That is right, Mr. Speaker. You had asked a question at the end of my remarks. I am concerned that you may have misunderstood what I was asking you to do, or perhaps I expressed myself poorly and therefore created a situation where a misunderstanding occurred.
Mr. Speaker, I am not asking you to shut down the committee, which I think was what you understood I said. I am not asking you to make an immediate ruling, given the difficulties that are involved, including the fact that the chair of the ethics committee is not here to present his case, which does of course deserve to be presented.
I have my own feelings on whether or not he broke the rules, but that is separate from the point I was trying to make.
Without finding on either side of the point of order, I am asking you, Mr. Speaker, to accept that the disorder that you referred to earlier in March, when you talked about committees that were approaching chaos, potentially has occurred, that effectively this committee may be operating in disorder. What is appropriate for a chair to do, when a committee is in disorder, is to cause the committee meeting to be suspended so it can be reconvened in good order.
The assertion I have been making is that, effectively, this committee, by meeting this summer, may continue to operate in disorder, engaging the tyranny of the majority in what amounts to chaos because the rules are being suspended whenever they do not suit the will of the majority. That is why I used the phrase “star chamber”.
Mr. Speaker, I would like you to simply suspend the committee for the summer and then make a ruling this autumn. If you find the committee has been operating in good order and that the chair's rulings were in fact reasonable and appropriate, then the committee could carry on.
There is far less damage to be caused by holding off on those hearings until the autumn than there is in allowing them to forward if the hypothesis that I have been presenting, that the chair is operating outside the rules and ignoring the rules, is in fact the case.
I want to put forward this very important point. With regard to setting precedents, I should point out that if you allow the committee to continue to operate, if you do not suspend it, you are setting the following precedent: that it is acceptable for a committee, on the very last day of Parliament, to rush through a decision which is an abuse of the rules, even a grotesque and obvious abuse of the rules, and by ensuring that at least one or two of the players who were involved are not present to comment, effectively, makes it impossible for you or any future Speaker to make a ruling, thereby allowing the committee to have a whole summer, free to ignore all the rules of Parliament, and to engage in potentially grotesque abuses.
I do anticipate, Mr. Speaker, if you do not suspend the committee, that we can anticipate that the current chair will carry on in a manner that I regard as being a grotesque abuse of the rules, and will ensure that by the time we come back, the Conservative Party will have been found guilty by the committee of all the allegations being made.
That is the precedent that could be set. I therefore point out that you, Mr. Speaker, are really caught in a situation where you cannot avoid setting a precedent. This seems to be the more dangerous precedent.
The safer precedent would be to establish the precedent that when something happens at the last minute and, as is at least possible, is done in a coordinated fashion to ensure that no full ruling can be made, it thereby opens the door to whatever abuses might occur.
The only avenue I could see for governments in the future to deal with this sort of thing would be for the House to prorogue every summer as a way of ensuring that any minority government has a way of ensuring these abuses do not occur. Because, effectively, the precedent will have been set where, even if that is not what is happening here today or happened yesterday, that is what would be permitted in the future. I think that is a very dangerous precedent to set.