Mr. Chairman and colleagues, let me first welcome our newest member, Ms. Bonnie Crombie, to the committee.
Mr. Chair, with respect to paragraph three on our first report, and the invitation that we've extended to representatives of Toyota Motor Corporation, I just want it to be very clear, on the record, that when we discussed who we wanted, we were looking for those people who had the decision-making capacity with respect to Toyota Motor Corporation and its products in Canada and, I dare say, in the United States.
I proposed, as you see in the report, Mr. Yoshimi Inaba. My understanding is that Toyota Canada is proposing somebody different.
Now, the person who represents Toyota Canada, Mr. Stephen Beatty, in response to a question from the Financial Post about why Yoshimi Inaba was the correct person to appear before the congressional committees in the United States, answered as follows:
The North American president [Yoshimi Inaba], the person responsible for all the consolidated operations in North America, is the person that will appear before the committee and was the one invited to appear before the committee and the person most intimately aware of all those operations and the chronology.
That's making reference to Toyota in North America.
He is the right person to be there.
And in my view, “there” also means here.
When Mr. Beatty was asked why Mr. Inaba was a better person than the president of the company, he went on to explain as follows:
In part, because he was the former president of Toyota Motor Sales and has steered the company through those years of its development in North America.
Now, why would we accept anybody less than that to appear before this committee? Are we going to allow the suggestion to prevail that Toyota doesn't think as highly of its Canadian market as it does of its North American market; or maybe that the congressional committees in the United States are more worthy of deference than the House committees here in Canada; or maybe that the consumers in Canada are not as worthy of protection and access to information as those in the United States; or, even worse, in terms of the information that's going to be sent, all of the proprietors of Toyota products in the United States are worthy of greater attention than those in Canada?
Mr. Chairman, I just want it to be on the record that if Mr. Inaba is not here, there's no need for us to talk to anybody else. As far as we're concerned, there's no need for us to talk to any of the other officials that Toyota wants to present before this committee. It's absolutely ridiculous that we should be treated as second- and third-class parliamentarians in North America and as consumers not worthy of the protection that Toyota is offering the rest of its consumers around the world and in North America.