In and of itself, it's usually a good thing, but it was a little perplexing given that it came in the middle of our doing a process that historically, and by all-party agreement, we do in camera. All our motions and all our actions, of course, have to be done in public, but the actual deliberations, the give-and-take, the negotiations, take place in camera to give us the latitude to try to get to agreement. Anybody who has ever negotiated collective agreements understands the one thing that's a certain kiss of death—to try to negotiate in the media. At some point, you need to have a Get Smart cone of silence over it.
I keep dating myself, don't I, Chair. I just can't avoid it.
I will go this far. If I get tagged, I'll take the hit, but the reason I do it I think will be clear. We asked for a reason why—just “why”—and in this climate of goodwill and working together and co-operativeness and trying to be helpful to one another and working at a common goal, there was radio silence. No answer. Okay. We're certainly never going to oppose going in public if there's a good reason why we should. Normally, you would think, when we come into a meeting like this....
Mr. Chan has been very good in the past, as the usual lead on the government side, to talk to me and Mr. Richards ahead of time, to give us a kind of heads-up—i.e., “Hey, guys, here's what I'm thinking of doing, and here's why, just to let you know.” What that does, of course, is it settles down the suspicion. Then you enter into these things with some idea of what the government really has in mind so that you don't do your usual, which is to go apoplectic to make sure you stop them from doing something when you have no idea what their game plan is. It's a default mechanism. We all do that.
There was no explanation forthcoming, so we went public. Mr. Simms' motion is now on the floor for debate. I said earlier it was Mr. Richards' amendment that we were debating. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's Mr. Reid's amendment we're debating, correct?