Mr. Speaker, respectfully, it is difficult to sum up this question of privilege if the facts are not laid out and if the Chair is not reminded of some of the points that were brought up.
In the first intervention on this question of privilege as it related to the previous Parliament, the member for Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes went on for two hours about this, laying out foundationally where the privilege had been broken. There is a need, respectfully, to summarize for the Chair exactly what the basis of this breach of privilege is. I would ask for some indulgence on this because it would be awfully difficult for me to go to the back end, as was the previous case, and really lay this out.
I will note that when the explanation was made to the Chair as to why it was important to lay out these facts in addition to what was not dealt with in the last Parliament and the Speaker's own spirit of the ruling that it be presented at the first possible opportunity, that is precisely what I am doing here. I want to thank the Speaker for that.
Much more recently, in Mr. Speaker Milliken's highly celebrated ruling, which I will repeat because this is the point where I was cut off, on the Afghan detainee documents on April 27, 2010, he made some much less well-remembered comments on witness matters, including at page 2041 of the Debates, where he stated, “the procedural authorities are clear that interference with witnesses may constitute a contempt.” Beyond the matter of the government's so-called instructions, at page 13 of the ethics committee's March 29 evidence, the then government House leader made the claim, “ministerial responsibility means that a minister can replace an employee who reports to the minister, not to Parliament.” That is just not so. In fact it is, in my view, a gross misstatement of several constitutional principles. Ministerial staff enjoy no special status when it comes to being summoned as a witness.
Page 981 of Bosc and Gagnon states quite clearly, “The Standing Orders place no explicit limitation on this power. In theory, it applies to any person on Canadian soil.” While very limited categories of persons do have immunity from appearing, the Law Clerk and Parliamentary Counsel advanced the point that there is no immunity for political staff when they appeared before the ethics committee on April 12 and the committee thought fit, in appendix A of its second report, to include a summary of the evidence:
Mr. Dufresne stated that political staff and public servants have no immunity, by virtue of their positions, from requests to testify before parliamentary committees. He also suggested that the topics of discussion and the different roles that ministers and political staff play have been factors for deciding which person is the more appropriate witness to testify on a given topic.
In 2013, the United Kingdom Parliament's joint committee on parliamentary privilege considered a government green paper on parliamentary privilege, which, among other things, asked—