Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I had an opportunity to talk about this motion during the other study, where we got as far as finding out how many witnesses there would be.
Mr. Lake raised a very relevant point. Witnesses won't necessarily want to be associated with one of the political parties here. How can you say that a witness has a specific political affiliation? You will take away people's right to speak and to testify before the committee because, unfortunately, they asked to appear before the committee without being associated with a party. How can you sincerely say that those people will automatically never have the right to be heard by this committee owing to this? Is that really what you are trying to do?
I don't think that is the right way to proceed. As Mr. Lake said, we have a great tradition. The precedent Mr. Davies is talking about concerns a specific and very broad study that was adopted by the House of Commons owing to the exceptional situation caused by COVID‑19. Every meeting lasted two hours: one hour during which each party could present a witness and one hour during which we heard from officials, be they from Health Canada or the Public Health Agency of Canada. So there were many witnesses, and the situation was exceptional. I said I was ready to accept that for the study on children, as that is a cause that brings all of us together, but we cannot make this proposal into the norm for this committee's every meeting.
I was ready to try this formula in the study on children, but I unfortunately must oppose us using it for our current study. That is why I wanted us to begin the study on children with a pilot project, if we can call it that, to determine how we could do this.
Mr. Lake is completely right. He has brought up things I was absolutely not aware of. We cannot ask people to align themselves with a political party in order to testify. That is not fair for them or for the people they represent. We must all take this into account.
As for our witness list, we can work together to ensure that every party can have representatives, but by consensus, as we do in other committees. I have never had any issues doing this in other committees, and it has always worked well. We should continue proceeding in this way. As I said, I was ready to try it, but unfortunately, the negative impacts of this proposal clearly outweigh the positive ones.