Mr. Speaker, I too would like to thank you for the carefully considered ruling. It is quite obvious that you considered it from all points of view and you did come up with a very judicious ruling.

As you noted toward the end of your remarks, I ended my own intervention by indicating that we did indeed trust the good counsel of the Speaker on the matter. We did appreciate the position that you, as Speaker, were in with respect to the absence of clarity in subsection 463(2) on what the effect of going to court was on whether it would enter into immediate effect.

You have canvassed very well, Mr. Speaker, the legal issues at stake with interpreting the statute, but also the very special question of the House's own jurisdiction, to make its own interpretation of what should happen with respect to our colleagues from Saint Boniface and Selkirk—Interlake. I note, however, that you have now brought to our attention that the Chief Electoral Officer appears to have sent a letter that indicates that one of the two members, if I heard correctly, may now indeed be in compliance with the corrected returns provision of the act, and we may be in the position of only talking about one of our colleagues.

I would like to return to what my colleague from Beauséjour has referred to, which is that we are still left with the issue of what should be the case with respect to the right to sit or vote now. I will use the member for Selkirk—Interface as the reference point.

The fact that the member for Saint Boniface has received a new letter that indicates her right to sit or vote in the past will still be legitimately looked at as part of the package of the issues PROC has to deal with, but we are at the moment immediately dealing with the right of the member for Selkirk—Interlake to sit or vote.

All I would like to say there is that in the spirit of your ruling, Mr. Speaker, and the fact that we have not actually implemented any suspension but are going to PROC, and you did find a prima facie question of privilege, it is incumbent on our colleague to ask himself whether he should voluntarily recuse from his right to sit or vote.

I see that you are wanting to end the debate, Mr. Speaker.

Craig Scott

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