Thanks very much, Mr. Chair.
I appreciate the spirit of collaboration the parliamentary secretary showed by showing up to committee and not sharing his motion in advance with the members. That's very, very collaborative.
Obviously, we're not going to agree to the motion as it's drafted in its current form. We've been doing this every single year. Wisdom has been chasing this government for a very long time; it just hasn't caught up with it yet. We do this every single year. We're in the same position. If you want MP Rick Perkins to come in to talk about elvers for another 40 hours, he's on deck. That's no problem. We can make that happen.
However, in the interest of trying to get something done, why don't we park the clause-by-clause date? You can bring it back later. If you want to bring it back on Thursday, that's fine. If you strike that from the motion right now, we can continue with our meeting and we can revisit that on Thursday. We can revisit it when we get back. That would be acceptable, at least to me; I won't speak on behalf of my colleagues.
I will just mention getting lectured about people visiting food banks. Stats Canada is going to release their household income survey in probably a week, and I'm not really sure you're going to want to be patting yourselves on the back for the work the government's done, because the survey is going to show that tens of thousands of people are falling below the poverty line. I don't really think lecturing people on food bank lines is a winning strategy for you.
Of course, we also know that one of the requests we've had at this committee is to have Governor Carney show up. He was at a Senate committee last week, so apparently it's okay for him to appear at the Senate committee. If we were to arrange for Governor Carney to come here, I think we would be able to move this motion forward. If that's acceptable to the government, they'll let us know.
In the interest of time and with the nice officials we have here, if we struck the clause-by-clause end date, we could move on. I'm not really sure that's going to be possible, so we'll get Rick Perkins all dialed up and ready to come in to talk about elvers.
Thanks, Mr. Chair.