Thank you, Madam Chair. I appreciate that, and I appreciate the attention of my colleagues.
I have a lot to say today. I've been doing a lot of research on this topic. As always, I pride myself on reading a lot and trying to learn as much as I can about such an important topic.
I do appreciate my colleagues' trying to get to a point of consensus on this committee. I put forward an amendment to Mr. Cooper's motion in a good-faith attempt to extend this study a little more and to have a few other witnesses come before the committee.
I think Mr. Gerretsen was right to point out in his remarks that the leader of the official opposition, years ago, made many of the arguments we have been making. It's funny how the Conservatives have pointed out, quite a few times in our deliberations on various topics, that the Conservatives seem to switch positions when it's good and convenient for them.
Pierre Poilievre has argued for ministerial accountability, MP Julian from the NDP also made that argument in previous meetings, and now we seem to have a complete 180° on that. I don't understand why members want to do that, when we've covered the fact that, during an election within the caretaker convention, there are public officials who oversee the panel and the protocol. All of those officials have come before this committee.
Within the rest of the time, there are ministers who are responsible for the all-of-government approach, which is referred to by Rosenberg as the “electoral ecosystem approach”. It's clear to me that those ministers are accountable and have come before this committee. If there are any who haven't come, I'm sure they would be willing. All we would have to do is make those requests, if they haven't been made already.
Instead, we see an attempt to make this a partisan undertaking, and it shouldn't be. There are those of us who have been working on election interference, including the leadership of our government, for many years. The last intervention I made was quite substantive. I took the time to read through all the various reports. I came up with an outline, year by year, of all the things that our government has done either to try to prevent foreign election interference or to combat, essentially, interference in our democracy and democratic institutions as a whole. There is much work that's been done.
Again, I will not let people just say things that are completely false. The things that the opposition parties have said are not true. In particular, the Conservatives have said over and over again that the Trudeau government hasn't done anything. Well, that's not true. That's patently false. It's false on every level, and I will never stop saying it's false. You'll never get me to agree with that because it's just false.
I have many examples, counter-arguments and substantive steps that we have taken to combat foreign election interference. Therefore, you're never going to get me to lay down and just accept the fact that you guys are going to propagate falsehoods. To me, that is what's happening here.
We also heard from the Leader of the Opposition recently. In the press gallery, he was giving remarks to what I think was a hypothetical question that a reporter asked. Mr. Poilievre said, “The question...was...would [I] go in and...get briefed about secrets of the state...the answer I gave was 'Of course not, because then they would use that to silence me from speaking out any further.' It would then become illegal for me to speak out.”
I don't know about you, but I just find it shocking that the leader of the official opposition, who claims over and over again to want to get to the truth of the allegations that have circulated in the media, would not want to get a briefing on these matters if he were given the opportunity to get to the truth.
Is he really committed to getting the truth or is he more interested in casting stones at Justin Trudeau and our government, all else be damned, basically? That's how I read that statement. I don't know about others, but certainly it doesn't reflect well on the leader of the official opposition in terms of actually getting to the truth in this matter.
I really [Technical difficulty—Editor] Mr. Duncan's ploy to try to appeal to the committee that we're blocking this or blocking that. We're not. We're actually speaking—