Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I appreciate the opportunity to join the debate again and to make some follow-up remarks with respect to some of the things colleagues have said. I will start by reflecting on that.
The main thrust of my remarks was to say, look, this committee has a finite amount of time. The House of Commons has a finite amount of resources. We deal with scarcity in all areas of life, and one of them is the work of parliamentary committees. That means we have to make choices about priorities. We can't just say we're going to do all of it and there's no such thing as scarcity.
I'll share with members that I sometimes have questions about the way in which the scarcity of House resources seems to be selectively used in certain situations. I think members of Parliament should have access in the form of committees to be able to sit when and for however long they want to be able to deal with issues, and to be able to add extra meetings and so forth. But that is just not the reality of how this place is operated. We do have to make choices in the face of these scarce resources between different topics that are up for consideration. That's not even about constraints that exist on our schedule. That's about constraints that we are told are just a function of the structure and the way in which the House of Commons is operating right now.
Over the course of this debate, we have therefore made the argument that the priority of the Canadian foreign affairs committee should be the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and that we should not replace the possibility of further discussion of the invasion of Ukraine with discussion that reflects the desire of some interest in the PMO to reopen the abortion debate in every parliamentary committee, or at least in most.
We are already seeing the impact of that scarcity. Even today our position was that we should adjourn debate and that we should have discussion in the subcommittee about how this and other priorities of the committee should be scheduled to proceed. The government consistently refused to support that. The consequence was the whips of other parties deciding that the Afghanistan committee that was supposed to meet tonight and hear from interpreters would be cancelled.
That is a mighty shame, given that interpreters who served Canada were going to be here to have their voices heard. We repeatedly tried—