Sorry if I said mid-May. My apologies--it is the end of May.
Things take time to happen, but that doesn't mean that things aren't happening. That's one of the reasons we're supporting this.
The Prime Minister has promised publicly to bring an inquiry on this item. He has not indicated, nor has anyone else in this government, that the commitment is not going to be met. We are following the process that has been set out. We all knew well before we started along this road that there would be a process put in place to have a properly constituted inquiry, with the proper framework and the proper principles to be looked at. Decisions would be made about how and where that would take place and the timing of it.
In my view, it will take time to find the right individual to be the commissioner of this inquiry. This is going to be a very difficult issue. Politics are involved in it. Some expertise will be needed from whoever is chosen as the commissioner to do this job so that we will be looking at this in an appropriate way.
The mover of the motion talked about public interest. I would say there's no greater public interest than there is in doing this right. I think Mr. Martin probably agrees with that. Doing it right, thoroughly, and properly is in the public interest. The public interest is not in trying to do something for political reasons or in doing it in a way that would not give confidence to the public.
I have to be perfectly frank with you. During our review of the study we did, I got a number of calls and e-mails from my constituents saying things like “I saw you on TV last night, Mike. I liked what you were wearing. I liked what you said...”. There were lots of those kinds of things, like “I can't believe what one of the witnesses had to say”, or “don't trust that person”, or “are you sure?”, or “ask this question”. I have had a tremendous amount of response to that.
Since the report has been done, since we concluded our work, I have had exactly zero calls and zero e-mails, and no one that I can recall has come to me in person. I've had probably three public meetings since then. One of them was on taxes, but two of them were open sessions in which people could ask me about anything the government is doing, or what I'm doing. Mr. Chair, do you know how many questions I got about the Mulroney-Schreiber study that this committee did? Absolutely none.
The issue is not of the huge public interest that the mover likes to dramatically.... And he's very good at the drama. Perhaps Mr. Martin should try acting after he's done with this career.