My point was just on who could substitute on the subcommittee. I asked you a question to clarify whether it had to be one of the permanent members, and your answer was “yes”. I indicated then that I had a substantive concern with that, because I feel it restricts our ability in terms of substitutions and that it should be a government member.
In the past year, as you know, I suffered from cancer. If I was away for a protracted period of time, this would have just made it much more difficult for us to substitute me. We're all busy people. We're not suggesting that we don't want one of the permanent members. They're simply more familiar. But I don't want to preclude that capacity of our sometimes, on occasion, having to bring somebody else in as a substitute.
The key point for us is the removal of the parliamentary secretary, with which we would be fine. If you want to explicitly say that, I'm fine with that. I'm more concerned about our inability.... It's our intention that in most instances the substitute would be a permanent member of the committee because we are more familiar with what's going on. However, I don't want to fetter our ability to put someone else in, just in that circumstance where we don't have a permanent member of the committee who's available to come in and substitute and we must draw on somebody else. That's all.