Mr. Chair, on a point of order, I just want to talk about the confusion that you caused at previous meetings and that seems to have spilled over into this one regarding the order of exchanges in committee, where you mistakenly came under the impression that the way questions and answers work is that the member asks a question and the witness then gives an interminable speech for the rest of the time left.
That is not how the rules work, and as a result, today we see more confusion where you're recognizing a member who was behind me on the list and he is now claiming he had his hand up for 40 minutes. Of course, we haven't been meeting for 40 minutes, so that's impossible.
These kinds of games are going to cause more and more disorder as the meeting goes on and potentially make it impossible for any of Mr. Beech's or anyone else's motions to get adopted.
That unfortunately is the case and it is unfortunate that you are obstructing the committee's work in this way. We obviously have important work and planning to do for Canadians, but that can't be done if you continue to play these kinds of games.
I've been on this committee since 2017. We did not have these problems under the previous chair. He was a Liberal, a proud, long-standing Liberal, a former cabinet minister with whom I had many disagreements, but he did not play games in the manner that we're now seeing. It is causing is a distraction from the work we need to do today and the work we need to do going forward.
I suspect that it will continue to cause these same problems if we don't get them solved, and that will prevent us from getting programming motions passed or achieving anything else that we desperately need to achieve in these times.
As you know, we have a lot of issues to address. We are the finance committee in a time where inflation is at a generational high, when housing prices have increased more than at any time in recorded history, and when our economy sits on the precipice of the debt crisis—