Former Conservative leader Andrew Scheer said Speaker of the House of Commons Greg Fergus’s failure to remain non-partisan by speaking at the Ontario Liberals leadership vote is like a one-sided hockey referee. “If you’re a hockey player and you’re about to play a game and you just saw the referee in his uniform giving a pep talk in the locker room of an opposing team, it wouldn’t matter what the context was, would it?” said Scheer at a Monday hearing at the House of Commons Procedure and House Affairs Committee. “You wouldn’t want that official refereeing your game if you were involved in some kind of dispute that needed an arbitrator and you saw that judge at an event with opposing council, it wouldn’t matter what the context was.”.Since Fergus showed partisanship, Scheer said people cannot unsee that. Fergus admitted it was a major mistake. As many of his colleagues have noted, he is required to make quick decisions without time to process them. Scheer said MPs have to trust he is coming from a non-partisan, objective place. Since Fergus did not see that, Scheer said it “shows you’re still too close to the partisanship of it.” Because he is so close to the Liberals, he said other parties have a problem with it. “So again, I’m just going to ask you: Would you want to hear your case adjudicated, would you want to play in a sports game having seen the referee or having seen the judge or arbitrator involved in that type of display with an adversary or an opponent?” he said. Fergus responded by saying the referee analogy is “quite frankly a different league.” “I also recognize that the member is right,” he said. “That talking about my past, although that reference to the notion of our party was when I was actually a resident of Ontario back in the late 1980s, early 1990s up until early 1994.”When he was speaking about the Ontario Liberals, he said he was referring to the past. He admitted he does not want to talk about his past, as it sounds as if he is being partisan. Fergus was ordered to be the subject of a committee investigation by the House of Commons on Wednesday. READ MORE: Speaker Fergus investigated over ‘partisan’ video at Ontario Liberal Party conventionDue to his overt partisanship, 149 Conservative and Bloc Quebecois MPs have called for him to step down.“Canadians are watching,” said Conservative MP Corey Tochor (Saskatoon-University, SK).
