Thank you, Madam Chair.
I had my hand up for a while because I wanted to respond to some of the questions that our colleague Mr. Barsalou-Duval had earlier. I wanted to again make sure that the committee understood that section (b) is about the new allegations that have come forward on General Fortin. We don't want to at all dive into the allegations themselves, and although this seems very fresh, we have moved quickly as a committee on all of the allegations against former generals and admirals as they became public.
It's interesting to note that all the action by the government doesn't take place until after media outlets start reporting on an allegation of sexual misconduct against one of our commanders. If you actually look at the way things have played out, February 2 is when Global News broke the story on General Vance, and then we had the headline on February 8 about Minister Sajjan not having acted upon it for three years. On February 9, this committee then had an emergency meeting, and we brought forward the motion to start the study into sexual misconduct allegations against the former chief of the defence staff. On February 24, news broke about sexual misconduct allegations against chief of the defence staff Admiral McDonald. We moved as a committee, and by March 8, we already had a motion to expand the scope of our study.
Having us look at the allegations against General Fortin—or, not the allegations, but rather how this information has been handled—is germane to the overall study. Again, we have allegations that broke in the news media that General Fortin wasn't even aware of last Friday, and Prime Minister Trudeau, in a press conference this morning, said he was aware of this several weeks ago, and of course it only became public after media sources started to report.
Madam Chair, and to my colleagues, it is important that we look into how that flow of information is being handled and why there is this lack of transparency. If we have commanding officers who are continuing to be implicated in sexual misconduct allegations, why are they allowed to stay in command posts as long as they have, until we actually get to the point in time when due process has been completely fulfilled for both the complainant and the commanding officers?
We should be drilling down into this. On the report side, I'm not suggesting at all that we slow down the report, and that's why part (c) is there. It's to make sure that we have a timeline, that we have an autopilot in case we can't come to decisions through constructive debate and working together on the draft report. It's to ensure that we do get to the point of just voting on each paragraph and each recommendation as we go forward after the end of the month. If the Fortin part of this study yields some extra information on how information flows from the Canadian Armed Forces to the Minister of National Defence and up into the Prime Minister's Office, we can include it before the deadlines that are laid out in this motion and include it as a separate paragraph or two. If it is impossible because it actually creates more questions than answers, we would then have a supplemental report just on this part of the motion, on part (b).
It's about making sure that we can address the full scope of sexual misconduct within the Canadian Armed Forces as it's impacting our highest-ranking officers.