First of all, I want to express my disappointment that we had a subcommittee meeting scheduled last week that was cancelled. I don't know about the rest of you, but I have a very busy schedule, and when something is scheduled, I oftentimes have to take something else out or move stuff around so that I can be here. This committee is a priority for me, and I take it very seriously. So when a meeting is scheduled—especially a subcommittee meeting, which I was really pleased to see—and then cancelled without any reason given, it does a number of things that aren't very helpful, one being that I had thought we could, at that subcommittee meeting last week, perhaps have spoken rather directly to the issue of needing to have the minister here before the committee to speak to estimates. In fact, I thought maybe we could have had him here today. We're wasting time when we do this kind of thing. I believe there's a timeline for when we have to get estimates done, and I think it's coming at us very quickly, or we have to report back to the House but can no longer perform that exercise with which we are charged, and which is actually a priority for this committee, because there are lots of things in this very thick book on estimates we certainly would like to ask the minister some questions about.
So I guess I'd like to know from the chair how decisions like that get made, because this could happen again. First of all, the subcommittee was called and then it was cancelled. There was no attempt to explain to anybody why, and that leaves us, in my view, behind the eight ball.
I would like to support the agenda put forward by Mr. Savage, that items of importance to this committee be established. Certainly, estimates and getting the minister before us so that we can speak to him are really important. I think we need to quickly finish the employability study, which we have put a lot of effort, time, and energy into, and get that out of the way and bring it to the House so that it can be used.
Then we should move on to this study on poverty, which I believe all of us have now committed to seeing done. As you've probably all noted, it's becoming a very prominent issue out there in the public sphere, and I think it would behoove us to get moving on that.
So those are the kinds of agenda items I'd like to see us address. However, I thought we could have done that more effectively and efficiently had we had that subcommittee meeting last week, after which we could have come today to the table with a suggested agenda put forward by the subcommittee.