Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank our Conservative colleagues for bringing this motion forward. I will, of course, accept this motion.
However, Chair, I'm getting more concerned about the cost to taxpayers that these surprise meetings are having. I know that we've had many of these meetings that send MPs from their home riding. We're all going home on Friday on flights, and the taxpayer pays for all of the Conservative members and everybody to go home, and then they pay for those flights again just to sit for two hours.
I think it's a concern to taxpayers that in a Conservative-controlled committee, we're continuously piling on these costs to taxpayers over and over. I'm fully in favour of the motion, but I think we can do this work during regular times when we have resources and MPs are gathered. I appreciate Mr. Nater's comment and his motion, but I don't appreciate the tax burden, the cost to taxpayers, that these extra meetings continue to put on everybody.
I would ask the Conservatives to think about that, about the impact on taxpayers. We're in an affordability crisis right now. It's a very important issue, and we're talking about the cost to taxpayers, but how can the Conservatives continue to justify these extreme expenses? We're talking thousands and thousands of dollars to host these meetings for two days, to fly Conservatives into Ottawa, have all the interpreters and have all this work—thousands of dollars. We must be approaching hundreds of thousands of dollars on extra meetings that could be done during regular business hours because of the Conservatives here.
Chair, I think I find it appropriate that we should start documenting these extra associated costs, so I would like to amend Mr. Nater's motion to include a cost analysis of that meeting to Canadian taxpayers, and I'll give you notice that in any other surprise meetings that are going to burden the taxpayer, I will be asking for a cost breakdown and analysis for these costs, because I want to be able to make sure that we're being reasonable with the money we're spending on behalf of Canadians.
We have a meeting all day today when we could be talking about this. We could be talking about it a week from now. We have two more meetings scheduled. I just want to make sure that we're getting the best value for Canadians here.