Mr. Chair, I would like to make a couple of comments in response to those made by Mr. Ehsassi.
First of all, I did not say that this committee is an inappropriate venue. I said that it is not a perfect venue, because in a perfect world, had the government been transparent, the Prime Minister would have taken this issue seriously and gotten to the bottom of it or the Attorney General would have committed to investigating the matter of this leak. That simply hasn't happened, so we are now left with the justice committee, which certainly does have purview over the substance of this matter.
I want to correct the record in that regard.
Mr. Ehsassi suggested that we had some interest in hauling in journalists. That's not true. That's not what the scope of this hearing would involve. It might involve hearing from the Prime Minister, the Prime Minister's chief of staff and other officials in the PMO who might have knowledge about a leak that very likely came from the PMO.
To say that the Prime Minister is taking this seriously, how is that so? Is he taking it seriously by issuing a blanket denial after about a 24-hour period where he was trying to figure out how to get his story straight? We know the Prime Minister changes his story on so many things by the day.