Mr. Speaker, I would like to join the Liberal House leader in asking you to rule this motion out of order and to prevent the Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development from meeting today to finish its work on this bill.
Like the Liberal House leader, I interpret this motion as being one of time allocation. As such, there are already precedents on this matter, including a Speaker's ruling on September 18, 2001. In his ruling, the Speaker said that Standing Order 56.1 should not be understood as another procedurally acceptable mechanism for limiting debate. Further on, with respect to government attempts to speed up business, he added:
The government is provided with a range of options under Standing Orders 57 and 78 for the purpose of limiting debate. Standing Order 56.1 should be used for motions of a routine nature, such as arranging the business of the House. It was not intended to be used for the disposition of a bill at various stages, certainly not for bills that fall outside the range of those already contemplated in the standing order when “urgent or extraordinary occasions” arise. Standing Order 71 provides in such cases that a bill may be dealt with at more than one stage in a single day.
Consequently, the Bloc believes that the motion was misinterpreted and that it should therefore be ruled out of order, as I said earlier.
Furthermore, this is a common sense issue. The witnesses we need to hear in order to debate this bill come from as far away as Saskatchewan and Alberta. This affects aboriginal communities. If the committee is forced to meet today to study this bill, members of the committee will not have access to all of the information they need to make an informed decision. There is nothing in either parliamentary privilege or precedence that justifies the motion before us.