Evidence of meeting #116 for Citizenship and Immigration in the 42nd Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was plan.
A video is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Michelle Rempel Conservative Calgary Nose Hill, AB
I thank you for your retraction of that assertion.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant
I'm not ascribing motives.
We have a motion on the floor to have three one-hour blocks of time within our minimum of two meetings—
Conservative
David Tilson Conservative Dufferin—Caledon, ON
No, that's not what the motion said; it was “at least two meetings”.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant
Yes, we'd have at least two meetings, but within those “at least two meetings” we would have three one-hour blocks of time for ministers.
Do you want this on division as well, or no?
Conservative
Michelle Rempel Conservative Calgary Nose Hill, AB
Yes, and emails to offices afterwards.
(Motion as amended negatived: nays 5; yeas 4)
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant
Just as a note to the committee, I get that the intent of this is to make sure that the committee has enough time for several things. You want enough time for ministers, for officials, and for witnesses. In our limited amount of time, I will do my best to make sure that we have all of those covered.
Conservative
Michelle Rempel Conservative Calgary Nose Hill, AB
On a point of clarification, Mr. Chair, you actually missed a fairly important thing in that, that the opposition members be allowed to have time to ask questions of ministers. I think you conveniently left that out. I would like to know, first of all, whether you think that is important, and then how you plan to achieve that in terms of the scheduling of ministers.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant
I will send out a notice of meeting and you'll see the agenda based on the motions that have been passed today.
Conservative
Michelle Rempel Conservative Calgary Nose Hill, AB
But just for a point of clarification, since you just summarized what you thought the committee thought was important, do you agree or disagree that—
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant
I will also add: in the questioning of, I'm assuming, ministers, witnesses, and officials who are important to all parties.
Conservative
Michelle Rempel Conservative Calgary Nose Hill, AB
Just so that the committee is clear, what would you consider adequate time for opposition members with that number of ministers?
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant
I'm very pleased that the committee has a process whereby minutes of questioning are allocated to each of the parties appropriately. That was passed as a working principle of this committee, and we will follow that.
Conservative
Michelle Rempel Conservative Calgary Nose Hill, AB
Just to clarify, if you were to schedule three ministers in one one-hour block, that would leave approximately one seven-minute round each for the opposition members?
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant
I had no idea what the outcome of this meeting would be today, so I will take this back and I will work with the analyst and the clerk to ensure that the motions that were passed today are appropriately followed.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant
I believe the committee would always have had appropriate time based on the structures that we've passed.
Ms. Kwan and Mr. Maguire.
NDP
Jenny Kwan NDP Vancouver East, BC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I know that the motion Ms. Rempel moved failed. I don't normally do this, but we did have an offside conversation, Mr. Chair. I had an offside conversation with you just now about adding the ministers and my concern about the adequacy of having our normal two-hour-block meeting to accommodate that. I made a suggestion, off the record, to say that if we can have a three-hour meeting so that we can accommodate those three ministers accordingly, I think that would be to everyone's advantage.
The goal of the work of the committee is to get the information it needs, and for committee members to ask questions, hopefully to work toward a solution that we can all agree on. That may or may never happen, but that is still the goal here. I hope you will undertake to do exactly that. I hope the ministers will understand the importance of this work and why committee members from all sides of the House have decided that we will come back in the middle of summer, taking time away from our constituencies as well as our families, to do this work. I hope they will accommodate us accordingly.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant
I believe I responded to you in the affirmative, and my mind has not changed despite attempts to change it.
NDP
Conservative
Larry Maguire Conservative Brandon—Souris, MB
Thanks, Mr. Chair.
If we're going to have three ministers here, I think Canadians deserve to have three hours for them. However you put it together—you have the chairmanship role to play in that—I think Canadians expect there to be some obvious time for questioning on this to get some of the answers they don't think are happening today.
Thank you.
Liberal