Thank you, Chair. I appreciate the opportunity to be here. It's good to see you in the chair. I fondly remember our days of working together on the immigration committee and in various other places. We've had a lot of good discussions about various issues, domestic and international, over the years.
It's good to be here at the health committee, supporting my colleagues and subbing in for Mr. Strauss, who I know has distinguished himself in many ways already in his early career as a parliamentarian and as a doctor. We don't end up with a lot of doctors in Parliament, and it's an honour to serve with him. I'm married to a doctor, which is not the same thing, needless to say.
I am pleased to speak to this motion.
I think it's important to provide some context for where I see this motion coming from. I want to be careful not to be too definitive about the motives of some aspects of it, but this is the sort of thing we have seen before at other committees, in my experience. There are different aspects of the context.
This motion essentially proposes to set aspects of the committee's agenda. It's an agenda-scheduling motion, and it has various provisions around a particular study on HIV and syphilis. It also has various other elements of scheduling—prescribing a minimum number of meetings and potential witnesses.
This motion also involves a proposal for summer work. I want to commend the committee for the interest in doing committee work during the summer. I've generally been of the view that committees can and should work from time to time during the summer, not only because I fundamentally enjoy committee work but also because, for better or worse, we now have the tools of virtual Parliament. When there are big, emerging issues and members are not able to travel to Ottawa, being able to do a few two-hour meetings doesn't dramatically cut into what we're otherwise doing in the summer, which is primarily, of course, focused on engaging with our constituents. The motion involves continuing to work into the summer. I commend the committee for its willingness to do this.
I'm on the human resources committee. We tried to get a study of youth unemployment going last summer, which I saw very much as an urgent situation. Sadly, there wasn't appetite on our committee to do that. In that regard, I am hopeful that this might reflect a trend across different committees of being willing to take on important public issues during the summer break.
Having said that, though, I think there's another piece of context here, which is that members of this committee have been doing their best to get to the bottom of a major IT scandal in this Liberal government—the PrescribeIT scandal.