Evidence of meeting #157 for Public Accounts in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was point.

A video is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Karen Hogan  Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
Chris Forbes  Deputy Minister, Department of Finance

1:15 p.m.

Conservative

Brad Vis Conservative Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon, BC

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'll yield the floor.

The Chair Conservative John Williamson

Mr. Cannings, you have the floor. I'm eager to hear your thoughts on this amendment to the motion, please. It's over to you.

Richard Cannings NDP South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC

I will try to be as brief as possible to give Mr. Vis back his chance to go on and on about things.

Let me just say off the top that I think this whole discussion we've been having over the last two meetings would have been completely avoided if we'd had a discussion about the report of the subcommittee when it was handed out. I can't comment on the contents or what went on at subcommittee, because it was in camera, but I was surprised, certainly, at the report. I thought it was incomplete. It didn't really cover all the issues that were discussed and all the conclusions. We could have come up with a plan of work that I think everybody would have been happy with, or at least I thought we had accomplished that in the subcommittee meeting. Obviously, that wasn't the case.

I'll just start with that. Again, I'm new on this committee, but normally when we have a subcommittee meeting, or when we do at other committees, that's the first thing on the agenda when we come back. The subcommittee met, and let's have a short in camera meeting about our work plan or whatever the subcommittee met about.

I'll just say that, to me, this was completely avoidable. I find this whole back-and-forth, with witnesses having to stand down, just really bad management. I think what we're seeing here are motions that try to fix this, yet we're just going in circles.

What I meant to do in my short time speaking here was just to put forward an amendment to the motion to fix all this, to make everybody happy, but I'm assuming that I don't have that opportunity now.

1:20 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative John Williamson

No.

Richard Cannings NDP South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC

We're talking about a subamendment. Again, Mr. Genuis comes on and puts forward a totally ridiculous subamendment that was clearly designed to stop me or other members from making substantive amendments.

That's all I'll say here. I think we could fix this fairly easily by changing the motion—I can send on the subamendment that I had prepared, if you like—to make it clear that, where it says “no more meetings”, we add in language that says the exception is meetings that flow from a Standing Order 106(4), just to show that we're not trying to guillotine debate on a subject. If something important or new came up, as Mr. Nater said, we could say, yes, we should be talking about this. We could be talking about it during the break if it were so important.

I will try to be short here. I won't go into trying to use stronger language, but I just find this extraordinarily frustrating. I'm hoping that we can fix this. We could have fixed this quickly if we'd had a chat about the subcommittee meeting. We could have fixed this quickly if we'd had some co-operative amendments so that everybody would be happy and we knew we could come back if necessary.

However, we have gone down a rabbit hole. I'm not going to blame people and name names, but it's just really disappointing what I've been seeing in the last two meetings. That's all I'll say.

1:20 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative John Williamson

Thank you.

Richard Cannings NDP South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC

If I have an opportunity at some other time to put forward that amendment, I will, but it looks like it's not going to happen today.

1:20 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative John Williamson

Thank you. We're literally out of time.

Mr. Vis, I'm not going to give you the floor back, because we're out of time.

We will pick this up again. We are going to try for line by line.

Mr. Cannings, I will reference your comments about the subcommittee, as it had been my intention to bring that up at the end of our previous meeting to avoid disrupting witnesses. This has now happened twice, which I, like you, am not very pleased about. It is extremely rare for this committee to turn away deputy ministers and the Auditor General, and we've now done that twice.

We'll see you Wednesday.

Thank you. This meeting is now adjourned.