgotten that we are doing politics here, that we are in the Parliament of Canada where what we do is debate democratically and make decisions?
To take away the privilege, our privilege, as members of the Standing Committee on Official Languages, to hear witnesses on a relevant subject such as the court challenges program, that shames our Parliament! It is shameful to do this today, the day on which the Commissioner of Official Languages has condemned the government for what it has done in relation to official languages.
In order to paralyze our work on that committee, the government is supporting the chair of the Standing Committee on Official Languages and refusing to appoint someone else. How can it say that it is acting democratically? How can it say that it supports the official languages of our country?
It is shameful that the government is paralyzing its work, when the chair has lost the confidence of the committee. He lost that confidence because he wanted to make a unilateral decision that went against a democratic decision by the majority of the committee: to hold hearings about the court challenges program.
For these reasons, and because in the past you have said that we were masters of our own house, “the masters of their own house”, there can be no one who decides in the committee’s name.
I would therefore like you to consider this view, and tell the House what direction it should take. It is unacceptable, in a democracy, for a person in Canada to be able to make decisions in this way and take away our privileges, here, in the Parliament of Canada. We were elected to represent the people from all parts of this country.
The government cannot decide to do this because it is being criticized by francophone communities for the cuts it has made. It is being accused of taking away the ultimate tool that gave us schools in Prince Edward Island, Montfort Hospital here in Ottawa, schools in Nova Scotia and British Columbia.
If it does not like its cuts, it can reinstate the court challenges program. It is unacceptable to paralyze the Standing Committee on Official Languages, to take away our privilege of sitting on the committee, and to refuse to appoint someone to chair it. If it refuses to appoint a chair, that means that it does not support the official languages of our country.