No, this is what happened on Thursday night. They seized an opportunity to try to deflect from their own strategic error. That being said, Canadians are smart and recognize what they are seeing, and the NDP knows this.
All that happened during Thursday night's vote was that 100 or so Conservative MPs, proud to be here to vote on behalf of their constituents, were voicing their opinion about the NDP's voting. If the Speaker actually watches the video of the vote, she will see that the four or five NDP members who were voting physically in the House actually reacted in a playful and good-humoured way, like gesturing that they could not hear, jokingly, what the Conservative colleagues were saying, not that they could not hear the Chair or the vote callers. They were actually looking at our members, joking around and playing it up for the cameras.
In the moment, that is how those MPs interpreted the noise that was coming from down the hall. We can actually see the NDP member for Port Moody—Coquitlam jokingly asking Conservative members to speak up, because she was pretending that she could not hear them.
That was the flavour and that is visible on the cameras. That is without debate. That is not my opinion. That is what the Speaker will see if she looks at the video from that evening.
Now, I do believe that all that might have drawn a brief intervention from the Chair, and the House moved on, as it naturally would. It is the Speaker's job to enforce decorum, enforce the rules and apply them when he or she believes that it is getting to the point of being disruptive. Conservative members heeded the call of the Chair, and the House moved on, as it would.
As for specific allegations that were made, I have it on very good authority that we categorically reject the NDP's defamatory, spurious and completely unfounded allegations of anyone being intoxicated. If the Speaker really wants to take a look at the validity of those allegations, the two members who the NDP accused, in this chamber, that was again caught on video, are two members who are non-drinkers. This is not only insulting to them, but it is incredibly dangerous that somebody can use the parliamentary privilege like the NDP House leader has done to make these unfounded and baseless accusations, which now have gone out into social media and have really damaged members' reputations without any substantiation at all. That is really a problem.
If the Speaker looks at the behaviour of members that evening, if there is a question of who might have been intoxicated, it certainly was not Conservative members. Yesterday, the NDP House leader made an intervention where he asserted a number of those outrageous—