Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I feel very sorry for the government representatives having to try to defend this, because this committee has got along reasonably well. We've all, each and every one of us, taken our shots at Mr. Easter, and that's kind of held us together.
All that aside, it's hard not to believe that there's something else going on. In a committee that Mr. St. Amand and I are on, there was a very similar issue. We had proposed one thing in our report, through the course of many meetings on a national summit for forestry. Before the report was released—it hasn't been sent to Parliament yet—the Minister of Natural Resources announced a watered-down version of what we were proposing in our report. To me, this is very similar.
Considering we've been meeting since February on this, there are lots of other topics we could have done if this whole thing was going to be dealt with in this way.
Mr. Chairman, clearly the consultation process.... The dynamics of this are that the minister and the CFIA officials will meet with key stakeholders, farm groups, processors, retailers, and consumer groups. Well, who have we been inviting? Who have we been hearing as witnesses testifying to us?
If you ask me to give up my time from February to the end of May or early June to do something that, in a matter of a constituency break, a media release is going to subvert.... And look at the timeline. June 11 is the deadline, starting a couple of days ago. You've really got to ask what we were doing.
I think we have actually been meeting in quite good faith here. There has been a high degree of collegiality in terms of the way we conduct ourselves, and I have to agree with all the colleagues here that it's impossible not to assume that there is some hidden agenda and some trick has just been played on us for all our time.