Thank you.
I support the August 10 date. I really am flabbergasted that anybody would think it would take two and a half months to produce this documentation. It's June 15. We don't need to go until August 31. Frankly, I think the documents could be produced much sooner than August 10 as well.
In some ways, it's arbitrary. We're just picking dates here, but if Mr. Kitchen's motion was that he wants documents by August 10, then I think we should respect that. Whether it's August 1 or August 15, none of us has any basis for determining if that's enough time or not. I think we should respect the intent of the original motion and, as Mr. Van Bynen said, obviously by picking a cut-off date we are limiting what's going to come after that. Mr. Kitchen must have recognized that in his motion. There's no bureaucratic reason that we can't have these documents prepared in the next two months. I'm going to support the motion as August 10.
I also want to reiterate again that responsible government requires oversight by democratically elected politicians. I'm getting concerned at this repeated point and argument being made that by requesting disclosure for us to carry out our obligation to oversee the civil service, or oversee the behaviour and response of government, we somehow are derogating or taking away from the government's ability to deal with the pandemic. The government can chew gum and walk at the same time. I haven't heard any member of this government say that transparency and accountability are not possible right now because they're too busy dealing with the pandemic.
I want to in the strongest terms possible indicate my opposition to this false dichotomy between taking away our civil servants' ability, somehow, to deal with the pandemic and discharging our responsibility to have parliamentary oversight. This is a minority government we're in right now. No party enjoys the majority support of the House of Commons. I think it's unfair to suggest that by us as parliamentarians discharging our duties, as this motion seeks to do for transparency and accountability, somehow we are harming the government's ability to deal with the pandemic. There's not a shred of evidence of that and it doesn't pass muster.
I'm going to support the motion as is and suggest that we move on to the vote. We've already lost one panel. That's fine, by the way. I want to also say that committee members have the right to move motions at committee, and it's unfortunate that sometimes it happens when we're in the middle of a study, but I'm also a bit troubled when people apologize to witnesses as if what we're doing here is somehow inappropriate. This is the only time we have to move motions—during committee meetings—and it's a totally appropriate use of our committee time to do so.
Unfortunately, it does take away from witness time, but since we have witnesses scheduled at every meeting, there's no other time for us to do this. I respect my colleagues' right to move motions and I respect the right to debate them, but I think we've heard a lot about this motion already and I would hope that we could move to vote on it as soon as we can.