Speaking on the amendment, as I was stating before we broke, the purpose of my original motion was to talk about food delivery in Canada and its effectiveness in Canada. The proposed amendment talks about something else outside, by itself. We are now expanding the scope by bringing outside countries and developing countries into it. It takes away from the whole study on what Canada was going to do. I don't have it, in principle...another motion put forward by the Bloc somewhere down the line to study what that would achieve, which would be a different study.
From my perspective, to combine it within the context of what we would call a Canadian study would muddy the waters. I have no idea about the direction and which witnesses we would call. Would it require us to make an overseas trip to see whether the productive capacity of developing countries is there? We would have to see the structure and what is happening there. So what you have here are two totally different aspects of the study, hence our reluctance to agree to this amendment.
Based on my past experience with these things, I can talk about the developing capacities of these countries. Before I talk about that, I want to add a comment on what my colleague from the Liberal Party was saying about Pakistan. The productive capacity of developing countries would apply to Pakistan as well as Afghanistan. Due to the war conditions and the insecurity that exists there, the local productive capacity of those countries has suffered seriously.
Let's talk for a minute about the poppy-growing issue in Afghanistan. The farming capacity of Afghanistan--agriculture--through all these years of war has collapsed. It has made room for this development of poppies, which one can very clearly say has damaged the agricultural capacity of Afghanistan. In that context, I was a little surprised that the Bloc refused to accept an amendment to discuss the security situation in Pakistan. That security situation in Pakistan also has a developing impact, a farming impact on that country, which is part of this thing here.
Frankly, because it came as a proposal from the Conservative Party, those in the Bloc don't want to support it, which goes to show the nature of partisan politics that exists in this committee. Even if you propose a common-sense motion, you are going to get opposition just for the sake of it. There was no reason.
After opposing it, they didn't realize they had made a blunder of it. Henceforth, the Liberals came along proposing to have an all-party committee meeting. My friend on the other side is the vice-chair of the Canada-Pakistani friendship group. He could have easily gone to his own group over there and asked the department to come to do something, but we were doing this portion here in the independent committee of the House of Commons, where we can decide what to do.
I'm still puzzled as to why the Bloc said no to a very good, common-sense.... We called the people from the department. It's all about local capacity.
