Mr. Speaker, I actually am approaching now the conclusion of the remarks I have to make. I am looking now directly at the government motion that led to today's question of privilege. The motion was simply the apparently innocuous motion to move to orders of the day. The point is that in moving to orders of the day, the vote on the matter of privilege effectively was diverted until we do not know when. We do not know when; maybe it is never.
There is no standing order to deal with this problem. That is actually the underlying thing. No one ever contemplated that this would happen, so there is no standing order to deal with it. That is the problem. A procedural trick was used, the implication of which was not understood by those who did it. I do not see malice in this matter in this respect. I just see a problem.
Reference was made by the member for Brossard—Saint-Lambert, before she moved her motion, to a motion being made at committee. She effectively said that this is going to be dealt with, because a motion is being moved at the procedure and House affairs committee to bring this forward. There is a second problem, which is that if we allow this to go forward, motions in committee can cause questions of privilege to be dealt with. That is an issue.
The third and most substantial issue relates back to the privileges of the member for Milton, which is the matter on which a prima facie case was found yesterday by the Speaker. The issue here is this. The way the member for Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas worded the notice of motion at committee, the way it was introduced, removed the priority, the part that was in the member for Beauce's amendment to the motion regarding privilege:
and that the committee make this matter a priority over all other business including its review of the Standing Orders and Procedure of the House....
The point is that the member left that part out. It will be dealt with after this interminable debate. It guarantees it. Far from ensuring that the privilege will be dealt with, this is a way of killing or delaying this question of privilege to a point where it is not dealt with, because this debate will go on and on, like Jarndyce, in Dickens' novel Bleak House, the fictional recounting of a true court case that started in 1798 and wound up in 1915.
There is a fundamental issue here. It goes back to the endless debate in that committee, precipitated by the government's desire to unilaterally rewrite the rules, which is actually happening right now, as we speak. While that is partly a discussion about the rules of this place, and maybe is appropriately a point of order, it is relevant to bring it into our discussion on privileges, because if there is no order in this place, if the orders are to be rewritten on the fly by new ideas invented by whatever hyper-caffeinated 20-year-old in the Liberal war room has dreamed this up, then we are in a situation in which privileges are going to be violated as a matter of routine, and this is just the first example.
The fact is that the conventions of this place are being profoundly abused, I think without any malice on the part of the government members but without regard to the way this place works. We do not need malice to ruin something as delicate and organic as the pattern of folkways, the culture we have here, the practices we have, which are written down not in one place but in various places, just like our common law. They are not in one place, yet they are sacred to our liberty. Just as the common law protects the liberty of citizens, so too do our practices in this place protect us just as much as the Standing Orders, which they supplement.
My logic, my argument, is this. The privileges of everyone here were violated by this motion in two separate respects, which I will not repeat again, in the interest of brevity, and in a way that is absolutely critical to the question of privilege that was under debate yesterday. It was adjourned in an unprecedented way that was clearly in violation of the spirit of the relevant standing order, Standing Order 48(1), and probably in violation of its letter, as well.
The point is, Standing Order 48(1) was violated in a way which offends the privileges of the member for Milton and, although the ruling was not on his question, those of the member for Beauce, who was on the same bus that was delayed. That is relevant to the privileges of all of us who may find ourselves in similar circumstances. The same thing happened to Yvon Godin when the president of Germany was visiting. The member could not get to the House because the motorcade took priority over him crossing the street. It also occurred when President George W. Bush was here and members could not get through for security reasons. This may occur on other occasions as well.
This is a matter that needs constant revision and not one that gets pushed off until the government has figured out how it wants to deal with a filibuster. The government is not willing to consider just setting aside this matter in committee, this matter of the Standing Orders review that has been under discussion since March 21 in order to deal with the other matter of privilege. It does not mean that the government has to back off and give up on its plans. It means it has to push them aside a bit, as it ought to do anyway, given the other things that are on the agenda of that committee, such as a review of the Elections Act, on which the Minister of Democratic Institutions asked us to act as promptly as possible and get back to her by May 19. That deadline is impossible to meet now.
My goodness, we cannot have everything pushed aside while those hypercaffeinated teenagers in the backroom try to figure out the next thing to do. Their organizational ineptitude is no reason for us to throw aside the centuries of practices and customs we have built up in this place that protect our democracy. They can grow up at their leisure, but not, surely to goodness, at the expense of every Canadian coast to coast who is defended by the people in here only so long as we actually have privileges that are respected.