Thank you very much.
I didn't think this is where we would be this morning. As my colleague just talked about, having expert witnesses with testimony in regard to Build Canada Homes and creating this new Crown corporation that's going to highlight all the good work, collate it together.... People travelled from all over the country to be witnesses here today, and we just dismissed them because of a motion that we've already been trying to work out.
I'd love to ground this discussion today in what's actually being proposed within this motion. As it stands, this is not a modest request. The motion itself has five different subsections, and each of those is for very complex sets of documents to be produced within 30 days. I'm looking at this and the hours that it's going to take; not that it's not an important thing, but this is not a modest request. It's going to require production of what could be millions of pages of documents across multiple federal departments. Think about that.
We are not going to talk about a discrete set of briefing notes or a defined dataset. We're going to be talking about an enormous volume of materials—potentially years' worth of internal communications, analyses and records—that would need to be identified, reviewed and redacted, because of necessary legal arrangements, and then translated and, finally, compiled.
To put it plainly, this is not a small administrative exercise. This is an enormous undertaking. We forget about how important this particular committee is. We have an umbrella of five or six different ministries, and we already have a very busy schedule. We are dealing with some of the most vulnerable people in our country within this committee, so when we have these little willy-nilly....
I shouldn't say willy-nilly.... Well, it is willy-nilly. When we have motions like this that come out, wanting us to produce all of these different documents, we could be better focusing a lot of time, money and energy into the vulnerable people we're trying to help serve. I did not come to Ottawa to worry about all of these different, unnecessary amounts of documents that the Bloc and the Conservatives are trying to get us to produce right now.
I feel like this is a last-ditch grab, because of our newly formed majority, as a way to get us to—