Madam Speaker, I hope it never comes to having to do a filibuster at any committee, particularly at the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs. As I jokingly say with colleagues, “filibuster” is my favourite F-word in this place. I have been at PROC as a regular member and as a substitute member. I have testified before PROC as well. I hope it does not come to that, because in this particular case, all a filibuster would do at a committee would be to give more time to the Liberal Party to find a way out of its current predicament.
All we are asking for is the release of the documents, not to the Conservative Party, not to the official opposition, but to the law clerk. I think it is a very reasonable thing to ask, to release them to somebody who has no political affiliations, no past political preferences that have been expressed publicly. I have seen this done at committee before, where we have demanded documents be produced. We do it through the law clerk's office, when there are these worries from the government, from the cabinet, that they could be used directly for a partisan purpose.
Sometimes there are thousands or tens of thousands of documents, and it is perfectly reasonable. Then they can be passed on to the RCMP in this particular case, and the RCMP can determine what it wants to do. All a committee would do at this point, if the threat of delays called a filibuster came about, would be just to give itself more time. An election would end all the procedures and processes of the House; it would not be able to get to those documents to hand them to the RCMP, which I think is much more critical. When it has the documents, the RCMP can do with them what it wishes.