Thanks, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank Mr. Green and Ms. Vignola for some very good points.
Watching my Liberal colleagues talk about this, it's kind of like Queen Gertrude with “The lady doth protest too much, methinks” from Shakespeare.
There are a couple of things I want to bring up. It's quite funny to hear the Liberal side talk about there being so many other committees studying this. I want to hearken back to the 42nd Parliament, where we had five different committees studying greening the government and the Liberal majority on this committee insisted that we needed to have another one, despite so many overarching concerns we needed to look at. It's funny that they would justify five or six overlapping committees at one time, but now they're in abject opposition to doing the same.
I want to bring up a couple of other points. We hear again and again from the government side, “Oh, pandemic. We can't do anything. The pandemic.” Just last week, we saw Kevin Lamoureux justify corruption because of a pandemic. We can't look at ethics because we're in a pandemic. Now we're hearing from the Liberals that we can't look at incompetence that has hurt Canadians, blatant incompetence that has punished Canadians, because of a pandemic: “We have to do it for the safety of the public service. We can't bring them in and force them to work. We can't take them away from needed stuff.” It's as if it's Patty Hajdu herself sitting there flipping through her emails to find this information. There are over 120,000 public servants working in Ottawa. I'm sure we can find the resources to get this information.
I was looking at the PBO's study on the 699. Do you know how many people from the Public Health Agency are taking the 699, which is paid time off without work? Six in the entire department are not available for work, six out of the entire department. We had the people. We had the resources to get this done.
The public accounts are coming out next month. We have all the resources to comb through all the government's spending records to publish the public accounts safely. The other general work is still getting done safely. We can get this stuff done safely as well.
We should look at this. We have the resources. There's no reason in the world we can't get this done. I'm with Mr. Green. This is not an issue that's going to go away, so we either sit here and allow the will of the committee to proceed, or we get to a point where every single meeting is just going to be Liberals filibustering and blocking our ability to help Canadians.
I want to thank Mr. Green for being so forceful on this, and Ms. Vignola for her remarks. I would just say to my Liberal colleagues, let this go ahead as we agreed before prorogation. A lot of it has probably already been done. Let's get the work done. We have the assets. We have the ability to easily get this done. We owe it to Canadians so we do not have a repeat of this down the road, whether it's in one month, one year or two years.
Thanks.