That's not a point of order, Mr. Chair.
First of all, I'd like to make the point that the opposition couldn't even get their witnesses organized before they called this meeting. That's one of the things that have ticked me off about this whole thing, and particularly their attitude today.
I'm glad Mr. Regan brought this up. I don't think they've treated this meeting seriously at all, and evidence of that would be the fact that they released their news release earlier today before the meeting was even half over. On Monday morning we heard from the opposition that they wanted to have a meeting. We're required to have it within five days. That basically gave us three days to set it up--Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday--so we could have it today. We did that. The clerk worked very hard, worked overtime to try to put this together. We set up a three-and-a-half-hour meeting today. It's hardly a short meeting, as Ms. Bennett called it. We've been here.
There is concern over witnesses, apparently. We have used the opposition's witness list. That's what we used to set this up. We brought as many new witnesses into the hearing as we possibly could; it was set up that way. There was apparently some concern over five witnesses, and it gets awfully ridiculous, Mr. Chair, because three of those five witnesses have already appeared at either this committee or at the health committee. One person--and they don't even know this themselves, because it's in their news release--declined. This is their witness who declined. They don't even have that much knowledge of what went on this week to know that.
I think that is probably a pretty good sign of why this meeting was held. It wasn't to find out about isotopes; it was to set up some sort of political charade, which we've seen this afternoon.
Mr. Chair, we're having a health minister here even though this is the natural resources committee. I think we've gone the extra mile for these folks. Clearly, the opposition has been poorly organized right from the beginning, and that's evident by the fact that the witnesses were not even called prior to their deciding that they had a witness list and submitting it to us. A good number of those witnesses were not available.
So between that and the Liberals' having released their news release earlier today, I think it shows what they really intended to do with this today, which is, as Mr. Cullen said earlier, to make it into a spectacle, and they've been able to do that. We probably are not going to get a lot of this testimony out into the public view, because these folks are more intent on trying to make this into, as Mr. Cullen called it, a spectacle rather than dealing seriously with this issue.
So we don't need to meet again, and we don't need to meet again in the near future, and we're going to happily decline Mr. Regan's offer.