Good morning, Mr. Chair.
I have a point of order that I'd like to put forward this morning. Yesterday, there was some mention, I think from the chair, about the calling of potential witnesses. I want to start by pointing out that the motion passed by Mr. Oliver was to call a maximum of 90 witnesses. Now I've heard some numbers thrown around that we've had 96 or 100 witnesses. We could not have heard more than 90, since the motion passed by this committee was for a maximum of 90 and we never amended that motion.
The reason I point that out is that yesterday the chair mentioned that the committee was open to any member to call a potential witness from Uruguay, and on the New Democrats' list, our witness number 17 was Julio Calzada, the secretary-general of Uruguay's National Drug Council, who spearheaded Uruguay's cannabis legalization.
Because there are only 90 witnesses and all the parties had witnesses proportional to their representation in the House of Commons, the NDP were only allowed 12 witnesses. Our witness was number 17, and we never got that far. However, we would have gotten to our witness if the Liberals would have passed either the NDP motion to have an additional two days of hearings or the Conservative motion to hold another six days of hearings. If either of these motions had passed, we could have heard from a lot more witnesses.
When the chair said yesterday that no party nominated a witness from Uruguay or any of the other groups, that was not correct. In fact, we could have heard from those witnesses had the Liberals not tried to limit witnesses to only five days. I thought we would correct the record lest any Canadians watching be misled about the number of witnesses who appeared before this committee or who was actually nominated by the various parties to testify before the committee but ultimately weren't called.