I would just note that it's true we have not always reached consensus, but I always believe that the spirit of what we try to do is in consensus. That's one of the reasons I had....
When I spoke to Mr. Dorion today, I had some serious concerns that when the motions came forward it would be impossible to even have the spirit of consensus. It seems that everybody is starting off from a point such that I think it would be very difficult to reach consensus.
I think this committee--and I mentioned this as well to Mr. Dorion earlier--is a little bit different from other committees. There are a lot of things on which we can find consensus and a lot of issues internationally. I think where there is consensus to be reached on those issues, we should strive to deal with it. I don't think we're going to be able to find that on every issue, but I think we've made a good effort.
In the last four years that I've been here, very few motions of this nature have been brought forward. That's why I was trying to ask Mr. Dorion whether things have changed within his party, because generally speaking the motions that come forward are about a specific issue that we want to highlight in a specific country. We have concerns about it and want the government to actually take some action or to look at it.
This is very much a domestic attack on the government, and it seems to break—well, it really is breaking, in my opinion—the spirit of what we're trying to build here as a committee. If we want to be a committee like all of the other committees, then I don't think we'll ever be able to get the witnesses we want to have. Before, we allowed a lot of motions to go through, such as the one I asked for on Afghanistan and motions by other members as well, because we've allowed different members the ability to see what issues they wanted to bring forward.
I'm a little concerned that what we're trying to do here with these motions is to create a conflict where there was none before in our committee.