Look, we moved this motion. This is the second time under this study that we've asked former minister Bains to come. The first time he refused. Now he's been ragging the puck.
This is five weeks since we passed this motion. They were given all of May. The motion that this committee approved said to appear in May. I think we've been more than generous to these witnesses to try to accommodate them without further delaying. We do have another piece of legislation, MP Singh's bill. That is most of our hearings in June. We had an agreed schedule, agreed to in the steering committee, unanimously, including by the Liberals, that included this meeting before the end of May.
In order to accommodate, as the chair has said and as MP Turnbull and MP Gaheer have said, we've given them all this time. The first invitations went out at the beginning of May, when we passed the motion. It was public. They have been saying that they can't do this date, they can't do that date, they can't do this date. It's clear that they are refusing to appear through delay tactics, hoping that the summer comes and everybody will forget about this.
This has nothing to do, MP Gaheer will recall, with whatever it is the Auditor General is doing. We have our own inquiry, which we've done on this and which we still cannot do a report on until we've had these witnesses. That's part of the process that we all agreed to. It's amazing to me that the Liberals would want to go back on what they had agreed to in the steering committee before, that they would want to go back and not have the meeting that we agreed to when we passed this motion almost five weeks ago.
A summons is strong, but five weeks of trying to get these witnesses to appear has been more than accommodating. It's time to use that hammer. That hammer is the only thing that got ADM Noseworthy to agree to come.