Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank my Liberal colleague. I think he's sincere that he'd like to see if we can get moving forward. I would like to point out that only the Liberals are opposing this motion and only the Liberals are filibustering it. There's one way we could break this logjam. We could go right into a vote.
I can agree with the member that, ultimately, the minister should be held accountable, but if we look back at the original motion, the Prime Minister was able to come, and he refused that as well.
If we're looking at this issue, we've had ministers of the Crown tell other individuals to defy an order of the House. I think what Mr. Fortin put together here is not only factual but quite reasonable for us to report back to the House.
I do want to thank my Liberal colleague Mr. Sorbara, because I think I have a solution. He brought up two specific points with the motion he was having challenges with. One was why should we report this back to the House. I could tell him quite clearly that we should because there was an order of the House, and it needs to be reported back to the House because that was the order.
The other thing he said was that he saw no evidence that a minister told an individual not to come before this House. Mr. Chair, maybe we would could send it over to our Liberal colleagues. I know Mr. Fergus said a similar thing. I actually have the letter from Minister Fortier right in front of me. The second-last line, before “Yours sincerely”—and I'm going to quote her letter so my Liberal colleagues can hear it—reads:
Accordingly, Mr. Ben Chin has been instructed to not appear before the committee. In his place, I will attend the meeting on behalf of the government on Thursday, 8 April 2021.
There we have it, right there. As the Liberals are percolating, and I think everybody on this committee is percolating, Mr. Chair, now that I've actually answered those two questions for the Liberals, if you poll the committee not only will you get the Conservatives, the NDP and the Bloc in agreement to report this very factual motion back to the House, but now that I've answered his two questions, I think we will be able to get unanimous consent for that.
I'm not going to get into other comments I could get into right now, but, Mr. Chair, if you could do that, I think I've answered both his questions quite clearly. If that's what he was asking us to do, we've resolved the issue.