That's okay.
I was listening very carefully to what my colleagues were saying on the other side. To a certain extent I would be sympathetic to what they were saying, provided we were in an ideal situation. The reality is that this public accounts committee is not functioning like the public accounts committee did in the past. There's very little goodwill to proceed with the important oversight function we have. The subcommittee, which could be the place where we would create some form of consensus around witnesses heard and the agenda, has been abolished by my Conservative colleagues.
If we were in that ideal situation, then of course it would be normal to have our procedures to decide on the agenda and so forth in camera. The reality is that it's not normal, which begs the need to make public what the opposition is proposing and to have the government or other members of the committee deliberate on this issue as well as share their opinion. I think Canadians have a right to know that there has been a request to hear from certain witnesses and that this request has been denied, for whatever reasons.
So I think I'd like to come back. Obviously I sympathize with the chair's situation. I think it's untenable to play the gunslinger approach in trying to get the floor. It's an unacceptable way of proceeding. I think I speak for my other opposition colleagues that we're clearly willing to speak with the Conservatives, with the government side, to talk about how we could get out of this impasse, maybe reconstituting a subcommittee, so we could go forward with a more consensus-based approach with regard to the length of debates and the witnesses we want to hear from.
Canadians have a right to know there are people around the table who want to hear from people like the minister, Peter MacKay, on F-35s; Julian Fantino, obviously, the associate minister; and the public works minister. The debate was such in the last few weeks that it begs that we bring these people forward. We're far more uncertain as to what went on than we were before, and the only way to clarify this for Canadians is to continue this debate and call the proper witnesses.
I also would like to add that procedure can be used as a weapon to silence debate. This government has had a poor record since May 2 in that regard, in using procedural process to close debate.
I forgot to mention that I should probably share my time with Mr. Allen, as Mr. Saxton did with Mr. Kramp.