Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak on this point of order raised by the House leader from the Conservative Party.
Having lived through on the opposite side of exactly what the House leader is now complaining about today, I can tell you, Mr. Speaker, that the precedent you have set, given the guidelines in Marleau and Montpetit and given the guidelines in parliament precedence, are very clear. You have said that committees have the responsibility of maintaining their own decorum, that it is something that is incumbent on the chair of the committee to do.
Marleau and Montpetit and parliamentary precedence is very clear on this. When we look at page 827 of Marleau and Montpetit, it says very clearly that the chair is responsible for maintaining order in committee proceedings. It is a very clear precedent and a very clear mandate.
It refers to the right to speak. On page 857 of the English version, Marleau and Montpetit clearly states:
Members must be recognized by the Chair before speaking. On occasion, committees place strict limits on the amount of time during which a given item will be considered.
It is in black and white in Marleau and Montpetit. Now, we must examine what happened.
I am a long-time member of the Standing Committee on International Trade. You are aware, Mr. Speaker, as I am of what transpired in the fall of 2006. In 2006 the chair of the Standing Committee on International Trade simply stopped allowing the interventions of the NDP to revise and take out the most egregious aspects of the softwood lumber agreement. The chair, working with members of the committee, agreed to first limit the interventions that we could make on the many amendments we brought to that most egregious agreement, something that has cost 10,000 jobs, but that is not relevant to this point of order. However, we brought forward 100 amendments and the committee chair, with the majority of the committee, then decided to limit speaking time to three minutes on any one of those amendments.
Later on, the same committee chair, the Conservative committee chair, working with the support of other opposition parties in that committee, limited the time of debate to one minute. Further on, on these same amendments, which were designed to stop the almost certain hemorrhage of jobs that we foresaw through the softwood lumber agreement, the debate was limited to 30 seconds. Then finally the Conservative committee chair said that there would be no debate on amendments, no debate on the actual implications of each and every clause, clause by clause, of the softwood lumber agreement and the amendments to the softwood lumber agreement were adopted with no debate, not one second of debate. There were no points of order allowed and no opportunity to raise our concerns.
As you are well aware, Mr. Speaker, having gone through that process where Conservatives decided that an agreement and a bill, which had substantial and profound consequences for people in softwood communities from coast to coast to coast, from northern Quebec to northern Ontario to northern Manitoba to northern Saskatchewan to northern Alberta and throughout British Columbia, the Conservative chair decided there would be no debate whatsoever.
As you are well aware, Mr. Speaker, I brought and the NDP caucus brought forward our concerns that we were adopting legislation that had not been vetted appropriately, where there had not been discussion over the clauses of the bill, no discussion whatsoever on the amendments that would make a difference and save jobs and no witnesses called at that point to talk about the various aspects of the bill.
Therefore, the precedent was very clear. We brought this forward to you, Mr. Speaker. We raised our concerns and you, referring back to Marleau and Montpetit, and obviously I believe you have been consistent in your rulings, and in this case there is very clear consistency in this previous ruling, you ruled that the committee chair was right to do that, that the committee as a whole had the ability to not only curtail debate, but eliminate debate, that a majority of the committee could simply say no, that there would be no debate whatsoever.
We come back to this issue because in this committee case there was very clearly, and we had a comment from the member from the Bloc Québécois who participated in the ethics committee, profound, widespread, ongoing debate, debate that continued on and on. Then finally the chair of that committee faced countless points of order. We are not talking about substantial interventions like the NDP offered on the softwood lumber agreement, where there were real amendments that would have made a difference in changing the agreement and stopping the hemorrhage of jobs. We are talking about, from the transcripts, spurious points of order that were raised.
Yet for the Conservatives now to say that the committee majority of other parties and the committee chair were doing something untoward when they had practised it themselves consistently, simply defies imagination.
I know we will move forward on Bill C-5 and debate time has been allocated to that this morning. However, it is important to point out that the House leader is one of the people who may be brought forward at the ethics committee. For him to raise it as a point of order is inappropriate.
The ethics committee is seeking to examine those individuals and riding associations that have been tied to the in and out scandal and seeking to follow up on Elections Canada's very legitimate concerns around certain ridings and certain candidates, all of whom are Conservatives. Elections Canada is not in the process of looking at other candidates, but it certainly does that on an ongoing basis.
It seems inappropriate to me that members of the House, who may be called before the ethics committee, are now trying to essentially beseech you, Mr. Speaker, to not have the ethics committee call those members before it and testify on their involvement in the in and out scandal.
Those are the points I wanted to raise in addition to those that have been raised by my colleague from Timmins—James Bay.