Thank you, Mr. Chair. I respect your ruling.
I guess I'll continue to make the points that I was making.
There's a lot of terminology thrown around, which is kind of interesting here. Don throws around this “equality of witnesses” over and over again, but the point I'm making is that, if every member of Parliament on the committee, every member of the committee, had an equal number of witnesses, we would have an equality of witnesses, just as Mr. Davies is proposing.
If you extend the arguments he's making in terms of democracy and equality, then regardless of the outcome in the last election where the NDP got 17.8% and the Bloc got 7.6% of the votes, why not just have equal seats in the House of Commons? Why wouldn't the Bloc, the NDP, the Liberals and the Conservatives all just get the same number of seats in the interest of equality of parties? Why wouldn't we just have an equal number of seats on the committee if we're talking about equality? Why wouldn't everybody just get the same number of seats on the committee? Why wouldn't we all get an equal amount of time in terms of questioning of witnesses?
I don't understand this principle. This principle just flies in the face of the Westminster system and in the face of democracy. I've been here 16 years. I think Don might have been here 14 years or pretty close. He's been here a long time. We've both been here a long time. We get along usually, but not on this.
I was parliamentary secretary to the Industry minister for eight years, a similar position to what Adam is in right now. You can go back and talk to your colleagues, to my Liberal friends, Frank Valeriote, Martha Hall Findlay and Marc Garneau. They were on committees with me. In the NDP's case, Brian Masse and Glen Thibeault are pretty reasonable people. I think all of them would say that we took a very co-operative approach on committee. Certainly, of course, we represent different constituencies, and we work within different parties, and there are partisan considerations in that sense in terms of the conversations that we have and the approach we have in committee, but never have I seen an approach—again using Don's terminology of “partisan interest”—that would attach the party name specifically to witnesses. That seems about as partisan as it gets.
It's not something that I understand. We have the ability down the road to make whatever decision we want to make as a committee, but it seems to me the health committee.... When I take a look at these studies that we have before us from members of all parties on children's health, on the public service, on substance abuse, on the 988 suicide prevention hotline, we have all of these issues before us, and of course our COVID response. We have all of these issues before us that are so critically important, and I think all of us look at these.
We've had some side conversations where we're all in agreement that these are really important and that we need to move forward. If we're going to make the argument that something partisan is being thrown into the mix, a partisan wrench is being thrown into the mix, it's this amendment right now that would attach political party names to witnesses coming before committee. I've never seen that before.
Once again I think that we have to get to a place where we recommend witnesses. We might each recommend witnesses who don't necessarily affiliate with our party. I don't want to be tied to a place where the witnesses we recommend are tied to my party name. I want to be in a place where we might put forward a list of witnesses, including some who we have relationships with who might not be hard-core Conservatives, but we might put them forward anyway because we think that they have good ideas, and we think that it would be a good idea for them to come before the committee.
The Liberals may have them on their list, too, and the Bloc may have them on their list, too, and then we agree that would be a great witness because we're all in agreement. That's the way I think this committee should operate, of all committees in the House of Commons.
Again, I just can't possibly support this amendment for those reasons.