Thank you, Mr. Speaker, for the clarification.
I am surprised that my good friend the parliamentary secretary would want to revisit all of this.
The specific instruction says that one should vote for something at committee before it actually comes before the House of Commons, which is really quite strange. The hands of committee members would be bound by saying that they must vote for this that says one shall do this, but yet it is not here. There is no bill here, unless the House leader intends to bring one forward tomorrow that we do not know about. The CETA bill is not before us in the House, so how can it go back to the committee with an instruction that says thou shall go study it with the new pieces?
I agree with the parliamentary secretary that there are pieces we did not see before. As the House leader quite eloquently said, this committee report was written prior to all of the details coming out. The problem is that there is no legislation here from the government. If my memory serves me correctly, there is no agreement from the other parties across the Atlantic that they have accepted the whole thing yet, because a lot of countries have to vote on it and get it translated.
Could the parliamentary secretary tell me why the government would bind the hands of not only government members but the opposition as well, by saying that we must vote for this before we even know what we are voting for? Are we expected to agree on something, but we do not know what it is, because we really like it a lot or because the government likes it a lot? This reminds me of the leader of the third party, who jumped up and said he was in favour of it before he had actually read it.
If memory serves me right, the Conservative government always told us that we should not say things about things we do not yet know, and yet the government is asking us as a committee to vote in a way that will bind us. I am not sure how one binds oneself to a committee anyway. I suppose we could support the committee's report. Does that mean the government whip would tell us how to vote when the government brings in CETA? I do not think so.
I am not quite sure why the parliamentary secretary would decide to do it in that direction. If he wants to bring it back for study, why not just bring it back as an open discussion? Surely that is what—