Mr. Speaker, I would like to correct something that the parliamentary secretary to the government House leader said in terms of responding to the request of Parliament.
Last week we raised a very formal notice and request for a question of privilege to be determined by the House. The Speaker gave the government House leader and the government itself time for an opportunity for the ministers who were affected by this to respond to the House. That was a week ago. That was not a time limit allowed to see if the government could come up with some political stunt like it produced this morning in terms of making documents that were censored available to the House. These are documents that have been available for some time. The dates are in fact stamped on them.
I have had a brief look at the piles of documents. Some of them say that they were released in January and some were released in February, which I assume means released by the government lawyers, so these documents have been available for quite some time. If the government had any intention of trying to deal with this order, it would have been negotiating and discussing with the members of the House opposite on how to do that.
Do we have some sort of indefinite time for the government to actually respond to the question of privilege that has been raised before the House?
This is a provocation and an insult to the Speaker, to have been given an opportunity to respond one week ago today and we have no response, but today a political stunt, coming up with documents that are censored, that are redacted, that we never asked to be tabled before the House in any event.
The government has chosen to interpret this order of the House on December 10 as a request and an order to make all these things public on the floor of the House. What the order said was that members of Parliament be given access to an unredacted form of these documents.
It was very clear, in my motion produced last week, that this could be done and should be done, but the government refused to do it. What it is doing today, through a political stunt, is trying to avoid responding to the question of privilege and taking advantage of the Speaker's generous notion of giving it some time to respond. The government has not taken that time.
I would have expected, given the nature of Friday, when many members are not here, that we would have heard from the government on Monday if it had something to say. This is now Thursday and what we have is something he said in rebuttal this morning “here are the documents”.
If that is the government's response, we would look forward to a ruling from the Speaker, very quickly, as to the state of this prima facie case request of privilege, and we would look forward to having that happen very quickly. This is an insult not only to Parliament, but also to the Chair and to the role of the Speaker in Parliament.