Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for your ruling. If it's not out of order, I want to take the opportunity to wish the member a happy anniversary. I saw that on social media.
The member is up next, of course, and she is welcome to—and I suspect she will— disagree with a number of the points I've made, but I've presented my perspective on the issue respectfully, as I see it, and welcome the opportunity to hear the views of other members as well.
As I was saying, other committees can do what other committees wish, of course, but in the particular global context we're dealing with in terms of foreign affairs, we have said that we'd have a discussion at a future date about the future agenda of this committee. At the very least, let's make sure we complete the work required on all of the studies that are in front of us. That was our first proposal.
We proposed a number of motions to refer this to the subcommittee on agenda and procedure. The normal process is that the subcommittee on agenda and procedure receives various recommendations from members, and then there's a discussion in the spirit of co-operation about how to manage the committee's agenda in a way that makes sense, given the different ideas that come forward from members. We initially proposed to refer this issue to the subcommittee on agenda and procedure. Our friends in the other parties, through their votes, expressed that they didn't want to do that, so we asked if we could adjourn debate until we had completed all of the existing studies and return to this question of the agenda once we had completed our existing studies. Again, that was opposed.
We're back to a very precise and a very reasonable appeal through the motion that I moved, which is to simply adjourn debate on this question until we've completed our work on Ukraine.
Given what's going on in Ukraine.... Frankly, just given my observations about the public comments, the social media comments and comments in the House of many members on this committee, it seemed that, up until this motion was moved, there was a clear consensus that Ukraine was and is the urgent foreign policy priority in front of us. I understand that members on the committee may agree, yet there may be a PMO-driven strategy that says it wants the foreign affairs committee to be talking about something it decides is in its political interest to talk about rather than what's urgently before the committee.
As it happens, I'm a former PMO staffer myself, so maybe at another time I can make some confessions with respect to that—
