Mr. Speaker, you have obviously undertaken your responsibilities under the Standing Orders to select grouping for the purposes of debate and voting and applied the usual rules. The usual rule is that the purpose of the voting scheme is to obviate any requirement for two or more votes on the same issue.
I have a lot of sympathy for you, Mr. Speaker, in trying to respond to the complaint made by my friend opposite, in that he actually did not point to a single example in your grouping of where that had not been done properly. The member did not go to a single item or a single vote. He did not make any individual suggestion on where a grouping of yours should be split into two separate votes.
As such, Mr. Speaker, that leaves you with nothing more than what I could call a bit of complaining or whinging, but no real prescription. It also leaves me in the very difficult position of having nothing really to respond to, other than to say that you, Mr. Speaker, have done your duty as required and followed the general practice.
Following in previous decisions, Mr. Speaker, you have indicated that report stage motions are not and have never been selected for debate or grouped for voting on the basis of who the Chair thinks might vote on them and that you had in the past been asked to consider. This is another decision, a ruling from November 29, 2012, at page 12611. In that ruling, the Speaker said:
The Chair is being asked to consider the suggestion that every motion to delete a clause should be voted on separately. This would diverge from our practice where, for voting purposes where appropriate, a long series of motions to delete are grouped for a vote. Since the effect of deleting a clause at report stage is, for all practical purposes, the same as negativing a clause in committee, to change our practice to a one deletion, one vote approach could be seen as a repetition of the clause-by-clause consideration of the bill in committee, something which the House is specifically enjoined against in the notes to Standing Orders 76(5) and 76.1(5), which state that the report stage is not meant to be a reconsideration of the committee stage. That said, though, it has been a long-standing practice for the Chair to select motions to delete clauses at report stage. I reminded the House of our practices in that regard in my ruling in relation to Bill C-38 when I stated, “motions to delete clauses have always been found to be in order and it must also be noted have been selected at report stage”.
You have done that here again, Mr. Speaker. It is difficult for me to see in the arguments made by my friend where the flaw is in your grouping for votes.