My apologies.
I will be speaking to the last part of the amendment. I'll start with that to give you the context of the comments I'm going to give:
That six meetings be devoted to witness testimony and that witness lists be submitted to the clerk within seven days.... And that the committee report its findings to the House no later than October 31, 2024.
The comments that my colleague made before me and that I will make here as well, some specifically on this, I think allude to asking PROC members to vote on what the priority of this committee is over the next several weeks. What my colleague before me has just said and what we will continue to say is that frankly this is a distraction.
Cynical me, but I think many Canadians tuning in to this today will say that the fact that Mrs. Romanado had this on notice for two years and that today is the day it's brought forward is.... There was full knowledge by Liberal members and all members of this committee that only just recently Justice Hogue provided her initial report—dated May 3, 2024—in the public inquiry into foreign interference, something that this committee has been seized with a lot, and rightfully so. The more information is gathered, and the more information is put out as public information, frankly, the more questions there are that need to be answered, many of which this committee could and should be dealing with as a priority.
We don't know when the next election may be, but candidates are being nominated. The issue of foreign interference.... We talk about the amendment that is here, about the number of meetings. Let's just call a spade a spade. For Canadians who are perhaps not memorizing the parliamentary calendar as much as maybe those of us in this room would, with a recess week next week, by the time the House rises in June, six meetings would likely take us right out to the summer. That is a deliberate attempt to push down any conversations, meetings and further study on the issue of foreign interference and the things that my colleague Mr. Cooper has raised. There is absolute relevance when we talk about what we're talking about today and what we are laying on the floor here.
To the amendment specifically and the main part, I do find it ironic that here we are and Liberal members and NDP members are talking about how hard it is to be a politician these days. There is an irony in this. With everything that's going on in the country, the mood of Canadians right now is, rightfully, one of frustration and despair. We hear about food banks. We hear about housing costs. We hear about crime. We hear about drugs and the disorder that is happening in every part of this country. There is a lot of frustration right now with the current government, their policies and what's going on. To know what those struggles are—the millions of people using food banks, the millions of Canadians struggling to own a home—and to sit here and say that it's a tough time to be a politician, I think most Canadians would shake their head about what the priorities are.
Instead, the procedure and House affairs committee needs to make foreign interference a priority. It should be of no surprise to members, including Liberal and NDP members, that this would be an issue and a notice of motion or a priority of this committee after the initial report came in of what we need to know. Mr. Cooper has done a fantastic job in raising a lot of points and trying to get answers to the many questions that the government has evaded.
We've seen time and time again, particularly on the issue of foreign interference, that the Liberals are never forthcoming with the proper information the first time and proactively: It has been media leaks. Frankly, the whole premise of the seriousness and the magnitude of the issue of foreign interference didn't come because a member like Mrs. Romanado brought a notice of motion to take a look at this. It was only brought forward by leaks that came into media and reporting. I don't know who it was. Obviously, we don't know who made those leaks, but they were obviously frustrated at the Liberal government and ministers withholding information from members of Parliament directly, with Mr. Chong being the major highlight, sadly, of that circumstance.
Many times, again, only in the last couple of weeks, there have been further leaks about how members of Parliament have not been provided proper disclosure in a reasonable time frame, but instead we have read, through media reports and questions from journalists, about foreign interference attempts, attempts to intimidate members of Parliament and so forth. It was time and time again, and I've seen it here at PROC several times as well, how the failure to properly disclose information proactively has led that.
When we talk about what the priorities of this committee should be in the coming weeks, as we have a few more weeks left in the parliamentary calendar before the summer recess, Canadians would expect us not to talk about how tough it is to be a politician these days. Even when we talk about that issue, the fact is that the Speaker threw the Leader of the Opposition out of the chamber last week and created chaos. I'll remind you that the Speaker, in his opening days—since we talk about the operations and the Standing Orders of the House—used to say that his job was to be the referee and never to be the story—oops, that's been the story many times.
Again, I think what we need to focus on and what Canadians are asking us for, particularly with the lens of the procedure and House affairs committee, is not six meetings and a very last-minute amendment that comes in to a motion that's been on notice for two years and suddenly needs to be done and dealt with and heard basically at all the meetings until the summer recess. Canadians are smart enough to know just how cynical this attempt is. It's an attempt to silence the opposition on the topic, I think, and to create a distraction from the real issue—