Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I think Mr. Oliphant has made my point for me again, so I see no need to develop it further. I thank him for assisting me in that way.
I've never disputed that he has a right to be here. I never thought parliamentary secretaries couldn't come and participate in committees. I will say, with respect, to the subamendment in particular, that the subamendment has two parts. The first part seeks to remove the words “after the completion of the committee's studies on” and replace them with the words “the committee makes a decision on the studies before it on”.
As a matter of negotiation, if there's a will for us to try to come to terms and come to an understanding about a path forward, I think Conservatives would certainly be willing to engage in dialogue around those modifications. However, I do not believe they are ideal. I think the language of completion is preferable to the language of “make a decision on” because the language of completion is clearly stronger in expressing its commitment to actually doing the work and completing the work and reporting that work to the House before then proceeding on to something else.
It is our conviction that if this committee is to in fact join many, many other committees in studying the abortion issue—because Liberals have continuously brought that issue to many, many, many committees throughout Parliament—then, as per the language in the original amendment that is removed by the subamendment, our preference would be that we complete the committee's studies on those issues.
Why then is it important for us to not just make decisions about but to complete the work on these issues? Well, it's because these issues are extremely important and also time-sensitive. There are many issues that are important that either could be studied by other committees or are being studied by other committees or are questions of ongoing importance, but we had in particular chosen to begin and seek to complete studies on Ukraine, vaccine equity and Taiwan, out of the conviction that those issues were, I think, emergent issues. They were not issues that have been studied, in the present context at least, before, and therefore it was important for us to engage with them.
My comments about the take-note debate happening tonight in the House are to underline the critical importance of this committee completing its study on Ukraine, because the process of completing the study on Ukraine, which is what the text of the subamendment proposes to remove, should help us to get to important conclusions about how we can confront this global food crisis that is driven by, in part at least, the use of starvation as a weapon by the Putin regime. There are many issues. If you listen to the debate in the House of Commons, there are so many issues that are tied back to the invasion of Ukraine, in terms of their ultimate cause, and again, this speaks to why the completion—not just the making of a decision about, but the completion—of the study on Ukraine is so important. The point that my colleague was making—I think very well despite being regularly interrupted—was that the economic challenges that Canadians are facing around affordability and around gas prices are also often attributed by the government to the invasion of Ukraine.
So this is obviously part of the case that needs to be made in defence of saying, hey, the completion of the work on Ukraine as well as the other matters before us, is extremely critical. If we think about the various issues at stake in that debate, for Ukrainians, these are of course their lives and the basic security and the defence of their country. There are also the ripple effects: the food crisis; the questions around energy policy that this raises for Canada, for Europe and for other countries; and the questions around gas prices and inflation. All of these things, it is often argued in the House, have some relationship to the very acute crisis caused by the decision of the Putin regime to further invade Ukraine.
This is why I would say respectfully that it is just not enough for the committee to say, broadly speaking, “Well, we're going to make a decision about”. Making a decision about something.... Pardon me: I should say “making a decision on”, but it's the same thing. For the committee, making a decision on the studies before it does not require the completion of those matters.
I will say this as well. Insofar as Dr. Fry, Parliamentary Secretary Oliphant and others have said—and I referenced their comments earlier—that they're not trying to upend the committee and they're interested in completing the work that is before the committee, it is not reasonable for them to then say, “Well, we actually don't want the language of completion to be in the amendment.”
Mr. Chair, I think another important point to make about the work of this committee and other committees as a matter of process is that the question of how committees do their work and whether they seek the completion of studies before moving on to something else, or whether they seek to make decisions about it and move a whole bunch of pieces around at the same time, is I think very important for us to consider in terms of setting the stage for our work as we go forward.
When a committee is considering matters, it is of course sometimes natural for the committee to have more than one matter going on before it. There may be a number of crisis situations that require acute attention. There may be different parties that want different kinds of studies, so the way of building consensus is to say that we're going to move forward with a group of studies at a particular time. That also creates some potential challenges, in that when you have a number of different studies that are operating at the same time, it's a question of remembering and sustaining the work on that particular issue as, inevitably, a particular study takes longer if it's spaced out. Sometimes you have changes in committee membership and people coming and going in the middle of that study.
It has increasingly become my belief, just in looking at what leads to effective committee work, that you should finish one study or at least a particular group of studies and then move on to the next group of studies. This idea of working through one project to completion, of actually being able to set priorities as a committee and working through one project to completion and then moving on to the next project, is just good effective committee work, because otherwise you get situations where there are changes in committee membership, with people trying to remember—“oh yeah, we had this hearing on this eight months ago”—and connecting it with what a witness said today, and how do we draw conclusions, putting together...? Of course, we all have notes and we all have records that we can look at, but it's certainly much more natural for committees to be able to work through a particular issue in a period of time, to generate recommendations that come out of it and to then be able to move forward on that basis.
That is why our original amendment, which is now being altered by the subamendment, spoke specifically to the issue of not just “making decisions about” or “setting agendas on” but completion of that work.
I think, under most circumstances, most members would agree that to already have five agenda items before the committee, three studies that are under way and two private members' bills with studies not yet done.... Of course we have an obligation to get to them, because they have been referred to the committee by the House. The fact that we should work through the completion of those matters before proceeding to other matters is quite important.