Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Anybody listening with a modicum of good faith would understand what I was saying, which was that the speaker...the points that he is making, important as they may be, are irrelevant. One of the rules of speaking is that one's comments must be germane to the matter at hand. We don't have any motions before us. Mr. Doherty hasn't even moved a motion, yet he's speaking to a completely different subject than the one under consideration.
I might add that, as he well knows, this committee has already agreed to study the opioid overdose crisis as early as in December, so why he's raising this now is beyond me. We do have an act, a bill, that we have to get through by Friday or it will be reported back to the House unamended. I would ask you, Mr. Chair, to hold the speaker to the basic requirement of relevancy to the topic at hand.
If Mr. Doherty wants to make a motion to start talking about a completely different subject than we have before us at committee, then he can make that motion and we can vote on it. Mr. Ellis gave a very impassioned and eloquent defence of democracy. The democratic route would be to find out if the majority of committee members here today would rather deal with the bill before us or talk about the overdose crisis, when we intend to begin a study on that very subject in as little as six weeks.