Chair, on a point of order, I oppose both the principle and the specifics of the motion. In principle, again, and I've said this before, the government ran on a platform of strengthening committees and making them more independent. It spoke directly to at least not making parliamentary secretaries voting members, and it talked about strengthening that independence.
They're still there and so that ability to squeeze the throat from the PMO still exists through the parliamentary secretaries on the committees, so I'm opposed to that.
In the specific instance here, this is an oversight committee. The whole raison d'être of what we're going to hear from our briefers when we go in camera is about the absolute importance of being, as much as possible, non-partisan. Now, that's going against our grain. It's not easy, but that is the goal. We work best when we are being non-partisan.
We are an oversight committee. Why on earth do we need an umbilical cord between an oversight committee and the PMO? We're an oversight committee. There's no need for any direction from the PMO.
I make the case that it's the antithesis of what we want for a strong public accounts committee, which is that non-partisanship. It also goes against the promises the current government made to have more accountability to strengthen the independence of the committees. If you can't do it with public accounts, which is built-in non-partisan, how the hell are you ever going to reach that with the other committees that have that partisanship built into them?
I'm opposed to this in principle, because the government's not living up to the promises it made that in part gave it its majority government and its right to exercise power. I'm also specifically opposed since I have spent my entire federal public life on this committee and have tried—and often, I'll admit, failed—to be as non-partisan as possible. So to structurally build in an exception that allows parliamentary secretaries to be somewhere they weren't allowed to be even under the Harper rules, to me is just unbelievable. For all those reasons, I'm opposed.