Mr. Speaker, first of all, I can assure you that it is not my face that is speaking; I speak when I have something to say. However, I appreciate the fact that you are looking closely at the reactions of members of the House of Commons.
I want to say to my counterpart that I welcome him in his new role. I am a veteran here because I was here before. I am joking because I know that he has a lot of experience, more than me, and I appreciate the fact that he is the new House leader. I am sure we will have a lot of fun.
That said, I welcome everybody in the House and invite them to be very attentive to what we have to say, because what we are talking about is why we are here in the House of Commons. The member raised a point of order, but I just answered that point of order a few minutes ago. I invite him to read again what I had to say. I am sure he will find an answer to his point of order.
I will quickly summarize what I want to say about that. The argument that the government will likely raise is that it made the House an offer, but that offer does not stand up, especially since the government itself revoked it.
There are many other elements to address. Most of them were submitted to the court under your authority, meaning the authority of the House of Commons, when this government decided to take legal action against the House. We did not know about these elements before the House rose on June 23.
That is why we intend to remind the House of the key elements of this situation. Never in the history of Canada has a government used the justice system to diminish the role of the House of Commons and prevent the House from doing its job. That is a very serious concern because Canadians want to know what happened at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg.
Never in the history of Canada has the executive branch used the judiciary to attack the legislative branch. However, there is an example of that in modern history. It happened in July 1974 when a document released at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington triggered the Watergate scandal.
It was United States v. Nixon.
The President of the United States went to court to prevent elected representatives from Congress from accessing certain documents. That is exactly what the Canadian government is doing right now, and I would like to remind it of one thing: the President of the United States left office after that ordeal.