the release. Schreiber stated that if he testified, he wanted bail, to wear a business suit and not his prison jumpsuit, and would like time to study his files which were stored at his house in Ottawa. Schreiber had also stated that the German government may have obtained information from his Swiss bank accounts through Swiss authorities, without following proper procedures, and planned to use this as grounds for appealing his extradition. The plan was that Brian Mulroney would then appear before the Ethics Committee in the week following Schreiber's testimony. On 26 November 2007, Canadian Press reported that Democracy Watch head Duff Conacher claimed that Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Justice Minister Rob Nicholson are in a conflict of interest position with respect to the Mulroney-Schreiber matters, and had asked the Federal Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson to investigate. That day, 26 November, Schreiber received a hand-delivered summons from the chair of the Ethics Committee, Paul Szabo, a Liberal, to appear before the Commons Ethics Committee. The problem was that Schreiber was being held in a provincial jail in Toronto awaiting extradition which could take place as soon as 1 December. That he had a summons to appear in Ottawa was not going to be sufficient to get him released from the jail. In the House of Commons, Szabo reminded Minister of Justice Rob Nicholson that although Schreiber was in a provincial jail, he was held there under a federal warrant. Szabo demanded that Minister Nicholson bring him before the Committee in the Commons. Nicholson claimed that he had no jurisdiction in the matter. Later, on 28 November, House of Commons legal counsel Rob Walsh expressed his disagreement with Nicholson's opinion, stating "the Minister could facilitate this process in my view." (The National Post, 28 November 2007). This situation caused New Democratic Party MP Pat Martin, a member of the Commons Ethics Committee, to move later that afternoon that the Committee ask the Speaker of the House of Commons to issue a "Speaker's Warrant", an instrument which had not been used in Canada since 1913, so that Schreiber could be released from the Toronto jail where he was being held. The Committee passed Martin's motion, voting strictly along party lines, with the Conservatives opposed and the other parties in favour. The next day, 27 November, Commons Speaker Peter Milliken stated that he would immediately issue a Speaker's Warrant to have