Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to members of the committee for giving us a chance to have a bit of a break to discuss the motion that we had not seen, even though we had asked for it on Monday and again on Tuesday. I'm hoping, in the context of the study, that we will all work together across party lines co-operatively. That would include sharing things like the motion in advance. That didn't happen in this case, and I'm a bit disappointed.
I want to say, just as a precursor, though, that I think this committee has a really important.... The chair has mentioned many times that this is the mighty OGGO and how this committee is very important—and it is. It's very important that parliamentarians have an oversight role over government. This committee has a very important oversight role, and the study on McKinsey is an important part of our oversight role in the context of our study on outsourcing, which is a much broader question: What should be done by the public service, and where is it reasonable?
In some contexts, it is reasonable to give contracts outside. We can use this as part of that overall study to look at that specific issue and come up with recommendations that hopefully this government and all future governments may take into consideration and adopt with respect to when we outsource and when we don't.
I also agree with what Ms. Kusie said, that there's another question we could look at that would be a policy question: When should a company's actions abroad that become in the public domain—where we know there are settlement agreements and we know there are allegations going on in other countries—lead to us having an internal discussion about whether that company's standing offer should be cancelled or suspended and whether or not our current policies go deeply enough into researching what is happening with companies that may be on our list abroad?
There are a lot of policy issues here that we can work on together. I'm not of the mind that there's anything inherently wrong in terms of how the government engaged McKinsey or what occurred in respect of any of these contracts, but I'm happy to engage in the discussion and look through them all, so that we can all, with our own clear heads and based on the information we receive, find out. The goal here is to ensure that Canadians are well informed.
I have a couple of amendments, Mr. Chair. I'll make them separately, one by one, so that there's no confusion.