I just want it to be very clear that whenever I've been on committee, if we had a lot of witnesses, we sat down and said, “What are our priorities?”
We weren't given that opportunity. I thank my Conservative colleagues for offering to say that we could expand, because I agree with Mr. Simard: I can't sign off on a report at this point. To me, if we stop it now and we don't have those other voices, it's been a complete waste of time. We'll just be saying, “Well, you guys can do it.” We can't sign off.
It's about the process. We all come up with many witnesses and then we come back and say: “Well, who do we need to hear from? How do we feel this this is going to work?” If you're going to say that it's going to be decided on seat allocation in the House, then it's a waste of our time as well, because then I can't bring forward.... While I think that for the good of the committee these are witnesses who need to be heard, I'm going to have to be a lot more parochial in my decisions, and that's going to affect the quality of our work. From here on in, we're going to have to decide how we're going to operate.