Privilege  Mr. Speaker, I cannot do justice to the hon. member's quite detailed and lengthy paper on changes to the Standing Orders. She came forward in good faith with a substantial number of proposals. Rather than dealing with any of the specifics, I will make this observation. What she has done—and this is the best practice for any of us here—is she has looked at best practices of other Westminster jurisdictions, of which there is a treasure trove, a cornucopia, and drawn upon some of those best practices.

Privilege  Mr. Speaker, first of all, I am shocked and appalled to discover that member introducing electoral reform into one of his comments.

Privilege  Mr. Speaker, I hope you will not object if I take a moment to give context to the comments of my hon. colleague from Winnipeg North. In the last Parliament, I proposed a motion to amend the Standing Orders and when that motion came before the House, it was voted on in a free vote.

Privilege  Mr. Speaker, I am very glad indeed to participate in this debate. I want to address the problem that faces us as we decide on this matter of privilege to face the fact that we are going to be sending this question of privilege to a committee which has itself largely broken down.

Standing Orders of the House of Commons  Mr. Speaker, yesterday the Liberals announced that they will use a government order to ram through changes to the Standing Orders by the end of June. According to the House leader, these Standing Order changes will “make the House of Commons more efficient”. I think I am stating the obvious when I say that pushing the changes through the House of Commons in June will not help to make the House of Commons more efficient during the three-month summer break.

Standing Orders of the House of Commons  Mr. Speaker, when the Prime Minister promised he would be answering the questions on Wednesdays, we had no idea it would be done like this. The Liberal election platform contains only two commitments regarding the Standing Orders, only two, one of which is this gem, “We will change the...Standing Orders to end omnibus bills”.

Privilege  Madam Speaker, we will indeed be dealing with this issue when this motion is passed. That is when we will deal with it, not based on this ridiculous idea that the Liberals developed of killing the motion here and then introducing a parallel motion in the committee. I will not repeat my objections to that.

Standing Orders of the House of Commons  Mr. Speaker, in the last election the Liberals made only two promises regarding changes to the Standing Orders: to prohibit omnibus bills, and to prohibit parliamentary secretaries from sitting on committees. There was nothing about four-day work weeks. There was nothing about the Prime Minister turning up one day a week.

Standing Orders of the House of Commons  Mr. Speaker, on March 9, the Minister of Democratic Institutions asked the PROC committee to report to her by June with proposed Canada Elections Act changes. However, a day later, the Liberals ordered the committee to report back by the same deadline with omnibus changes to the Standing Orders.

Privilege  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.

Privilege  Mr. Speaker, you can see my desire to be concise from the fact that I keep jumping up at the same time as you in the hopes that I can continue and then having to sit down out of appropriate respect for your position. What the parliamentary secretary to the government House leader just did there was try to enter into the privilege discussion and make a point which is germane to—

Privilege  Mr. Speaker, you are right, and I ought not to have intervened and offered my commentary on the Parliamentary Secretary to the House leader's commentary. There is a certain sort of meta-level to there that perhaps ought to be left to one side. Let me return, then, to the motion introduced by the member for Brossard—Saint-Lambert, which is the issue at hand.

Privilege  Mr. Speaker, you are quite right to cite that practice. If you see me wandering away, would you point that out and I will promptly bring myself back to or terminate that point and move on. I am really trying to recount the narrative as a way of trying to make the point that there is a matter of privilege here.

Privilege  Mr. Speaker, I do not know the exact time. It would actually be hard for me to guess at that.

Privilege  No, not that long, believe me. However, what I have just done is laid out the background. I am now going to proceed directly to the question of privilege. I wanted to give the background to explain the relevance, because ultimately that is the issue that is referred to in the remarks by a member earlier.