Thank you very much, Chair.
And thank you all for your attendance here today.
Let me just say at the outset that I appreciate Mr. Williams' feeling of outrage. And the more we dig, the more we realize that there's more to find.
I would just point out that the investigation that has been called into this could get no closer to this issue Mr. Williams just raised than we did—in fact, less so. We at least have put people under oath. The investigator can't do that. The investigator can't command documents. Even if they do, there's nothing to require them to make those documents part of the final submission, and that's the problem.
It would help a lot—and I say this very sincerely—if the Conservative members moved from abstention to lending their considerable weight to the call for a proper judicial inquiry so that these witnesses can have the protection they need and ultimately we'll get to the truth, because we're not here. We're going to keep going in circles. We're going to keep doing this because it's better than that investigation, but this is far from perfect.
Every time we go around the table, to me it just reinforces that much more that what the RCMP deserves, what the officers of the RCMP deserve, and what the Canadian public deserve is a proper, full public inquiry, and we're not going to stop hammering away at that until we bloody well get one.
Deputy, I'd like to return to some of your comments.
By the way, I have a great deal of sympathy for the concerns you raised at the beginning. We're no closer to getting to the truth than we were at the beginning. I have no idea, at the end of the day, who is going to be held responsible, but I really worry about people being wronged in this process. So I appreciate what you said, Deputy, but as you know, we have to persevere, we have to do the best we can, and hopefully the minister will step in and give us tools to do a better job.
When you met with us the last time, you said, “It was felt at that time by the then commissioner that Chief Superintendent Macaulay would benefit from a secondment. He was actually given a short secondment with the military.”
Can I ask you to give us your recollection of that discussion you had with the commissioner, given that—I'm going from memory, so I stand to be corrected—the former commissioner's testimony stated that he thought Chief Superintendent Macaulay had made some kind of mistake and that by going off to DND he could reclaim his reputation and get his career back on track? That didn't sound to me like it was only about furthering Chief Superintendent Macaulay's career, and he has given direct testimony that he believes he was removed for other reasons—meaning, bringing forward these issues.
Could you tell us what that conversation was, as you recall it, with the former commissioner about how this was going to be a benefit to Chief Superintendent Macaulay's career?