Mr. Chairman, first of all, as you know, the committee passed a motion from Mr. Harris to deal with the continuing study of the Afghan detainee issue, and that was passed by this committee.
I had suggested to Mr. Hawn the other day, Mr. Chairman, that the official opposition would be more than happy to support this motion, with two provisos. One is that we go immediately to a full public inquiry so that we can deal with the detainee issue and have all the relevant documents. The second was that we simply--and I know that it's not a friendly amendment, Mr. Chairman--take out the words “begin without delay to”. In other words, it would say, “that the committee investigate and study Canada's preparations”, and so on. We are quite happy to do that, but since we have already passed a motion to deal with the detainee issue, that obviously takes precedence.
We are prepared to look at this. I guess it will depend on how many witnesses and on what the timeframe will be on the detainee issue. But there's no question. We do not believe, Mr. Chairman, that the detainee issue is a waste of time. We don't believe that it's a political witch hunt. We believe, in fact, that it's getting to the truth. Unfortunately, if we want to move to this motion immediately, all we have to do is get the government to call a public inquiry, and we'll deal with it today. Otherwise, we want to be on record as saying that we support what Mr. Hawn is saying, but it has to come after the current discussions we are having with regard to the detainee issue as, again, passed by this committee.
Thank you.