Thank you, Madam Chair.
I want to continue a bit with what my colleague, Mr. Bezan, was saying. There's a very big difference between delaying a study unnecessarily, and ensuring that a study addresses the critical questions brought to us to review. We are trying to ensure that we do a thorough and responsible job, and that we get the critical evidence that we require in order to answer the very fundamental questions that have been put before us.
As we said, this is not about delaying; it is about ensuring that we do a responsible job [Technical difficulty—Editor]. That is our responsibility.
To that end, we can't say what additional information we will require when we hear from critical witnesses. To Mr. Garrison's point, when the minister came, he said, “I gave it to my chief of staff and she went and spoke to people”. That's why we've called Zita Astravas to provide us with that information.
If we had received all of the information from the minister, we wouldn't have had to call Zita. We haven't heard from these remaining critical witnesses yet, so we don't know if they're going to tell us another piece of the puzzle that we absolutely need to review in order to do the job we need to do.
To the point that Mr. Bezan made about the military justice system, not only have we seen something incredibly disturbing, that we have senior military people who appear to be immune from the justice system, but we also have been given testimony that says the possibility exists for senior military personnel to interfere in the military justice system. That is even more egregious. Not only does it seem like there are two different approaches, but senior military personnel are actually able to interfere in the process to protect themselves.
If we have entrusted these senior military officers with such great responsibility, not only have we asked all serving members to protect and defend Canadian values at home but we've also asked them to go to other countries to defend and protect these values that the world wants to have. If they can't do that within our own organization, within the military itself, then we can't hope to be a model to honour and defend those values outside of the country.
We absolutely need to get to the bottom of this, because this is the tipping point for our Canadian Armed Forces. We as parliamentarians, at the moment, appear to be the last line of defence of being able to push this forward and have some of these really critical issues reviewed and explored.