Yes, I've seen you. You're good at it.
That segue was to mention that in the past—and we're all masters of our own destiny at the committee level—what we normally would do is go through the first round of rotation and questions, then do the second round, and that would complete what is considered a normal round, with two rounds of a normal hearing.
Now, usually we're lucky to get time. In this case, we only had one witness present, so we had the time. Many times, I won't get my three minutes, and we all knew that going in. But when we do find ourselves like this, normally in the past what we would do is stop, and then, as the chair, I would ask the committee, “Do we want to continue?” and “What's your pleasure?”
Sometimes there is one caucus in particular that's on one particular issue and the other two have asked the questions they want. Remember, not every report is headline generating. Some of them are actually good. They do come along and basically the government gets a “yes, not bad, pretty good, way to go”. That's the one the government calls, of course, and at the end of the day you can only run so far with that. You actually run out of questions.
But if there's somebody who wants to continue it, we may say, “Well, if everybody's in agreement, then, we'll give caucus five more minutes and then we'll call it.” Or we'll say, “Tell you what. We'll all do one more round for each person.” Or maybe everybody has a lot of input and we're going to run it right to the end. Other times, we'll say, “Let's adjourn, because we have a little bit of committee business.” Maybe we have a blackline report, a draft report, and five minutes on that report lets us finish our business. Or maybe we have committee business that we need to talk about, and it's in all our interests to do that. This buys us that time.
So as much as it's usually in the opposition's interest to keep committees going for every nanosecond we can, for obvious reasons of accountability, it is sometimes in the interest of the whole committee for us to end our rotation of questions and proceed to other business or to end the time in a different way than we would in the normal rotation.
If I have any question time left at all, I would ask a question on the Canada pension plan disability program. They made the change with the tribunal and then the backlog started. It went on for a number of years, for three years, as I think was mentioned here. Were there no alarm bells?
Prior to it becoming a crisis, was there no trigger mechanism to say that the tribunal, which was there supposedly to make things better than the system in the past, was actually creating a bigger backlog? Would there not be some kind of internal mechanism trigger, especially with a new tribunal, a new process, a trigger that would say, “Hey, we have a problem here”? Rather than just letting it run to the point where it became a crisis, should there not have been something that was triggered along the way to say, “Whoa, we have problems here,” and the early warning flags are going up?
