Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I'm glad that I get a few moments to say a few things after that. It seems to me that perhaps Mr. Lawrence and I have a different view on what's involved in holding a government to account.
I've been sitting around this table for quite some time now, and as he well knows, I've voted many times with the Conservatives and the Bloc on a number of things, including ministerial invitations. I've helped to amend government legislation in a number of areas where I didn't agree with the government, so I do act independently on this committee. I've never done anything but that, and today is no different.
What I'm suggesting to Mr. Lawrence is that his so-called strategy to hold the government to account actually hasn't been very effective, because what is happening by continuing to do the same old thing, which isn't working, is that the government gets to derail the good work of the finance committee by simply having the minister refuse to appear. We spend all our time talking about whether she's going to appear, when at this point we know full well that appearing is not her preference and we also know full well that we don't have a way of compelling her to appear.
I'm not talking about giving up; what I'm talking about is doing other things that might actually compel her to come here—not because we can coerce her, because we know we can't do that, but because this committee, instead of just navel-gazing all the time and whining about the fact that she's not going to show up, could actually do some work for a change to generate some interesting policy ideas that the minister would feel required to respond to.
I do think that not showing up is reprehensible. I think that ministers owe it to parliamentary committees to show up. I have said as much. There are extant invitations that she continues to ignore.
This isn't about whether or not people are willing to hold the government to account. This isn't about whether or not people believe in the role of Parliament. The member will know that I believe very strongly in the role of Parliament. This is about whether the opposition strategy on committee to get the minister here and to hold the government to account has so far been successful. I put it to the committee that it hasn't. Do you want the evidence of that? When have we successfully managed to get the minister to appear, outside of appearing for her own legislation?
What we have today is another attempt to do the same thing that hasn't worked. What I'm saying is that it would be nice to try something different. It would be nice to try to have the committee actually focus on a study. What studies, outside of legislation, has this committee reported back to the House in two years? None come to mind. It may be that there was one and I missed it, or it's just not occurring to me at the moment, but there haven't been very many.
We have an open study on inflation. We have an open study on fiscal federalism. We have an open study on green finance. It's not for lack of studies; it's for lack of time, because we spend most of our time talking about whether or not the minister is going to come and about the wording of a particular invitation, when I think all of us—on the opposition side, anyway—are pretty sure she's going to ignore it anyway.
When we call extraordinary meetings, it would be nice to do it in order to get some work done and in order to highlight issues for Canadians that might cause the government to feel that they need to respond to those issues.
Again, I absolutely think the minister should be coming. That's why I have supported invitations in the past. Those previous invitations for the minister to appear didn't pass on the steam from the Liberal bench; they passed because I supported them. I'm still waiting for an answer on some of those things. I think we have more work to do, of a different order, to get the minister into a place where she feels that she had better respond.
I would prefer that she had a more deeply ingrained respect for Parliament. I think that's important, but I don't see any evidence that this is the case, so I think we should spend our time talking about those issues that matter to Canadians and consulting with experts in order to get those things done. I think that's very much in the tradition of the NDP on Parliament Hill.
If we want to talk about the politics of it, I think it's convenient for the official opposition to be able to talk about the fact that the minister won't come instead of talking about what they share in common with the Liberals, which was that Pierre Poilievre initially said, when the mandate for the Bank of Canada was up for review, that it should remain narrowly focused on targeting inflation, which is why interest rates continue to go up and up and up.
New Democrats were talking about building into the mandate of the Bank of Canada a concern for full employment. We've heard from the Governor of the Bank of Canada at this very committee—because he does respond to our invitations, which is a good thing—that he's going to continue to raise the interest rate until unemployment goes up. That was the very thing that we were talking about when it was the appropriate time to talk about it, when we could have made a difference by actually building full employment into the mandate—not the preamble, which is what the Liberals did, but substantially into the mandate. Instead, they took Pierre Poilievre's advice.
He admitted as much. We were on a panel together in the fall of 2021, after the election, and I said so on that panel. He threatened legal action and said he'd have to talk to his lawyers about maybe getting a gag order because that hurt his feelings. He knew it was true, and incidentally, I don't think anyone who supports freedom of speech and expression should be talking that way as a response to a legitimate political criticism anyway.
Also, when we talk about inflation, New Democrats are the only ones talking about the role of corporate greed in driving inflation, so I think it's kind of convenient for Conservatives to want to keep talking about how the minister never shows up as if somehow she's magically going to change her mind instead of talking about the substance of the issue.
I'm still open to issuing some kind of invitation to the minister, but I'm done trying to fix everything at the table. I think we have an appropriate invitation for the minister, and in the meantime, instead of convening to continue to talk about how she continues to ignore our invitations and how maybe if we get the wording right on this one, it'll change her mind, we should start examining some of the issues that are really affecting Canadians and coming up with ideas and statements as a committee that she feels compelled to respond to, because I'm tired of doing the same thing and getting the same results. While I get that this approach is great for cheap political point-scoring for the official opposition, I don't think it actually does much for Canadians.
That's my point, and that's got nothing to do with not doing my job as a parliamentarian. It's got everything to do with honouring the role of Parliament and beseeching us to do it better around here instead of just doing the same old thing that hasn't been working.
Just before I conclude, I know that in her remarks Ms. Dzerowicz alluded to agreeing with me on a number of things. I had said that I thought it would be very helpful if the minister would show up in the context of our inflation study to help us wrap that up this fall. I just wonder if that was one of the things that I said that she agreed with.