Yesterday, the hon. member for Mount Royal called the attention of the House to what he considered to be inaccuracies in the Debates of Tuesday, October 27.
As all members know, the Debates are not a verbatim ad literatum transcription of what is said in this House. When producing the Debates, House of Commons editors routinely edit interventions for clarity and clean up our grammatical and syntactical lapses. They also of course consider corrections and minor alterations to the blues submitted by the member to which words are attributed.
Upon verification, I want to first indicate to the House that in the situation before me all editorial changes were initiated solely by the editors. I should add that both the question of the member for Mount Royal and the answer of the Minister of Foreign Affairs were edited in this case.
For greater certainty, I have also reviewed the audio of the proceedings in question and I agree with the member for Mount Royal that the omission of the word “finally” from the edited version of the answer of the Minister of Foreign Affairs is significant. Accordingly, I have instructed our editorial staff to restore that word to the final transcript so that it may be a more faithful rendering of what was said last Tuesday.
I thank the hon. member for Mount Royal for bringing this matter to the attention of the House.