Mr. Speaker, at the outset I want to commend you for your great years of service in the House, and how frustrating it must be to have to sit and listen to such irrelevant topics day after day that come from these members.
I am actually astounded that time is being taken up in the House listening to someone cry such sad crocodile tears. It is like two kids in the sandbox and one saying, “He took my toy”, and the other saying, “No, I didn't”. Canadians expect better of us.
The issue that we are dealing with is the ability of a committee to deal with the government's business. The member talked about how he was shut down because the chair said it was irrelevant. Committee members sat and listened to 20 minutes of absolutely irrelevant testimony from him about how his feelings were hurt. I say it is irrelevant because he must know the basic rules of Parliament.
The Speaker is not in a position to intervene, hold his hand, and take him back to the classroom and say, “Bad chair”. That is not the role of the Speaker. The member must know that there are certain rules of Parliament that go back hundreds of years that establish fair debate, so that a government party that is still, in his mind, a rump opposition cannot undermine the rules of Parliament. It cannot block committees day after day; it cannot filibuster week after week.
We are talking about an unprecedented situation where a governing party has tried everything it can to shut down the work of Parliament. It keeps coming back to the fact that this is also a party that has been charged, after an RCMP raid, so questions have to be raised about the ethical nature of what was done.
I do not think I need to get into the whole very dubious and dodgy past of the Conservative Party with election spending. That is not the issue.