Thanks.
I didn't mean to do anything other than try to be very precise on what I intend to ask for, and to put committee members on warning that if we don't get some answers to these questions—not all today, of course, but in time—that I intend to bring a motion in that regard.
To be precise, and just by way of background too, those are the six questions I'd like some answers to. I'll go through them as I can.
Thank you for coming here today.
I'm a little concerned, to start off, Mr. Minister, on the timelines here. In May 2008 to August 2008 you had your hearings. You went to every province and territory. I'm assuming you went to one place in each of those places, but that's part of my questioning, to figure if you went to multiple places within a province or territory. It looks to me—this is a question right off the bat—that the report was actually prepared on March 5, 2009. There's a date at the bottom, yet you don't refer to that report being dated March 5, 2009, in your covering letter to Mr. Fast.
That's my first question: was that report actually prepared on March 5, 2009? If so, why did we have to go through the trouble of bringing a motion on June 17, 2010, and wait for an appearance in December 2010? Mr. Minister, I know that the other place there, the chamber, is full of rhetoric sometimes, and I know that everybody gets a little flourish of purple prose, but you've often used the moniker of delay for us. One might say that there's a bit of delay here. If the hearings were finished in August 2008, the report may have been prepared—it looks as though it was—in March 2009. We asked for it in June 2010, and we're just talking about some specific answers in December 2010.
Was it actually prepared in March 2009?