Thank you very much, Chair. I appreciate that.
Again I am a little disappointed that we don't have a clear pathway forward. What are we doing here? We're spending so many taxpayer dollars on finding resources, and what's the objective here?
To me, in this committee, the objective is to find clear-cut recommendations in the Auditor General's report on ArriveCAN, to take what she wrote into consideration and to find a way, with all of the witnesses we have had, to put together some solid recommendations to say this is what needs to happen going forward to make sure that things like this do not happen again; this is what needs to happen to make sure we are continuing to build Canadians' trust in our democratic institutions; this is what needs to happen to make sure we are able to bring back the money that was spent on this; and this is what needs to happen to make sure we find fair value for the money that is spent going forward.
We don't have any of that, and we keep on calling witnesses. I think it was December 12 when all of us on this committee—the permanent members of this committee, none of whom are here today—spent over an hour working together to find out how we could find and build a consensus and talk about accountability, talk about how we were going to move forward together specifically on this issue. The fact that since then and until now we haven't been able to find a pathway forward and to find the next steps is disappointing to me, and for us to keep on calling witnesses who have literally nothing to add to what has already been said is disappointing to me as well.
We have heard again and again from every single department on this that there was no ministerial sign-off on this, that ministers were not involved. This was a middle-management issue. There are RCMP investigations happening. What is the role of our committee, then, if all we're doing is trying to find linkages between political work and what has egregiously happened here? We can't keep doing that, Chair.
I would ask that you perhaps reconsider that the best way forward for us here is not to try to find that red herring or whatever it is that Conservatives are looking for but rather to bring us back to reasonable decision-making with respect to what the next steps are. How are we going to fix our process? That is what our committee is and should be doing, rather than going on these fishing expeditions. I would again submit to you, Chair, that I think the best thing we could do would be to bring in TBS officials to talk about those next steps, rather than a minister, who really, as we've heard time and again, had nothing at all to do with this.
I'll stop there, Chair. Hopefully, we will come back to it at a later time.