Mr. Chair, I think Mr. Allen is the one who should be apologizing for playing games here. It is ridiculous for him to expect we're going to take his interest in this seriously when he pulled a stunt like this today and came here trying to redirect the interests and the direction of the subcommittee. That is something he should be apologizing for, rather than attacking the government.
If he wants new points we can do that, Mr. Chair. I was going to go through Marleau and Montpetit about subcommittees because it is important that the opposition understand the role of subcommittees. I'm sure he'll be appreciative of the many new points he is going to hear. A couple of them we've read before, but he'll be happy with that.
Sub-committees are to committees what committees are to the House.
As I said, “Sub-committees are to committees”, Mr. Chair, “what committees are to the House”, and the parent body has the opportunity to relieve itself of some of the work it's going to do. In this case, that's what the House of Commons Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food has decided to do. It didn't want, or didn't feel that it had the time, to take up the whole issue of food safety, so it has passed that off, as it has the right to do, to this food safety subcommittee. It has designated part of its workload to us, and we certainly want to get to that and to get that done as soon as possible.
It is interesting that subcommittees can only be established if they have been empowered to do so, and the House of Commons Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food has obviously been given that authority because it has been able to appoint this subcommittee to deal with the issue of food safety.
Mr. Chair, the House has on occasion established subcommittees directly or ordered that particular studies be carried out by a subcommittee, and that's exactly what's going on here. It has happened before. This is what the House of Commons Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food chose to do. They made the assignment that they wanted us to take to cover these issues, and that it be granted all the powers of committee as well, except the power to report back directly to the House, so I assume we will report to the committee and then back to the House.
Mr. Chair, the next sentence in Marleau and Montpetit is ironic, given what we're dealing with here today. It says that proceedings in subcommittees are to be of an informal and collegial nature. It is unfortunate that Mr. Allen was giving me a lecture about reading out of Marleau and Montpetit a little bit earlier, but had he read this before he came to the meeting today, perhaps we wouldn't find ourselves in the situation we find ourselves in now whereby you've had to reject the motion they brought forward. Certainly we would like to try to keep these procedures informal. We'd like to keep them collegial. A good suggestion was made by Mr. Shipley that if the opposition wants to change the direction of this subcommittee, they should go back to the committee. If the opposition were to make that suggestion today, we would be more than willing to take that up and say they should go back to the committee and get the directive from the committee that they want for this subcommittee. Certainly the government and the opposition members can then discuss that. We can come back here and, I hope, start over in that informal and collegial way that we, certainly Mr. Shipley and I, would like to pursue.
I think the frustration here now is that even as we go ahead we're probably going to be suspicious of what the opposition is trying to pull, because as you can see, we are outnumbered enough here that we really do need to work with them--
