Mr. Chair, I have received a message on my BlackBerry from my staff who are watching this in the office, and apparently we phoned your office at nine o'clock on Monday morning to have a steering committee.
So I'm just going to reiterate.... It's quite interesting to hear Mr. Reid talk about the need for an enlarged steering committee. There certainly are committees that operate with no steering committee, and if you're going to get to five or six people in a steering committee, it would seem to me that you're nullifying the agility that one would hope one would have with a steering committee. Maybe those kinds of future plans should be made by a committee of the whole, rather than by hiving off half of this committee to go off and decide things that come back to this committee before they're enacted anyway.
I have great concern that there has been filibustering in this committee since August--I would remind us collectively--on an issue that's of great importance to Canadians, in that there is a motion before us that has not been dealt with because of the active and vigorous discourse given by a variety of Conservative members who have rotated in and out of this committee. It is an issue that I think all opposition parties feel very strongly should come before this committee.
I'm also aware of the fact that we're keeping Mr. Archer waiting. He has braved the weather to come here and report on this issue. I would say that it seems like another attempt to catapult other issues, important as they may be, in front of an issue that was started and actually could have been well on its way to being discussed and perhaps resolved starting last August. There has been a vigorous attempt by government members to keep this off the table. This seems like another ploy, in my view. So because of that, I look at it with a little bit of concern and am a bit suspicious of the motives.