Understood, Mr. Speaker, and I will certainly make every effort to do so.
As I mentioned earlier, these issues are being dealt with in PROC. If you bear with me, Mr. Speaker, I will not take long to get to it, but it does come to a point, and it is this. The Liberals have this issue before PROC, which obviously they brought forward, to table drop this idea of changing the Standing Orders in the House of Commons.
It appears to me that was done in an attempt to try to ensure the Liberals had less accountability to the House of Commons, which means to the Canadian people we represent. We are here on behalf of them. Because of that, there has been a notice of motion brought forward in PROC, but we are seized by this other matter, with an amendment to the motion that has been put on the floor by a Liberal member to try to ram through the changes they want to make there.
That creates a great difficulty in order for this to be dealt with. More important, it should not be left to a committee of the House of Commons to make that decision as to how it is dealt with. That should primarily be before the House when it has been brought forward. The debate and the vote needs to occur here. That is the proper process.
It again ties back to how this is another use by the government of trying to change the way this place functions to suit its own purposes, much like the motion before PROC. It is an attempt to change the way this place functions to suit its own purposes. In that case, it is to try to ensure that the Prime Minister can avoid accountability to Canadians in question period. It is to try to take away one more day of accountability to Canadians by removing the Fridays. That is what it is about. In this case it is taking the ability for the House to deal with the most fundamental stuff we have to deal with, which is talking about privileges of members of the House of Commons, about their ability to exercise their right to vote on behalf of the constituents who have elected them to represent them in the House.
That is essentially why we have a breech of privilege on a question of privilege. That is what has happened here, and it is just staggering. It is almost hard to keep track of it, but obviously there is a need for us to look at it and deal with it.
I understand we want to keep this brief, but it is important to hear people out on this. This is a critical matter, one that if it is allowed to proceed in the way it has sets this great precedent that members of the government can change the way this place functions to suit themselves. This is the greatest breech of privilege of the members of the House of Commons and therefore the greatest breech of accountability to the Canadian people that I could ever imagine occurring.
I do not think we should try to rush this and say that members should only speak for a couple of minutes and move on to somebody else. That is very troublesome and problematic because of the very fact that we are talking about the heart of democracy, that ability to exercise the franchise that has been entrusted to us. We are put here for that very reason, to represent our fellow citizens.
For those two members who had those abilities breeched in that way and then to have the government try to avoid having the House deal with it in a proper manner, in the way it is supposed to be dealt with, in the way it always has been dealt with and instead have a committee take those responsibilities away from members is almost in itself another breech of privilege. It is the right of all of us to enforce something so fundamental about the way Parliament works, about the privileges of members and therefore the privileges of all Canadians to have their voice heard, to have their members of Parliament stand in this place and have a voice, on behalf of their constituents, that vote whatever that vote might be, to represent their constituents.
From that perspective alone, this is a serious and fundamental matter.
I see you are giving me the wave-off, Mr. Speaker. I understand your desire to try to move on, but I just cannot emphasize enough how important it is that privileges of all members be respected, and the privilege of all members to deal with a motion of privilege needs to be respected. If that cannot be respected, then how can we expect someone to have their privileges upheld in this place, if they have their vote taken away and then the government tries to find ways to procedurally prevent that from being dealt with in a proper manner?
It just speaks to exactly what we are seeing over and over again with this attempt by the government that I mentioned earlier, the one in PROC. We saw it happen in this House with ways to try to avoid accountability, with ways to try to change the ways things function, but with the consent of the people—