Further to the conversation we're having in terms of priorities, on the issue of concurrent meetings, the Investment Canada Act has been put forward as an urgent priority by all the other parties. So the motion as it stands basically puts off any decision, report, or recommendation that the committee might come up with, because it insists that for some reason it's concurrent with a census private member's bill, which I'm not sure I understand the urgency of at this point. I can understand that there is a difference of opinion and that members of this committee may feel strongly that this private member's bill is the right way to go, but you'd be hard pressed to attach any kind of urgency to passing this private member's bill through a committee prior to May 12, which is the deadline for getting it through.
On the other hand, I go back to several months of commentary on the Investment Canada Act, probably years of commentary on the Investment Canada Act for the NDP, articulating how critical it is that we study it immediately. Member after member of the New Democratic Party insisted that the Investment Canada Act should be studied immediately.
We had a motion to study it immediately in this committee, but it was defeated by the opposition parties, with the swing vote being carried by the New Democratic member. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I don't understand it. But now we're dealing with a motion where we're actually pushing it down behind a private member's bill. We can all probably agree that while we may have a difference of opinion in terms of the substance of the bill, the urgency of the bill is completely political. There's nothing urgent that that bill is going to accomplish by coming through our committee. So I put forward that I think it's incumbent on us as a committee to pick our priorities carefully.
If we actually want to get beyond the partisan conversations that we're having, the partisan tone in Parliament, if we really want to move forward together and work together, we have to start focusing on what our priorities are, what is going to make sense from the standpoint of the good of the country. When a minister is carefully studying an issue like the CRTC decision, I think it's difficult to argue that the committee has anything to add to that equation by having meetings ahead of the other issues on the table.
Secondly, I think it's impossible to argue that Bill C-568 is on a par with the Investment Canada Act, as far as an issue of urgency for the committee to study. I think that's absolutely impossible to argue, so I do not understand at all why we would put those as concurrent studies.
I say it honestly, Brian, in the interests of trying to work together. I don't understand how that—