Thanks, Madam Chair.
It's unfortunate that we're getting a motion table-dropped when we could handle this in other ways. I would simply say that in terms of our committee's mandate, we aren't here to change the policy of the Privy Council. We're not here to rethink the way that government releases documents that are held within confidence. We don't go on these fishing expeditions when we are really supposed to be looking at the report from the Auditor General.
The Auditor General has reported on what we've seen through the first stages of the CEWS implementation. I had some questions I was hoping to get to about the next steps on CEWS and what was announced in the budget going to September 25, and whether that would be included in the February taxation report that we may be getting from finance.
The process of preliminary discussions in cabinet in terms of how we would approach a program that would balance rapid delivery against the upfront needs of most government programs, including things like the SIN that we've talked about this morning, and rolling those out in a way that could benefit the Canadians that we had to help as soon as we could, were all part of the audit, and those were the things that we would normally be discussing at the committee, versus the process for releasing confidential documents.
I think that Mr. Sabia was quite correct in pointing out that we are working within the existing policy of government. We're working within the existing systems of governance, and if those systems needed to be changed, that wouldn't be done in this committee. That would be done in other committees.
Our committee has traditionally been non-partisan and should be non-partisan. In fact, in our training we had discussions about making sure it should be hard to determine from which party questions were even coming from. In other governments, questions were traded among members so that they don't have partisan games going on within this committee.
This committee is overseeing the operation of government, not the policy directions or the political part of government. How departments function is determined by the rules and regulations that they are given through the political sphere.
This isn't the House of Commons. This isn't the floor of the House of Commons. This is a public accounts committee that works in conjunction with the Auditor General. It's very unfortunate that we're going through this type of a discussion today in the way that it's being done. We could have looked at this in ways other than dropping a motion and demanding a vote.
I think it's something that we need to discuss.