Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I think what we're presented with here is the problem of omnibus budget bills and the provisions dealing with the access to information and the long-gun registry. It probably should have been in a separate piece of legislation, which could have come to this committee for full study with full witnesses. Unfortunately, that's not the case, so I do agree with the parliamentary secretary that the government has chosen to send this through the finance committee, and that that is where the issue will be discussed. Nevertheless, I think it's still a useful motion because we all know that the finance committee does not have the expertise nor the time to give full consideration to this.
That brings us to the question of time. There are many things that we New Democrats think need to have been studied in this committee, and I can make a long list of things we could have brought forward today—the use of solitary confinement, the treatment of women and transgender and gender variant Canadians in corrections facilities, PTSD in the RCMP and the shocking rate of suicide among law enforcement officials, the problem of harassment in the RCMP—a whole list of things we could study. However, we have a process in this committee that gives priority to legislation. So unfortunately, or fortunately, we followed that process, and the legislative burden has kept this committee quite busy and didn't allow us to get to a lot of things we might have otherwise studied in this committee.
Again, I think this would be a useful session for us to have, but we recognize that there are many things this committee was not able to get to because of the legislative burden, and I think this is yet another example of those.
We will be supporting the motion.