Mr. Speaker, I have two points on this procedural issue. The first one deals with the procedural acceptability of the committee's report on this subject matter. If one were to look at the Standing Orders, one would see that the subject matter jurisdiction for ethics of members of Parliament is assigned to the procedure and House affairs committee and oddly enough, not to the access to information, privacy and ethics committee. That was a decision made by the House some time ago. In terms of pure subject matter, the ethics committee is actually not the primarily assigned committee to deal with the ethics of MPs and conflicts of interests of MPs.
However, I submit that there is another perspective on this and I am going to suggest that you, Mr. Speaker, consider that the committee, while not having a subject matter jurisdiction, may well have had a procedural jurisdiction in that one of its own members was, by reason of the decision of the ethics commissioner in the report introduced in the House, handicapped or obstructed in his work in the committee, which reported.
In a procedural way the committee itself said it had to do something about the failure to accord full rights and privileges to this member of Parliament, the member for West Nova. There may be some procedural mandate here in the hands of the committee, the colleagues on the committee, in reporting to the House the problem.
The fix of the problem, however, may not reside with the committee and I will leave that to you, Mr. Speaker, to figure out how we might do a fix if there is a fix. I submit that there was some procedural jurisdiction here that the committee has responded to and it is not so egregiously out of order perhaps as the government House leader suggests, although I do accept the jurisdictional subject matter point that he made primarily.
The last point I want to make is that I did give notice to the Chair of my intention to raise this as a matter of privilege as an individual member and under the circumstances the best thing for me to do is to await your decision on the procedural acceptability of the report from the committee. I am prepared to stand and deliver my remarks and submissions on this subject matter as a matter of privilege at your convenience, at the earliest convenient date for you, Mr. Speaker.