Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I just want to reconfirm what we are actually doing here. It's the “within four weeks” and the difference between then and when we could go. I would be interested to know the procedural tactics that would be employed to actually get the Ethics Commissioner or somebody else here tomorrow, with less than a few hours' notice. It's almost sad to hear as an argument, because I think the member is better than that, suggesting that we can somehow have the power to do that, especially given the fact that we had to actually assign this as a special meeting. I don't know how we would subpoena somebody within a matter of hours or days for that. Why we would do that to a commissioner of the Crown who reports to all of Parliament and who has been co-operative in doing their job related to this seems rather abusive, that's for sure.
If we want to talk about scandals, if the Conservatives want to do that, I have a whole list here. We have the Nadon issue. We have the illegal transfer of funds. We have the Phoenix pay system. I could go on for hours and hours and hours, because I lived those Harper scandals. We have Dean Del Mastro. We have others of electoral fraud from the east coast in particular. We have a whole series of different things.
Again, this is something that we want to get to, and I think we're being responsible in doing so. To then be attacked for it is unfortunate, because I think it just cheapens the entire issue. I'm rather stunned in some respects that there wasn't an interest to actually co-operate to get what they could have achieved. I guess maybe they're having a tantrum right now, because they came into the meeting with probably a stronger position. What they're getting now is because they played their hand so poorly. That's the end result, at the end of the day.
There were actually two meetings with two hours. That was agreeable. I spoke to it at the beginning of my intervention, suggesting that I wouldn't reduce the time for the other request. Then we went to another attempt to have a sincere approach to getting this committee moving and getting things done, which was offered by the Bloc. That's where we landed and where hopefully we'll land here today and move on. If not, if we don't get this done in the next few minutes with regard to this, then I guess we have to call another meeting—or do we extend? I'm not sure of the procedure for that, but that's where we could end up, if that's where the members want to go, and continue the process.