I'll return the favour.
Let me first say I find your five recommendations to be very interesting and obviously well thought out. I'm going to take a good hard look at them because I think they have, in my first impression, some serious merit to them, but that's just by way of passing.
What I want to talk about for a few moments...and you might detect a smidgen of partisanship in my comments, but I'll try to keep it to a minimum. You mentioned the games that parliamentarians play. That's just the nature of politics, I suppose. We've certainly seen the partisanship and gamesmanship played here inasmuch as we've heard at least the Liberal opposition say, before testimony even began, that its end game, its target, is to find a ruling of contempt in this committee. To me, that puts a pall on the entire committee process. What are we doing here if they've already been predisposed to find a ruling of contempt without even hearing a shred of testimony?
This is what we have done here, and I say “we” being the government. About a week ago, as you well know, the Speaker's ruling came down in the House. There was a motion that accompanied that afterwards from the opposition that said the committee should meet, the government should be compelled to bring forward additional information that was lacking in their first presentation and tabling to Parliament, and a report should be tabled in the House by March 21, which is this coming Monday.
The government has complied with the information. We've heard complaints from the opposition saying that it's a document dump, but my goodness, they were the ones asking for the information.
The committee hearings started yesterday. We have consistently stated that we wanted to have the information to the committee by the time the testimony started, which we did. I'm not sure why the complaints are coming, but it was the shortness of time that really made the government have to get these volumes of information presented as quickly as possible.
You stated, and I think quite correctly, that for all members of this committee to do their due diligence, to do their work, to examine the documents that have been presented would take some length of time. This is what I see as the probability of what will be happening here, sir, and I'll just get your opinion on this. Should those members be united in their decision to try to find the government in contempt, which the opposition Liberals have already stated they want to see happen, when clearly they haven't examined all of the documents to the extent they should, I'm not sure what purpose committee hearings like these really serve.