Mr. Speaker, I would like to respond very briefly to what the Minister of Public Safety had to say and I am hoping you will not accept as a given two things that he said.
His remarks were quite lengthy, and I could not disagree with almost all of them, except two points that he made. First, he suggested, but did not say it outright, that there was not much of a foundation for the ruling made in 2001 because he could not find it in various text. I hope, Mr. Speaker, you will not accept that. I hope you will accept that there was plenty of foundation for your ruling at the time and there continues to be up to now.
Mr. Speaker, the second thing he said was that your ruling and the principle behind it was that a minister could not release the text of a bill when the bill was on notice in the House. I do not think that is the case at all and I hope you will be able to clarify this for him and for all of us.
It is quite possible for someone familiar with a bill that is on notice to talk about the contents of that bill publicly without releasing the actual text. The principle, as I understand it, is that when a bill is on notice the House is entitled to receive the bill and information about the bill and not anyone else. I think that is the principle that we must go on.
It is also noteworthy that bills on notice are routinely marked by the Privy Council as secret, so that if a person is talking about the bill, not just releasing the text, after the bill is on notice, there may also be a breach of the Security of Information Act in terms of releasing information about something that is secret. However, in this case, we are dealing with parliamentary law and not the markings on the bill by the Privy Council.
Therefore, Mr. Speaker, if you will be making a ruling on this, I hope you will clarify those two points.