It's very unfortunate that we were not able to discuss this further because, again, the practice of this committee has been to discuss witness lists.
Indeed, I've sat on other opposition-chaired committees. It was always the practice of the opposition chair for an upcoming study to reach out to all sides for a witness list and to discuss the scope of the study and a work plan, and the witness list would indeed be proportionate to the membership around the room, although I can remember that in both the government operations and ethics committees, members were generous with the allocation of time. If a witness was deemed to be of interest to other members, regardless of who had suggested the witness, that witness would be heard. It is unfortunate that we are.... I have a feeling that it's unfortunate but deliberate to put us in this position that we have to basically be defending what would be the normal respectful procedures of this committee.
We have already stated that we are gripped with—I'm going to say it in French, ampleur—the depth of this problem, of what happened here and how horrific it is that in trying to put together a tool that would effectively collect information in a digitized form.... We're all going to that technology. It would have been preferable if it had been developed before the pandemic, but there you have it.
We were in an emergency situation, and there were bad actors that took advantage of that time, however they did it, with the cozy contracting arrangements or fraudulent representation or whatever it was that they were engaged in during a time when people were of course physically isolated and communication was limited. This is an issue that, rightly so, we should be looking at. Indeed, the Auditor General had already signalled that ArriveCAN was of concern to her when we heard her after the first ArriveCAN report, which had to do with the actual value of the application itself. It did serve to save lives, because it did speed up and more accurately send out the information to provinces and territories regarding travellers who needed to be quarantined and so on.
You had us, Chair: We wanted to study this as well, especially when the Auditor General presented us with her report on the whole contracting process and the lack of proper documentation. We were all horrified, but apparently, that was not enough for.... Some of the members here have been subbed in and out so many times that they actually forget which committee they're speaking at. They refer to testimony that has occurred in other committees. I'm not even sure if they were right in doing so. It's a flagrant disregard for the way this committee runs.
Chair, frankly, I expected better of you in this respect. To put us in this position time and time again, where we could have very easily had this discussion in a subcommittee, although that's not normally a practice of this committee.... Normally, these discussions of witness lists and so on would be in the—