I hope we can get on with this, but I want to underline that Mr. Drouin is showing disgusting disrespect for the important work being done by parliamentary committees. Of course members share the work they do in various fora with their constituents, but this is not a studio. This is a committee where we undertake investigations into important issues of public interest. Those issues include a series of serious Liberal government corruption scandals.
I understand that you, as a new member of the committee—and some other members of the government—don't like those investigations, but they are investigations that have happened, have revealed important information and have been agreed to. The kinds of things we have seen happening with ArriveCAN certainly merit investigation.
The broader point, though, is that parliamentary committees require budgets to do their work. They need to spend money if they're meeting. If we're not spending money doing this study, we're spending money doing another study, or we're just not meeting at all. It's very convenient for the Liberals, who spent $60 million on an app, to suddenly claim to be fiscal hawks when it comes to this. Maybe parliamentary committees just shouldn't meet in order to save money. The work of public accounts saves the government far more money than it spends in gathering chairs together and having the audio equipment necessary for a meeting. We do important work, and the committee has already agreed to study these issues. It needs to study these issues.
I believe much more in the work of Parliament than Mr. Drouin clearly does. These are very reasonable budgets. They are in line with the work of committees. They are in line with the budgets we see at other committees. I think it is worth the public expenditure for parliamentary committees to conduct investigations that hold powerful people accountable and drill down on ways we can push the government to save more taxpayer money in much broader, deeper and more substantive ways than his efforts to hold up the budget for the committee to do that investigation.
I think all of this is fairly obvious. If we were discussing this in camera, he wouldn't bother making these interventions. He's trying to defend the government's efforts to minimize these investigations.
I think we should now get on with it.