Thank you. I appreciate the PMO allowing me to have a few words.
All I wanted to say in support of the motion was that it sounded as though there might have been a compromise in the works, and if there is, that would be excellent. That would mean that the government really is trying to make committee business different.
Here's my point. I'll tell you one of the reasons I would support this idea. I don't always support bringing in a minister, because the politics are such that you could always haul in a minister and play politics with it, but as a rule we do not. I try to be judicial about when I support calling in a minister, because ministers have their own table, the cabinet room, and this is ours, the committee room. However, in this case, given the importance of what's going on, how quickly everything happened, and the fact that there really hasn't been a lot of public discussion, I do.
I stand to be corrected if I'm wrong, but I don't believe there was a motion with a full debate in the House about this whole process. I don't believe there was a bill in the House with a full process that allowed full debate about it, so really, as Mr. Richards pointed out, this thing has been created in the dark, in secrecy. The end result is that the rules have been made public, but there's been no opportunity to have discussions on things such as why it's okay that a small group of people gets to decide what the definition of “diversity” is in Canada and why a small group of Canadians gets to decide whether someone's personality traits are such that they're going to be democratic and accountable or not.
Remember, Chair, that these are fair questions to ask when we're talking about appointing a chamber, each of whose members has more legal weight than each of ours does, because there are fewer of them.
I think it's fair for the official opposition to ask the government to bring in the minister to bring us up to speed. When we say “us”, we know, give or take some of the details, that means the public. Again I come back to the fact that this government said they were going to do things differently—that they were going to be more democratic, more transparent, more accountable—and I will not stop coming back to that fact. It's a reasonable motion to bring in a minister to talk about what the government has done so far, given that we haven't had the other usual opportunities, those being House discussion or committee discussion, to get at those answers.
Therefore, I think there's good reason to think this process here at this committee would serve the public interest. If we had the minister come in, we could ask some of the questions we have and the public has, before even getting into the partisanship aspect. They would just be legitimate questions about the process. We've had no opportunity to do that. I would argue that is legitimately Canadians' right, as well as the right of the opposition, particularly in light of this government's platform that they were going to be different and were going to provide accountability.
I heard Mr. Graham ask a minute ago if we would accept it depending on the minister's availability. That sounded like the beginnings of negotiations, an attempt to listen to what the opposition was saying and to try to accommodate it. I would respond to Mr. Graham that I certainly would be open to that kind of an amendment, as long as there's a deadline on it. Otherwise, guess what? The minister's never available, and therefore the intent of the motion would be negated through passive-aggressive measures.
Therefore, if the government said, “No later than five calendar days after returning” or something—