I made this point last time when we talked about this. At one point, parliamentary secretaries weren't even on committees, and then that was introduced. Nothing against Mr. Lake, but it clearly was an intrusion on the independence of the committees. This is a continued erosion of that by allowing the whip's office to be present during the committee.
The whole point of committees is that they're supposed to be independent. They're supposed to give advice to the minister and to the government and to the rest of Parliament. What's happened is that we've seen this drilling down. In the past, the Conservatives used to actually oppose this--the Canadian Alliance at that time, because it was during a Liberal majority government that the actual parliamentary secretary position was introduced to committees.
This element here, I'm.... We obviously don't have the votes to prevent it from happening, but I clearly want to say again that it has been the diminishing of parliamentary committees in general on the Hill. I don't think this committee, to be honest, has suffered too much from that, but it certainly has changed the makeup in relation to how we do business. There is no doubt about that. I have witnessed that enough over the years.