Thank you, Mr. Chair.
People have the motion before them. I'm going to make one small suggestion for a change, but mainly the motion is so that people have an opportunity to question the Manley panel, to challenge them or whatever, to question ministers of the crown--Defence, Foreign Affairs, CIDA--and potentially to call and question other witnesses over a fairly compressed period.
What we're suggesting is what would amount to six meetings, I believe, to February 28. Obviously it's an item of intense public interest, of intense parliamentary interest. We think it's in Canadians' interests, and, frankly, parliamentarians' interests, to have the opportunity to do that in public. There are many different sides to this debate, and we feel they all need to be aired. We feel that airing them with the Manley panel--who came up with, we thought, a fairly concise report--and the ministers involved would be in the interests of public information, obviously in the interests of democracy, and in the interests of collectively helping us to make a decision on the Afghanistan mission question when it ultimately comes up in the House.
There's going to be debate in the House, of course, and probably fairly lively debate. We think, as members of this committee and the foreign affairs committee, that if anybody ought to be as up to speed on it as possible, it would be the members of these two committees.
The same process is going on at the foreign affairs committee right now, and since we don't know what they're going to do and they don't know what we're going to do ultimately, I would put out the option of adding in the first line, after “Pursuant to standing order 108(1)(a), that the committee meet jointly”, the words “or individually”. If they decide not to and we decide to, then we have the option of doing it individually.
I would suggest that an option of each committee doing it individually would get a little onerous in terms of the time we would be requesting of the people of the Manley panel, the ministers, and potentially other witnesses. So if they do decide to do it, then we would do it jointly, but if they decide not to do it and we do, we could have the option of doing it individually.
Then we can talk about or take some other suggestions as they come up for things--you know, the way we may want to actually make this work--but basically the motion would be that we meet jointly or individually, and the rest of the motion would stay the same.