Thank you very much.
Thank you, Mr. Brown. I met you for the first time just before the meeting started and I welcome you here.
I thought it was interesting that one of your first comments when you got here was that you didn't have an opening statement because you couldn't think of anything that we didn't already have. That's the premise of where I want to go.
As you know, many of us at a certain point in the deliberations of the committee felt that we weren't going to be able to get to the bottom of this with the tools that we have because this is a limited process. It needs to go into a full public inquiry. You've disagreed; you have that right. I have to say to you that when I read your report, I didn't read a whole lot there that we didn't already have.
I would suggest to you, sir, that had the government followed your process instead of ours, you never would have gotten anywhere nearly as far as you did, because you wouldn't have gotten as far as we got. The reason we got as far as we did was the persistence that we were prepared to put to this issue. We held people; we put them under oath. You didn't. You didn't put anybody under oath, and they may not have lied to you, but they may have. They may have told you the truth, but not the whole truth.
Here, we, the four different parties that are here, as well as our professional analysts, had a chance to go over that from all different perspectives. In addition to that, the public had a chance to see what we were asking.
One of the reasons we were able to advance this agenda was because of the public feedback we had, particularly from people in the RCMP watching our hearings and contacting us and saying, “Wait a minute, let me tell you about this”, and that would lead us to inviting someone in. We would put them under oath and subpoena documents if we had to. The documents are all there for the public record.
You had none of that, sir. So I would lay in front of you the argument that you haven't added much to this. I don't have a lot to disagree with in what you said, but you haven't said anything that we haven't already concluded.
So I would ask you what value-added that has given to the work of this committee--and I don't mean you personally as a professional, but your process--and whether or not you believe you could have even gotten that far without our work as a starting point.