A federal government lawsuit against the Speaker of the House to prevent the disclosure of sensitive documents has highlighted the Speaker’s importance. Conservative MP Andrew Scheer, who was once a Speaker himself, said standing up to the government has long been part of the Speaker’s job. “The joke that clerks used to tell me—there was a bit of a tradition of clerks telling newly elected Speakers that there’s several Speakers who lost their head when they stood up for Parliament against overreach of the executive branch of government,” Scheer said in an interview. Opposition MPs on the Special Committee on Canada-China Relations have been trying since March to acquire classified documents regarding the firing of scientists Xiangguo Qiu and her husband, Keding Cheng, who had worked at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg and had transferred deadly Ebola and Henipah virus samples to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. …