Mr. Speaker, if my hon. friend across the way finds this funny, we need to get him out more. There are some great comedy clubs in Ottawa and some excellent movies in the cinemas right now.
The only thing I would say in relation to this is that I was not at the committee and I do not think the member was either. I was not there at midnight, as riveting as the voting on 3,000 amendments probably was. My friend raised essentially two points. The first is that somehow there was some sort of co-operation arrangement between the New Democrats and the Conservatives to allow the amendments by the member for Kings—Hants to be heard and voted upon. That is a strange thing to accuse us of.
The second is that I can only surmise from my friend's intervention and the number of political accusations has he made that there is a certain amount of smarting in the third party corner over the fact that it royally messed up the notion of MPs' pensions and included 450,000 public servants, many of them supposedly voting for them in the past election who will reconsider in future ones. The Liberal Party was willing, with the contrivance of the Conservative Party, to pass in minutes changes to the Canadian pension program to 450,000 civil servants and RCMP members without any debate in the House. I do not remember the Liberals making that promise in the last election. I do not remember the Conservatives making it either. However, that should not disregard the idea that they messed it up, the New Democrats fixed it, pointed the fact out and the Liberals seemed to have a problem with us correcting their motion to allow MPs' pensions to go through and other pensions to be studied.
In sum, though, what my friend from Kings—Hants is actually asking you to do, Mr. Speaker, is something that rests within the power of committees to do. He is asking you to essentially overrule a chair on powers he has. Thirty minutes ago I made an intervention on powers that the committee chair and committees did not have that can only be derived from the House, which he then argued against.
On both points, I am somewhat confused by my friend, who I like very much and enjoy his company. He has argued against committees taking powers they do not have, then within 30 minutes he has argued to take powers away from the committees that they do in fact have and, finally, that the committee was trying to allow his amendments to be heard and voted upon. That was the effort of the committee. If he did not want them voted upon, he should not have introduced them. They were voted upon. They were not successful, but that is the nature of some of the efforts made in committee.
Rest assured, we will always protect committees' rights to perform their duties for the House of Commons and when those rights are extended beyond reason, as argued in my previous point of order, we will defend the House of Commons, which is the place where those rights are enshrined and empowered.