I asked questions about the finance minister at a previous committee meeting. I thought it was unprecedented that the chair slammed the gavel and shut down the whole thing. You can understand why I'm sensitive about the possibility that our one chance to ask questions of the finance minister will effectively be shut down the instant the minister gets a question he's not comfortable with.
I have no doubt that he and his staff have complained to the chair of the committee before about the fact that his previous appearances have gone very badly for him, but it's not a self-esteem factory. It's not our job here to make the minister feel good about himself; it's our job to ask the tough questions that taxpayers demand be answered.
We're considering a very sweeping motion right here. It has a time frame by which the higher bill will be reported back, whether we vote on it or not, whether we agree to let that happen or not. We're effectively giving you licence to send the bill back to the House by a pre-set date, guaranteeing what you're looking for, and all we're asking for in exchange is that we have the minister here for a free and open set of questions for a three-hour period. That's it.
It's not a precedent, Frank. I'm sorry; it's pretty customary. We have a thin-skinned minister who's terrified of committees because he's become an Internet sensation because of his previous performances here.
I'm sorry, my constitutional obligation is to hold him accountable and to ask him questions that he's not comfortable answering. The fact that he doesn't want certain questions asked about his job is not my problem. My job is to hold him accountable, and when opposition MPs stop doing that job, pity the poor country we call Canada, because it's not going to be a nice place to live. The job of the opposition is to ask these questions, and we are not going to agree to a motion like this until such time as we have a guarantee that we're going to be able to ask them.
I'm not going to show up here on the day the minister appears and have the chair pull out his gavel and start banging away because he hears something that he knows the minister is going to be angry about. We're going to keep talking this out until such time as we get a very modest demand honoured, that we have free and open debate related to the minister's role as a minister for three hours on television. That's it.