I think the serious point, Chair, is that I didn't come here to Parliament Hill to spend two hours doing this any more than I pity the poor rest of all of you who had to listen to it. It's not fun. It's not really getting us all that far. I get that, but here we are. With so few tools available to an opposition party in a majority situation, we can only use the tools we have. One of them, sir, is that a motion is not finished with at this committee until everyone who wants to speak to it has spoken.
That's where we are. If we want to break this logjam, the government has my email. Just send me a little note saying, let's talk. I can do whatever circumstances they want. We can do a Get Smart cone of silence for those of you who are old enough to get that. If not, don't worry about it. There are many going, “What? Get Smart?” The rest of us get the cone of silence. What I'm saying is if you need it to be confidential because you want to just try it out, that's what diplomats do. That's why we have the diplomatic corps, the ability to do things that you can't do out front, which is for instance begin a discussion to see if there's enough willingness on both parts to get you somewhere before you make it public. If the government wants that kind of a discussion, they've got it. If they want to do it in the middle of the floor of the House of Commons, they've got that too. If they want to do it during a news conference, they can have that. They can do anything they want. You want to do it by phone....
The point is not how it gets done but that we recognize that Canadians have a right to be heard, not just this Canadian and not just those Canadians but all Canadians. Thirty minutes. Thirty minutes and this could be over and we could start focusing on timing, details, witnesses. Get down to the work. That's what we want. We're not standing petulant, holding our breath, and stamping our feet saying it's got to be our way or no way. We're not doing that either. But we're facing a government that's doing exactly that, that refuses to consider even the notion that Canadians would get a say in the places where they live.
Chair, we don't have a lot of options. What else could we do? The second we let go of this motion, it probably gets voted down. If we came to a straight vote right now, I suspect we'd lose. It's just fundamental math. I will always come back to this.