Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I think your ruling that that was a point of debate was, indeed, a very wise ruling, and I commend you for your sage wisdom. I prefer you as chair to Mr. Oliphant's pretensions at chairing the meeting.
Respectfully, to Ms. Fry's point, I do not accept that what I said was factually inaccurate, although even if it had been, it still would not be a matter of order or procedure. It would still be a matter of debate. Even when other members make errors in their comments—it never happens to me, of course—it is part of the cut and thrust of debate for people to get themselves on the speakers list and to offer substantive corrections, perhaps backed up by evidence, to support their conclusions.
However, given that Ms. Fry has made her points, I think it is important to respond to them and say the following. When her motion came before the committee, it was upending the normal process. It has long been that the committee sets an agenda through collaboration and discussion among parties, with the general implication that committees proceed in setting their agenda on something of a consensus basis. You have different parties that put forward different studies. Each party identifies its priorities and you try to set an agenda that reflects those priorities. You complete a tranche of studies. At the end of that tranche of studies, you define the next set of work that follows.
What we had instead was, in the middle of.... At the time, there were three ongoing pieces of business, and now there are five. We had a motion put forward to have a different study on something else. I think the clear implication is that we should proceed to it within an expedited time frame.
In fact, at the time, we had moved to adjourn debate. We said to Ms. Fry's point, which was that we don't have to discuss this and you don't mean to get to the study now.... If you don't mean to get to the study now, what in the world is wrong with adjourning debate on it so that we can consider it as part of our next tranche of studies once the work that is being done on the existing study is completed? That was precisely the point that was made when this matter was first under consideration.
If you look at the time that we've been discussing this particular motion, it's been a constant feature that Conservative members have moved motions to adjourn debate and moved motions to proceed to other matters or return to the matters that are currently before the committee. We have also moved motions to refer this particular motion to the subcommittee. In every single case, our friends in the Liberal-NDP caucus have—should I have said “caucuses”? I don't know. Maybe I'm ahead of the times. Every time, the Liberal and NDP caucuses voted against those motions to adjourn debate, to proceed to other business and to allow other things to take place.
In a sense, we adjourned debate at one point in time. We had an informal in camera meeting that took place in the midst of this by unanimous consent. We also had an election of a chair that took place in the midst of this.
I have exhorted members privately and publicly to say that when you adjourn debate on something, it doesn't mean it's over. It doesn't mean we're not going to do it. It doesn't mean we're not going to talk about it further. It means we're setting aside the debate on that subject matter to be able to continue on with something else. Our position has consistently been, let's complete the work before the committee and let's have informal discussions among members at the subcommittee. Let's hash this out. We don't have to hash it out on the floor of the committee. Those conversations can happen while the committee hears witnesses, completes statements, completes reports and completes the work that's in front of us.
It's impossible for people to say that they are the ones who want to get on to other things, and yet continuously be the ones voting against our efforts to adjourn debate and move on precisely to those other things.
What was clear with the manner in which this was brought forward was that there was no interest in efforts to form reasonable accommodations and consensus to set a forward-going agenda. It was just about trying to overrule the consensus norms of committee and to insert a majoritarian norm in place of that.
What we said was let's be specific about adjourning debate until the committee completed its existing studies. That motion was ruled in order by the previous chair. We were debating that motion. That chair left Parliament to pursue other opportunities. We have a new chair, who retroactively ruled the previous motion that we had been debating out of order, and now we're on a subamendment to an amendment.
The amendment seeks to put into the motion precisely what some members, including Mr. Oliphant, have said they want to do. Mr. Oliphant has said that he is supportive of having the Taiwan study moved to the Canada-China committee—I think that's what he said—but that we would complete the work on Ukraine, vaccine equity and private member's bills, and have some discussions about the parameters of the motion of how a study would take place.
That is more or less exactly the amendment that we put forward. It is the profession of Dr. Fry and of parliamentary secretary Oliphant that, “Okay, we're not trying to prescribe a timeline and we're not trying to upend the agenda of the committee. No.” What they're trying to do is simply put a stake in the ground—I think those were the words used—with respect to this motion, but we can come back to it and work on it at another time.
A simple way of demonstrating the genuineness of what you have professed to want to do would be to adopt the amendment that the Conservatives have put forward. It says precisely that. It says precisely that, yes, we would complete the existing work of the committee. After that, we would have consideration by the subcommittee of options, including this study. If the committee were to adopt the motion, it would be understood that the study would proceed, but it would proceed in a manner prescribed by the subcommittee. That would give the subcommittee the opportunity to address some of the concerns around exactly what the contours of the study would be, as well as to come to some determinations about things like the meetings and so forth.
We are trying to say, first of all, that we should adjourn debate to get back to the work that we should have been doing all this time. Secondly, insofar as continuous efforts to adjourn debate or proceed to other matters at the last sitting and this one were rejected by the NDP-Liberal group, let us try to put forward an amendment that will put into text of the motion the commitment that was verbally expressed by members anyway.
It becomes a bit suspicious when the same people who said this is their intention that they're not planning on upending the committee's agenda then come back to the point of saying well, actually, they're not going to support specific language in the motion that would have attended directly to that issue.
It raises the obvious question. What are we doing that has made the government not willing to support the amendment or the adjournment motion? It's basically the fact that the government and the NDP have made a political decision to refuse to allow adjournment, because they want to hold this committee hostage to demand that their particular agenda of upending the existing business of the committee happens. They are not going to let the committee do anything in the meantime. Again, if they wanted the committee to get on to other matters we could adjourn debate and they could bring this back at any time.
Sometimes I think there is a misunderstanding about adjourning debate. It's not defeating a motion; it's not sinking it forever. If we adjourn debate at 4:30 and then we hear a witness from 4:30 to 5:15, then someone can restart debate on the matter that was adjourned 45 minutes later, provided that something has happened in-between. It's not in any way a concession or an end, but simply to say, let's set this matter aside and proceed with other things.
I think that would be the healthy and natural way to proceed, but we've had a “no” to the amendment and a “no” to adjournment, and a “no” to our repeated suggestions that we proceed to other matters.
It just becomes hard to really take the things that, with all due respect, Dr. Fry and others have said about whether they are or aren't planning on upending the matter.... To refer to the comments that other colleagues have made earlier today in this debate, first of alI I do very much think it is important to establish the importance of the studies that we are talking about, because our proposals on proceeding to other matters and our proposals on adjourning debate speak precisely to what we believe the priorities of this committee should be.
We believe the priorities of this committee should be the war in Europe, the further invasion of Ukraine, which we're seeing have catastrophic implications for Ukraine, but that also raise massive questions and potential implications for global security. Tonight the House is doing a take-note debate on the global food crisis. A big part of that is, of course, driven by this invasion.
I believe what we're seeing from the Putin regime is in a sense a repeat of tactics that Stalin used, that is the use of starvation as a weapon of war in an attempt to erase and deny Ukrainian identity.
In this case, the victims of this tactic of trying to use starvation as a political tool, the victims of this, will be far beyond Ukraine. The victims will be those in many countries around the world that rely on the supply of food that comes from Ukraine.