I've heard that. I can only imagine how special it was. Actually, Mr. Preston was talking for two hours.
Anyway, we were talking for five hours, and we had witnesses, and it was because the steering committee had met in camera and had made a series of decisions as to witnesses we were going to see and the order we'd see them in. It was a decision I disagreed with quite strongly and didn't get a chance to look at until we were in that committee meeting.
The argument then was, look, we've got witnesses here, and one of them has a bad leg, and the other one's mother is ill and he wants to get home and take care of her, so let's just do it. But it didn't make sense. There was a problem, in my view, with what the subcommittee had decided. We had to have, I believe, witnesses in a certain order, because we were dealing with secret documents that could be leaked and we had to determine what documents we could and couldn't look at and whether we could look at them in camera or not.
One of the first problems we ran into in dealing with this was the fact that the steering committee, the subcommittee, had met in camera, so we weren't privy to the discussions that had occurred at the subcommittee or steering committee level. Indeed, I had not known until I walked in the door about one of the witnesses being there. It wasn't until we were about two hours into the meeting that someone inadvertently blurted out...well, not inadvertently, it was actually quite deliberate, but the point is they acknowledged that the House legislative counsel, Mr. Walsh, had been at the subcommittee and given some advice. But of course we still weren't privy to what his advice had been.
After that long meeting was over, I then went down and visited the clerk's office. Of course you're allowed to examine the minutes of in camera meetings as long as you don't take verbatim notes, so I sat down and went through them and made mental notes of what I had seen. At last, long after the initial meeting had occurred, I had a chance to determine with a great deal more insight how I ought to be behaving, but I hadn't had any of that available to me at the time of the previous meetings. So I just basically said that we were not going to be bulldozed into accepting effectively a secret report based on rationales to which we weren't privy, to which we couldn't be privy under the Standing Orders because of the rules about in camera meetings and their secrecy.
So it was completely legitimate for us to resist going in that direction, which is essentially what both Madam Redman and Monsieur Godin have been saying with regard to the subcommittee for this committee, which met in camera and made what I thought was a very intelligent and actually fairly collegial decision. I don't think I'm giving anything away when I say that, because that has been the nature of the subcommittee. In fact, it's been the nature of this committee in this Parliament. It's been very collegial and cordial.
We decided, based on criteria, on our decision that's in our report. But the committee as a whole doesn't have access to everything, so it's entirely legitimate to overrule. Obviously you can guess that I would be voting in support of the initial decision--I made that clear--but there's nothing inherently wrong with voting against that decision, based on the merits of the case as restated.
If anything, the problem here, Mr. Chairman, is that these subcommittees do meet without having direct access to the MPs who have presented the private members' bills or motions in order to hear their cases. The rules don't make explicit provision for that, so it's not our fault that we didn't, as a subcommittee, summon Mr. Rodriguez to present his bill and give the explanation as to why he thought....
I'm sorry?