Thanks, Madam Chair. I don't think your comment at the beginning that this was going to be a quick one is necessarily accurate at this point in time.
I don't sit on the subcommittee, but we all received a report from the subcommittee and I thought there was a lot of goodwill when we talked about the ability to talk about the supply chain issues that we're facing.
I think Mr. Sidhu's and Mr. Miao's motions were good motions, and I think we came to a good understanding about what that would be. The subcommittee report—to remind everybody—started with this biocides meeting that we had here for, I was going to say, Mr. Savard-Tremblay, but I think it was actually a pretty good study for everybody to understand that. Then we were going on to the port strike. I think, again, that was something that everybody was in agreement with. Again, it was in the subcommittee report that we were doing it. I just remind the committee that the initial motion for that was to include the minister as part of that study and that study would have been happening Tuesday.
We now understand that the minister is free Tuesday, but she's not appearing on this. It's about this prestudy, which seems to have jumped the queue, if you will. I think there was a lot of good faith in removing the minister from that and making sure that we're focused on the government's response and having government officials. We didn't necessarily demand that the minister appear, which I know has happened in previous committees that I you and I have sat on together, where we spent a lot of time demanding that the minister show up.
That wasn't the case this time. I think, again, it was the understanding that we were going to move directly to the port strike. I know there has been a lot of anticipation from pretty much everybody in this room, and we wanted to do it. It was topical. We wanted to do it sooner rather than later.
Certainly I think this is something that I, unfortunately, won't be supporting—going to this prestudy just because the minister happens to be free, when initially we were looking for the minister for the first one.
I'll leave my comments there, Madam Chair, but again, to my first point, I don't think this is going to be a short discussion, as you said in your opening comments. Hopefully we can resolve this.
Thank you.