Thank you very much, Chair.
I appreciate the opportunity to talk about this. Quite frankly, I don't disagree with the intentions and the spirit of all of my colleagues at this table. In fact, the purpose of public accounts is to ensure that there is accountability when it comes to purses and how our public dollars are spent.
Chair, what these nine years as a member of Parliament have really reinforced for me is what we can do and what we can't do. The division of powers is significant.
We all know at this table that an active RCMP investigation is ongoing. We know for a fact that RCMP officers, or whoever the RCMP sends as representatives, will come to this table and say time and time again they cannot answer our questions because this is a public or ongoing investigation. Knowing that at the outset, why are we wasting taxpayer dollars to have this meeting in the first place? Why not wait until the investigation is over so that our committee can actually find out what went wrong and how we can provide recommendations to fix the process that went wrong?
As members of this committee, we do not have the right, or even the jurisdiction, to take over what is an RCMP investigation, Chair. We have to respect the division of powers and we have to respect the public purse, which is exactly why we have this committee in the first place.
When we're asking the RCMP to come here to talk about an open investigation, knowing full well beforehand that they cannot answer any questions on the public dollars or on an open investigation, either we're grandstanding on an issue and trying to take political points for whatever they may be worth or we just don't understand parliamentary procedure. I would credit all of the colleagues at this table with understanding what parliamentary procedure is.
At this point in time, I feel this is a waste of resources for us, knowing full well what the RCMP is going to come and say about an open investigation and its inability to answer any questions about it. For the RCMP to have to come and sit here and say again and again, “We can't answer. We can't answer. We can't answer”....
We know that after the investigation is over, we can have a thorough discussion on all of this. We can ask those questions and we can talk about procedure and we can talk about fixing how things are done and how procurement happens, etc.
How do we justify this? How do we justify political grandstanding right now?
Yes, I agree 100% that the RCMP should be coming to this committee to talk to us about how we can work to make sure that we are holding the public purse in the safety that it should be held in. That's the whole purpose of our committee. However, knowing beforehand that the RCMP is not going to be able to answer the questions we want them to answer, and still grandstanding.... I find that to be a little bit disingenuous, Chair.
Again, I have no opposition to the RCMP coming to this committee. I have no opposition to their coming and helping us understand how we can improve, but knowing full well that they cannot answer any questions and still inviting them anyway, while there's an open investigation going on.... I'm really not sure what we're trying to achieve here, Chair.
I'll stop there.