Unfortunately, Mr. Chair, the parliamentary secretary has now gone from trying to tell just this committee what to do to telling multiple House of Commons committees how to do their work.
In fact, Mr. Chair, I think you out of all people would know, having worked so closely with the clerk, that everyone wants to come to finance. We're one of the busiest committees. There are other committees, such as industry, that are extremely seized as well. To suddenly say that you have 11 days to report back on major areas means members would have to stop what they're doing, immediately start a call for witnesses and then immediately start planning sessions. By the time they even got to the first meeting, we probably already would have hit that hard deadline of May 20. That is patently unfair to those other committees.
I totally understand that the member from the Bloc Québécois, MP Ste-Marie, is honourably trying to do his job, Mr. Chair, and trying to work with this and find a way so that he can have his concerns raised in front of those different committees, but you know what? Conservatives have been taking a different approach right from the start. You will know that we've been bringing in shadow ministers who have specific responsibilities to ask questions of the officials specifically on Bill C‑19. We will continue to do that. Unfortunately for my friend from Quebec, MP Ste-Marie, even though his heart and his temperament are 100% in the right place, to have the parliamentary secretary now compound the damage that I think this government is doing to the independence....
Last week, Mr. Chair, as you will remember—you were there in question period—I asked specifically the Minister of National Revenue if she would support a Conservative motion, my colleague MP Stewart's motion, about the concerns of allegations around advance pricing arrangements at CRA. She said, “Oh, well, the member knows that we don't take opinions at all on who comes before committee.” Well, I guess the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance certainly doesn't mind telling the finance committee what to do. Our parliamentary secretary sure doesn't seem to mind telling other committees what to do. I think that's a bit of a shameful process.
Look, I'm not going to make it personal. I know that Mr. Beech as a parliamentary secretary has a job that he is given. I would simply suggest to him to maybe reflect on the points, because it's a long way from when he was elected in 2015, when parliamentary secretaries could come into the room, listen to the debate and maybe have conversations on the sidelines with their other members of Parliament. They would not be voting members.
That changed in 2019. They became voting members.
Now it has changed yet again, Mr. Chair. Now we have the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance dictating not just what the finance committee will do but actually what multiple independent parliamentary committees will do, at the drop of a hat. I think it's not a good faith request that he's made of MP Ste-Marie. Not for one second would I hold it against Mr. Ste-Marie—not in any way, shape or form—that he would be as mad as heck at this government for how they are treating this parliamentary process, and particularly this budget implementation act in this committee, so I would—