You've already had Bob Marleau's pretty effective rebuttal of that view so I'm not going to try to improve on what he said.
One of the things that one observes, though, about the Canadian Parliament is that there's an enormous turnover, and that's also been said by other people coming. I think, again, Marleau was absolutely right in suggesting that perhaps there was some way of people staying on the committee for a reasonable amount of time.
I did a lot of work some years ago on how chairmen were changed. I specifically remember when Mulroney was Prime Minister, in 1984, the appointments that he made were excellent. They were the best people in the House for the chairing of the 19 committees. But come 1988, all but two were changed because you were all competing for the jobs, so only two remained. One was Don Blenkarn, because he was so damned good that everyone recognized how good he was; and the other was Pat Nowlan, and that's because his family had such a connection with the Conservative Party that he had a certain standing.
I remember there was one guy coming from Montreal who had been elected for the first time in 1988. I took a group of members of Parliament to Washington to try to expose them to some of the benefits of the American committee system. I'm not talking about the American political system but the committee system. The man who was made to chair the energy committee had previously been chaired by—I forget her name, because I forget all sorts of things now—but she was from Alberta. She had run an energy company; she knew her business. The man who was appointed had some business experience. He'd come from Montreal. But I remember his saying to me during the course of our visit down there, “My only experience in the field of energy is when I pump my own gas at a self-service station.”
So the answer is, you really have to spend more time. I think if you can have it established that the right people are left in a committee, not only the chair but all the way down, it makes a huge difference and you begin to have influence with your colleagues on both sides.