Yes, you keep getting that wrong, Ron.
It's looking kind of bleak for the Liberals here. This seems to be decided upon.
It may surprise those in the opposition to know that I don't actually have a lot of disagreement with a lot of what any of you have said. I absolutely agree that COVID-19 is the number one issue facing Canadians right now. There is a priority. I do in fact like what Ms. Rempel Garner said about getting to work on this. As a long-time emergency room doctor, in that life when we say we have to do something right away, it means within seconds or minutes. There aren't weeks or months for answering questions.
Given the importance of this crisis, I do agree we have to start looking at it. As for the motion itself, there was a very long list of things that we ought to be looking at. I think it was pretty comprehensive in that it dealt with pretty well all of the problems related to COVID. On all those things, I agree; however, I do have some disagreement.
First, you've provided a great big long list of things. I don't know if you had a paragraph (z) for all other matters related to COVID not included in the list, because I don't know if that's a comprehensive list. To accept that motion means that we've accepted this comprehensive list, and I'm not sure that the list is comprehensive. I think other things could be included on that list.
I think this is an evolving situation. As time goes by, there may be other things that we didn't really think about that will become more priorities. For example, I don't know if on that list was concern about COVID-19 getting into isolated indigenous communities. That's certainly been a big concern. Influenza was really devastating in those communities. I don't know if that's on that list. If we vote and say, “Yes, okay, we're going to vote for this,” what about that? It wasn't on the list, so are we not going to do it? That doesn't make sense to me.
Second, there's no prioritization. I totally 100% agree we stay on COVID. This is our number one problem in Canada. It's our number two problem in Canada. It's our number three problem in Canada. For many of those who've spoken, I do believe that the health committee can serve a constructive role in addressing this problem and be a forum to bring up many ideas that we have to look at. We have to prioritize which things in COVID we're going to look at. This list, in setting the agenda, has no prioritization in what we're going to do.
Those are a couple of substantive issues I have with it. In the previous session, I think we worked pretty well together. I think we decided together what things we wanted to study. Together, we called witnesses. In a way, I think we did rise above petty politics in dealing with this issue. That's what we should continue to do. I don't know. This seems to me to be a bit like petty politics in that we've allowed one party, the Conservative Party, to set the agenda, set the table, and then we all follow suit.
Included in that, you throw in the request for procurement of a bunch of documents with no redactions. Maybe I'm just a stupid doctor and not quite as complex as you people, but that was a very long motion, and by the end of it, I can't say I was falling asleep, but I was starting to lose track of all the things that were in the motion. I'm not sure what was actually said about redactions, but obviously this is a big issue.
I think almost everybody agrees that there probably ought to be some redactions of, for example, personal privacy issues. If there are things in documents that are related to individual names, I think we can probably all agree that we don't want that kind of information coming out. There might be things to do with national security. You've thrown it all together in a kind of omnibus motion.
There's a lot of good stuff in there. Yes, you've outlined a lot of the important measures related to COVID, but you've thrown in these other things that are problematic. I don't think the redaction issue is really nice and clear and that we can come to an easy agreement on it.
I think we ought to collectively decide that, yes, we're going to deal with COVID, but decide what issues we want to pursue with respect to COVID, what meetings we want to have, and then take the procurement of documents issue as a different thing, rather than addressing it all together in one omnibus motion.
Thank you.