Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I would say to my colleague, Pat, that we have had a very collaborative and constructive committee in the first session of Parliament, in the first two years. I think we got a lot of work done. It was a very workmanlike committee. I don't know if that's considered an appropriate non-sexist term, workmanlike. We got a lot of work done and it was very effective.
I don't sense that this motion is in reaction to anything that we might have done on this committee. We went in camera for doing things like working on reports, for some technical briefings and so on, so I think we were wise in our use of in camera motions where it was appropriate.
I've met a lot of parliamentarians from different parliaments around the world. They've often asked about committees and how they function in our Parliament compared to theirs. I met somebody from Estonia recently. That country has a fairly new democracy, having.... It's an old democracy that disappeared for a while and then was renewed when it escaped or broke free from the Soviet Union. None of their committees are televised and they said there's a different comportment. It's not about secrecy, it's just the way people behave and act when the cameras are on compared to when they're not on. So there are some advantages to not having the cameras on at times. I think that's why we use in camera, for example, when we're just working on the wording of a report. There's no real benefit to having the cameras on where people are posturing and perhaps not just trying to work constructively. Other parliaments in the world do not have televised sessions.
The one challenge, and I think Pat raised it already, is that there are scenarios that you sometimes cannot predict. Even today there was a motion that was presumably well thought through. It identified another exception of another instance where we might need to go in camera. So it's a question of when you can exhaustively identify every scenario where you might need to go in camera.
For example, someone could be having a heart attack and it would be against the rules to go in camera while that person is having a heart attack. That's just one example. There could be others. For a variety of reasons there might be a reason to go in camera. It's hard to predict each and every scenario under which you might need to go in camera. That's the main challenge.
I think there's a certain responsibility to use that kind of motion wisely, which is in the rules. There's been no abuse of that rule within this committee, at least that I've observed in the last two-plus years. In a sense, nothing particular is broken on this committee, so no fix is required.
I hope that we'll continue to have a good collaborative relationship across all parties and work to do things that we're responsible for in a manner that bears in mind our responsibilities not just to Parliament but to all Canadians. That's why I won't be supporting the motion, because I think that we just need to have that flexibility, bearing in mind what our responsibilities are as parliamentarians.