Mr. Lemire is worried about what we are trying to hide. We're not trying to hide anything. We want to do a real study. We do studies in all of our committees all throughout Parliament. We do them all the time. We bring witnesses in. We ask them questions, and we get them to provide us information that they can offer. That's exactly what we want to do.
The notion of getting this massive dump of documents, even though we have agreed to narrow it down somewhat.... It's still a massive dump. To think that we're going to take this massive number of documents and suddenly discover magic solutions to this problem is not realistic.
From my perspective, we're trying to make this not into a backward study. We want to call the witnesses forward, drill down into the issues that were identified before, conceivably invite the Auditor General to do a further study to follow up, and absolutely find out what went wrong here.
I'm an IT guy from way back. I spent probably 30 or 40 years doing IT. Things happen when writing code. Things change. We're not going to get some magic document dump that's going to tell us what went wrong.
I think we have to look at the matter systemically, and we have to do that from a coherent perspective, looking at the salient witnesses that we can bring forward to do the study. I'm fully prepared and fully interested in doing a study to drill down and find out what went wrong. I just think that getting this mass of documents ahead of time is, without having an opportunity to narrow the scope according to the witnesses and find out what the problems might be, extraordinarily problematic.
I certainly will support this amendment. If this amendment is not going to pass, and one hopes it does, we will basically go back and start to work on the original motion to see if we can make it more effective and more useful.
Anyway, my perspective is that we absolutely want to do this study. We want to find out what went wrong, and there is absolutely nothing we're seeking to hide here. We just want to undertake a process that's most likely to give us answers that are meaningful.