As I said, so much committee time has been wasted and so many hours have gone to the same thing, yet the Conservatives have not been able to determine that a minister has been involved.
Why do we continue with this? Maybe the Conservatives don't care about the issues that matter to Canadians. After all, the Auditor General selects topics that are of concern to Canadians in her selection of the reports that she presents, and the Conservatives seem more interested in posturing for social media than going back to issues that matter to Canadians.
We did have consensus, at one point, to study reports like cybercrime and like professional services contracts. I thought, “This is good”, but the consensus was short-lived because we never went through with studying those reports. Instead, we've done over 25 studies of ArriveCAN and now nine studies on SDTC.
We really need to return to what our original mandate of public accounts is, which is studying the reports of the Auditor General, and not taking up time and second-guessing the Auditor General. We should be able to trust in her reports and not have the Auditor General feel compelled to write a letter asserting her independence. It proves that this committee, like some of Mr. Perkins' comments, has gone too far.
Some of the reports we could have been studying also include contaminated sites in the north, looking at the board of directors of Canada Lands Company or the greening of building materials in public infrastructure. These are all important reports that need to be studied, and I hope that we would return back to them before the year is ended so that we would actually have something to show. In fact, we have not even finished our draft reports, and they've been waiting since January of this year, like the GBA+ report.
I hope that we would be able to focus on what really matters to Canadians instead of going on witch hunts.
Thank you.