Thank you, Madam Chair.
First, I'm really bewildered. We have so far been given three different answers as to why the officials are unable to make it. One answer is that they're busy. The second answer is that the minister has already answered the question. The third answer, which we've just heard now, is that the officials are not really supposed to answer policy questions; the minister is supposed to.
I don't want to waste time trying to figure out which one is the right answer, but it's really quite confusing, and it really shows that they're not even sure how to defend that excuse.
Second, I'm even more bewildered by the reluctance of the government to allow officials to come and speak to us about those cuts. They're very proud of these cuts, and if the questions we're going to ask are about policy, the officials can tell us, “those are policy questions; we can't answer those questions”, but we need to understand a lot more beyond policy. We need to understand what impact those cuts will have, how they came about, when they came about, and who is going to be affected. Those are operational questions. The minister could not answer them. We want officials to come and answer these questions.
Earlier my colleague Ms. Thibault and I were talking about the irony that when the Conservatives were in opposition they would have jumped all over this, and now that they claim to be championing accountability, they're shutting down officials from coming to this committee. It's complete disrespect for this committee, for Parliament. If the committee asks the officials inappropriate questions, the officials can easily say, “this is not within our mandate; we can't answer these questions”.
But the committee has a role to play on behalf of Parliament and Canadians to examine these cuts, to talk about the operational side of these cuts, and to speak directly to officials, especially and particularly given the attitude that we saw from the President of the Treasury Board when he was here last week, when we didn't get a lot of these operational questions answered.
So I think, first, this motion is appropriate. I want to express how outraged I am and the rest of my colleagues are about the response they've given us. And I really hope they come and appear before this committee and answer these questions.
Thank you.