Thank you. I appreciate that, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Barrett, there is no fish that has been caught here. The many thousands and thousands of hours that you guys have spent in trying to find something here that doesn't pass your sniff test, and the fact that you keep on calling so many committee meetings on this, tell me that you haven't really found anything.
I think what we have found and what all parliamentarians agree on is that something happened with the ArriveCAN app, and we need to make sure that bureaucrats are held responsible. We want to make sure that the money that was paid out to these middle-management folks is brought back to our government and that Canadians have accountability for how their tax dollars are spent.
What we are not finding, regardless of all of your countless efforts, is that this was a ministerial sign-off, that the Prime Minister, for some reason, signed off on this. That is not what happened here.
We've spent 6,000 hours on this so far. Let's talk about not finding anything for 6,000 hours. What are one or two more hours with the President of the Treasury Board going to do? She's going to come in and add to the 6,000-hour tally and millions of taxpayer dollars so that the Conservatives can go on sniffing and trying to find something, and they haven't found anything.
What I would appreciate is if we had public officials coming in to talk about what the next steps are, how we can get our taxpayer dollars back and how we can fix the process here. Are we able to not make everything political? I would really appreciate it if we're not just trying to find those cheap political wins in every single thing, as the Conservatives are doing. Let's actually do something productive. That's what the purpose of the public accounts committee is, Mr. Chair. I really appreciate all of your efforts in making sure that we are doing our very best to hear from all of the witnesses.
The reality is that we still don't have a game plan. We've had so many meetings and we still don't have a game plan as to what our next steps are within this committee. We can call a million and one witnesses, but until and unless we as a committee decide how we are going to move forward, what recommendations we are going to provide to our government, and what we need to do to make sure that something like this does not happen again, why are we going on a wild goose chase?
Again, I reiterate that I have no problem with any minister appearing before the committee, but I think that it is ineffective. It is a waste of taxpayer dollars. It is a waste of all of the amazing people who are in the room right now, making sure that this meeting happens. It's unfortunate. I would hope that my colleagues agree with me.
I know that my Conservative colleagues are still going to go down this path of a witch hunt to try to find something they can take and run with. At this point, rather than having the minister come in, I think perhaps the best thing that we can do is bring back the officials of the TBS to talk about how we are going to move forward on this and about how we are going to hold people to account and make sure that this does not happen again in the future.
Therefore, I would move an amendment to say that we change “President of the Treasury Board” so that it says, “invite back officials from TBS”.