I want to be able to go back to my constituents and be able to present facts, as I'm sure everyone wants and, based on those facts, to be able to say, “Hey, look, this was the government's response.” This is where I have a problem.
Let me give you from a witness list an example of who we've had here to provide testimony. We have had the Department of Finance, the Department of Natural Resources and the Business Council of Alberta.
We also had the Calgary Chamber of Commerce. We had Canada's Building Trades Unions. We had the IUOE, International Union of Operating Engineers, IUOE, and the Pipe Line Contractors Association of Canada. In their testimony around jobs and early involvement, I found that there were a lot of lessons learned.
We had the Trans Mountain Corporation here, which specifically talked about being a smart seller and making sure they shared a lot of lessons learned. We had CAPP. We had Synovus. We had Red Nation Natural Law Energy. We had a lot of individuals who came here from the Canadian Climate Institute, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and the Transition Accelerator.
I'm not going to go through all of these lists, but what message are we sending to them? The message we are sending to them by doing this is, “You came here, you travelled, we incurred the costs, and you sat here and provided your insight.” As a result of that insight, we want to make sure that we get lessons learned. How we can digest that $34 billion and where are the opportunities to learn? The message we are sending to them is: “From an accountability point of view, right now our focus is on a political agenda.”
I still don't understand. Hopefully, Mr. Simard or some of my other colleagues, when I yield the floor, will be able to explain to me and to Canadians what is wrong with the process that we have. If it's a concurrence motion, if it's a 30-minute debate, why not have all the facts? Why not have all of the facts in order to get up in the House, hold up the report and get the response from the government and say, “This response is good” or “This response is unacceptable”. We are not even giving the government a chance to respond.
When you look at that and at what else we are doing by actually bypassing the process we have, we are bypassing witnesses and their input. You can see that all of those bypasses are going to erode our ability to have a very fruitful conversation in the House, whether it's in the 10-minute late show, whether it's three hours of concurrence, or whether it's a whole day of opposition.
Mr. Simard and the Bloc will get the opportunity, should they choose to accept this amendment, to have a fulsome conversation.
When I yield the floor, I'd love to hear why we are moving from an accountability agenda with a very clear structure to a political agenda.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I yield my time.