Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
Thank you very much, ladies, for coming and informing us of the great progress you have made toward parity on your boards of directors.
Given our discussions this morning, I am pleased to see that my colleague Mr. Shields asked you to clarify the mandate of headhunters.
Ms. Ouellette, you have clearly identified what will be asked of your headhunters. I think that's part of the solution. The government as a whole needs to set standards. Parity on boards will become the new standard, period. But we need to do this.
Not so long ago, a witness made a nuance saying that, if there is a goal of parity to be achieved on the boards of directors, there is also one to be achieved on the executive committees and in the work environments. The board brings a certain philosophy to the company or organization, but the executive has a lot of power.
Madam Chair, please excuse me, but I absolutely must change the subject and propose that we move immediately to a public vote on the matter of the Chagall painting.
My motion asks that the committee invite National Gallery of Canada representatives and other witnesses to discuss the mess surrounding the Chagall painting in order to inform the public about what is happening. My motion reads as follows:
That the Committee invite the Chair of the Board of Trustees of the National Gallery of Canada, Françoise Lyon, the director of the National Gallery, Marc Mayer, the Chairperson of the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board, Sharilyn J. Ingram, and the Department of Canadian Heritage, within 45 days, to explain decisions concerning Marc Chagall's La Tour Eiffel and Jacques-Louis David's Saint Jerome Hears the Trumpet of the Last Judgment and to account to the Committee for these decisions' cost to the public.
I think it's important that we discuss this topic today, in public. If we don't want politics to interfere with the administration of our major national museums, it's clearly better for the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage to be interested in this matter, precisely to depoliticize it and so that we, as specialists in the House of Commons, in a special committee dealing with that, can shed light on this issue. The public needs to know how these great museums are managed and, ultimately, whether there will be serious financial penalties. As I said earlier, The Globe and Mail referred to a penalty imposed by Christie's in the order of $1 million.
I'm asking that we vote on this now, in public.