Thank you.
I have a few more points I want to put on the record, but members who are waiting to speak next will, I think, be wondering about when we'll go on to the next phase, and we'll see. It may depend on whether there are votes again in the House, because that has seemed to be a fairly common occurrence lately.
The spacing that I have proposed in the context of my amendment is to say that, yes, we'll proceed with the HIV study but that instead of having that study take place at every single meeting, we will have that study take place at every second meeting. That will create the space for the committee to continue with studies of other matters, one of which is PrescribeIT.
On the issue of PrescribeIT and the study the committee is going to do on that, I think some of those in-between meetings could be used for some further discussion of the subject matter of this article that I have included in this notice of motion and, really, of the absurdity of the arguments being used to justify the non-transmission of records.
This is a principle that, for whatever reason, various government institutions have had a surprising problem in understanding. However, it's a foundational principle of our constitutional order, which is that parliamentary committees are not just committees of parliamentarians. A committee is not just a group of parliamentarians sitting around a table and talking about issues that they want to talk about. A parliamentary committee meeting has a distinctly different character. If all of us who are meeting right now as part of the health committee were to separately decide that we were going to get together in a room and talk about health care, but not under the official auspices of the health committee, it would not be the same. It would be a very different reality.
The easiest way to explain this is by stating the fact that parliamentary committees have a character similar to that of a court. When they make decisions, they exercise specific powers that are necessary for those committees to do their work. The same principle applies in a court. There are specific offences that relate to conduct that shouldn't happen in court. There are specific requirements around the form that action takes in court, and courts are able to order certain things to take place, things which someone wouldn't be able to order outside of those proceedings. Our system invests the official action through those fora with specific powers, and the same is true of parliamentary committees.
The structure and the form are not exactly the same, but the principle is that committees are not just places where important policy discussions happen. They are also places where powers delegated by the House of Commons are definitively exercised, and those include the ability to subpoena witnesses and to send for documents.
In my time as a member of Parliament, I've been through many different situations—and this is another one—in which institutions make up fantastical excuses to justify not handing over documents. They will claim in some cases, for instance, that they are bound by the Privacy Act or that they don't want to because it would cause some problem for them.
Well, the Privacy Act has provisions in it that exempt situations in which documents are lawfully ordered by a body with the authority to do so. That exception clearly applies to parliamentary committees. Moreover, the constitutional principle of the supremacy of Parliament predates and supersedes any statutes that would be used as an excuse not to hand over documents.
To hear the excuses that we're hearing from Canada Health Infoway for not being accountable—