I find that it is rather ironic to have a motion to discuss the agenda when Mr. Lemieux has just said that motions are or were preventing us from doing our work. I would like to remind Mr. Lemieux that motions are usually not a problem. During the previous session of Parliament, Mr. Lemieux's motions were all adopted. All of Pierre's motions were adopted. Therefore, there should not have been endless discussions about this. When the government was not satisfied, as usual—I am referring to my motion on SRMs—there would be a problem, and the government would filibuster. Aside from this, regarding motions, we can usually adopt a half a dozen of them in a few minutes without much difficulty. We are sending a message to the government. I believe that the consequences are not so serious as all that, but it is certainly important for us. For the agricultural community, it is important that we can continue having these motions. Therefore, we will not stop this practice.
There is something else to point out: some people have said that we should not talk about the past. I do not mind saying that we have wasted time. First of all, I never said that we lost five months; I said that we lost two months. I said that we will have three months of work in committee instead of five because of prorogation. I will not hold back from saying this, and nobody else will stop me from saying it because that is what happened. It is a problem for us.
There are priorities that should be discussed by the steering committee before we move motions here for managing the agenda and before presenting our report on which we will spend much time before we deal with certain current priorities, priorities that agricultural producers are asking us to deal with and on which we could not focus because we were not sitting. Now that we are back at work, we have priorities and we need to go over this report. We should reserve some time on the agenda for the report, but there is no reason why we cannot do that in May or June, or at some other time. Why start with this item? We know that each page of the report may have us arguing for hours on end, wasting time in the process, not discussing the issues and saying no to moving motions during the discussion of the report. In my opinion, this is out of the question. The agenda should be discussed by the steering committee. We should set aside some time for the report, but we have priorities that must be discussed before we get to the report.