Chair, with the greatest of respect—and it must be just the role you play, and I understand the line between the bureaucracy and the minister—this really is not getting us too far. At some point you have to get engaged with us and go back and forth and actually.... Maybe we need to go in camera so that you have a higher comfort level, but with the greatest of respect—and I'm not faulting you—Chair, this is not engagement. This is question and answer, and it's nice, it's helpful, but it's not what we're undertaking here.
We're trying to develop a whole new protocol. We need some ability to provide a comfort zone for the staff, so that they can interact with us in a way where we're going back and forth and working through problems and saying, “Okay, we see what you're saying. We identified that problem. The way we do it now is this, and Bill C-2 is going to affect it this way. What else can we do?” We Have to have that engagement. Otherwise, Chair, this is helpful for a Q and A, but we're not developing protocol this way.
I'm not faulting you. Please don't take it that way at all; I didn't mean that. But this is a little frustrating. We're chasing our tails here, and at some point—it may be down the road that it is built in—we have to have more give and take if this is really going to be a joint project, or we're just going to be an island unto ourselves, doing what we think is best and throwing it out there, praying like hell that somebody cares enough to do something about it.
Thanks, Chair.