Honourable senators, I rise on a point of order. I do it somewhat reluctantly. I don’t take any pleasure in it, and quite frankly, I don’t expect any action to be taken on the point of order that I’m raising, but I think we deserve to at least get this on the record.

Colleagues, Your Honour, we spend a great deal of time as leaders negotiating a number of things, including Committees of the Whole. We do a lot of arm-twisting, and we’re actually quite possessive of the amount of time that we want to have, each of us, on Committee of the Whole. We do horse trading, and we get ministers in here, and we agree on a certain amount of time.

In the past, we have agreed that ministers would make five-minute opening statements so we could have the full two hours or the full hour and a half, whatever it is that we would agree to, which in today’s case was 125 minutes, with 5 minutes for opening statements, and the ministers, I suppose, could decide who was going to make them or whether they would combine them like we do in many cases; we combine a few senators and they can share their time. As the Leader of the Opposition, I have typically been the first person to ask questions, and I’m being given an amount of time.

Today, Your Honour, when I started off asking Minister Freeland a question, she took over two minutes of my question time — not in a statement ahead of time but in the 10 minutes that I was allotted — talking about something that was entirely unrelated. As a matter of fact, she admitted it was unrelated.

She said:

Thank you very much, senator, for the question. I would like to start my first comments here, before you all, just with one reflection that I had Tuesday night and, indeed in the early hours of Wednesday morning when I was in the other place voting. It was actually a remarkably collegial, even friendly and convivial atmosphere. We joked across the aisle, and ultimately there was unanimous support for the bill.

That same night, as I am sure everyone here is aware, there was an important debate happening in another country close to us.

She wanted to make a comment, and she said, “I would like to make a comment about Canadian democracy, senator, if I may. I’m about to finish.”

She went on to say, “I will answer, I promise, senator. We are here for two hours.

She was here for two hours. I didn’t have two hours. I had 10 minutes. She took over 20% of my time to toot her own horn. It had nothing to do with my question.

Your Honour and colleagues, we in this group represent, in my opinion, about 6 million Canadians who voted for us and who have the right to answers. When I’m asking a question here, I’m asking a question on behalf of those 6 million Canadians.

My questions were directly related to the bill. My question was: Why was Bill C-2 changed to Bill C-4? What was the problem with Bill C-2? I still don’t know because I didn’t get an answer.

I had a supplementary question: Can you tell us about the sick leave promise that you negotiated with the NDP? What did that cost Canadians? Again, no answer.

So I guess, Your Honour and Leader of the Government, I am asking that in the future, when we have a Committee of the Whole and we have ministers come in here on our invitation and we ask them questions, they are not here on their own time; they’re here on our time and we have a negotiated agreement. When Senator Ringuette does not cut them off when they go on about their own agenda and then does not allow us the amount of time that they take away from us, that is not the way to conduct business as a Committee of the Whole.

So I want it on record at least, Your Honour. We want to cooperate. I think the other leaders would say that we have had great cooperation in deciding how many minutes we each get. Overall, Senator Ringuette has done a good job of giving everybody the same amount of time, but she will have to put the hammer down on ministers who want to talk about what they want to talk about. They are here to talk to us about bills that we are expected to pass and, again, are expected to pass in a real hurry. We on this side agreed that we would give leave so that this could be done in three days, rather than four. We have been cooperating. That is not cooperation that we are getting from the government.

I’m asking here on the record that, in the future, when we have ministers in here, they answer our questions. They make their statements ahead of time but, once the questioning has started — and if other senators want to give them whatever time they want to talk about their own ideas, that’s fine. But I think, for the best part, the Conservative caucus wants to have answers to the questions that we are posing on behalf of Canadians. Thank you, Your Honour.