Mr. Speaker, I wanted to take the opportunity to respond to the report. My party, the NDP, has prepared a dissenting opinion with regard to the recommendations that came from the procedures and House affairs committee.
This is a very important issue with regard to the practice of the privileges of our members of Parliament. We have a long tradition of an absolute right to unimpeded access to the House. There have been a number of times that the committee in the past has looked at this in the way of a motion as a result of determinations by yourself, Mr. Speaker, and other speakers, your predecessors. We have consistently retained that right as an absolute. It was always expressed as an absolute.
What I am very concerned about in the report that came out through the majority of the committee members on the government side is that it made no finding of breach of privilege in this case. It is quite clear from the facts that at least several members have been improperly impeded on those occasions from accessing the House in order for them to do their parliamentary work.
We have recommended in the dissenting opinion that there be a finding that privileges were breached and then, as the main report does, made some recommendations. Unfortunately, the main report made a major concession, as we saw it.
There is always this issue of a balance between the historical absolute right of our members of Parliament to access the House and precinct unimpeded versus—and this is where we get into the balance argument—the question of security.
The security issue, Mr. Speaker, as I am sure you are quite aware, only comes up as a significant concern when we have international visitors and the risk is raised significantly. For instance, when the President of the United States was here, there were problems. When the Prime Minister of Israel was here, there were problems, which is what this is about.
The government side is saying in the report, in effect, that security trumps. We are saying no, there are alternatives. We set those out in three very specific recommendations, that there are alternatives, that the absolute right should remain and that security can still be taken care of and all those concerns met. That is why we presented the dissenting report.