Citizenship and Immigration Committee on April 9th, 2008

[Jim Karygiannis, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

Go ahead and do it. You just don't like the heat. This is why you're not.... You know what, you shouldn't be in the chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

If we do not continue with this meeting, and if we continue to eat into the time of the members here, I will adjourn this meeting.

Mr. Komarnicki.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

In fairness, the jurisdiction of what we're set out to do here is fairly clear. Some leeway has been given to the parties here and there, but the point of the matter is that members are trying to get it wider and wider, and it's going further away from what we're supposed to be doing.

[An hon. member]

He didn't do it yesterday.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Order, please.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

It's appropriate to say, “You bring it up at the right place, but don't take that opportunity here because that's not what we're doing.” I think it's important to enforce that.

[An hon. member]

Did you miss an opportunity yesterday?

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

I'm going back to questioning here now. I'm not entertaining any more points of order on this particular issue.

[An hon. member]

I am raising a point of order.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

I am not entertaining any further points--

[An hon. member]

Why don't you adjourn the meeting and resign as chair?

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

I'm suspending this meeting until members come to order.

[An hon. member]

You know what, I'm not going to sit here and take this. He allowed leeway yesterday. I brought in two amendments and he just didn't want to pull them in. Today when he got hard questions he didn't even want to answer. Forget it. This is a farce.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Are members prepared to allow the witnesses to continue? I'm not entertaining any more points of order on this.

[An hon. member]

This is my point. You've got no choice about entertaining a point of order, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

This meeting is suspended. You are interrupting this meeting and interfering.

[An hon. member]

You are to listen to my point of order when I raise it, Mr. Chair. You are breaking the rules.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

This meeting is suspended.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Hopefully we can continue this meeting in an air of cooperation.

The chair is aware that we are on three different topics here. We've been given orders by the House of Commons to hear these three different topics. We all know what they are: temporary and undocumented workers, immigration consultants, and Iraqi refugees.

During the course of our travels the chair has been lenient in allowing some leeway with regard to questions on Bill C-50. That's when there was an air of cooperation between all members to proceed in that way. That air of cooperation is apparently gone, so I'm going to be fairly strict in where we go with questions on Bill C-50.

At the same time, the chair has already stated that we don't mind being in the periphery of that. We don't want to see Bill C-50 dominate the debate and get us off the topics we want to discuss, that we have been ordered by the House of Commons to proceed with. We have recommendations that'll be made to the House of Commons on these items.

We will be having a hearing on Bill C-50, and all members will be given the opportunity to call witnesses and hear testimony from these witnesses on Bill C-50. Nobody is trying to shut down Bill C-50; it's just that we've been given an order by the House of Commons to do three items, and that doesn't include Bill C-50. So the chair has to be fairly strict in that regard.

I hope members will continue with the air of cooperation we developed since Vancouver and allow us to proceed in the manner we're supposed to proceed in.

On questions, I don't know who was last.

[Andrew Telegdi, Liberal, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

I have a point of order, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

I'll entertain one point of order, and then I won't eat any further into the witnesses' time.

[Andrew Telegdi, Liberal, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

Mr. Chair, had you let the question be finished we would have dealt with it a long ago, and it probably would be over to the Conservatives now.

The point I'm going to make is that never have we gone on tour--and this is my third tour with the citizenship and immigration committee--that we did not bring in other issues, if the member so desired to raise them. There's nothing in the Standing Orders saying that's the only thing you can talk about, number one. Number two, had we been aware, had the committee been aware--they approved the travel--that Bill C-50 was coming forward, I dare say they probably would have asked us to study nothing but Bill C-50.

Mr. Chair, in that role, you cannot determine everything that might be 100% relevant to a particular issue. So had you been a little looser, we wouldn't have had the problem. But the point is that Bill C-50 is the most important piece of legislation before us. The parliamentary secretary asked the committee to try to expedite the matter--and I underline that--in the hearings to Bill C-50. So any information we can gather would have helped that process, but it didn't.

I just want to have that reflected in the record. That was my point.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Okay. No point of order.

Mr. St-Cyr.

[Thierry St-Cyr, Bloc, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I would like to know how many members each of your organizations has.

[Ramesh Dheer]

Approximately 150 plus.