I move that this committee undertake a study of the criteria used when awarding funding to community organizations that assist new Canadians as they make Canada their new home; and that pursuant to Standing Order 108(1), any findings and recommendations based thereupon be reported to the House.
We have had a flurry of activity, Mr. Chair, on how certain organizations get funding. We have people using adjectives, and the minister is certainly responding by threatening to cut their funding. We've clearly heard from the department this morning that there is a procedure and there are ways of doing this. I would like to put this on the table and certainly look for the support of the members to examine how an organization gets funding. We should examine the criteria used for the funding, and we should also call upon the minister to tell us the criteria he uses--be that a knee-jerk reaction or whatever--in order to cut funding from an organization when its president or vice-president might use some adjectives he doesn't like.
Certainly, that's not the mandate of the minister. That is certainly not the mandate he got from the Prime Minister, and on that, sir, I'd like to find out what mandates the department has and where the minister intervenes. How does he go about intervening in funding, and what criteria do we use in order to cut funding from an organization that's been getting funding for a long time?
I'm seeking support. Should Mr. St-Cyr want to defer that, you might want to go to the organization and say, look, I deferred it because I thought we wouldn't like to study this. This is an item du jour, if you want to call it that. This is something for which we need to find the criteria and that we need to discuss thoroughly.