Thank you, Chair.
I don't know if this sentiment is widely felt, but I do want to say I'm sorry for the witnesses, who have come here and put in the preparation, that members of the Liberal Party, the Bloc and the NDP just voted against our giving them the opportunity to be heard.
It couldn't be clearer. We just put forward a motion to proceed to hearing from the witnesses, and the other three parties voted against that motion.
Of course, we have other business to attend to, the subcommittee report, and the chair could very easily have set aside time for that to occur. Mr. Badawey is heckling that we should just go to a vote on this motion, but I don't think it's reasonable at all to propose an item of business that's not on the agenda for discussion and say, we must have an immediate vote before we will allow the items that are on the agenda to proceed. I would suggest the committee undertake the items that are on the agenda, but that we set aside time to consider the matters in the subcommittee report.
Nonetheless, let me conclude my remarks here quickly with a couple of final points. The amendment we've proposed is to establish certain things with respect to the future business of this committee: to establish that this committee should complete its hearings and present a report to the House on the Bernardo prison transfer, to complete the work that it has committed to with respect to the transfer of Luka Magnotta out of maximum security, and that the committee should hold four additional meetings as part of its auto theft study before the end of June.
One item that I haven't mentioned yet is that the committee invite the Minister of Mental Health and Addictions to appear for one hour and the Minister of Public Safety and the Premier of B.C. to appear for one hour to discuss the impact of the government's approach to dangerous drugs on public safety and the diversion of taxpayer-funded drugs. This is another urgent public safety issue.
That particular proposal does not have a timeline associated with it. It's something that could well be done in the fall. Our view is that we should hear from ministers and those responsible more generally for this file at a time when there is an acute and escalating crisis around addiction and the diversion of taxpayer-funded drugs driving that crisis.
This is broadly what we're trying to do. We're trying to establish the agenda of the committee going forward and trying to establish it on a consensual basis. We're not going to accept that a backroom deal between coalition partners, which excludes some parties, should be the basis for setting the committee's future agenda. We think it should be set in a consensual manner that allows the important work of the committee to conclude.
Of course, we're prepared to make reasonable compromises in the course of establishing the committee's agenda going forward.
The one point that we have persistently insisted on, and we will insist on, is that, given that the families of the victims and their representatives made the sacrifice of presenting their experience before Parliament, it is vital that we honour that sacrifice by taking the information we receive from them and finalizing a report and reporting it to the House so that it can lead to policy actions.
We are committed to saying that, given that they testified and given that the report has been drafted, we should complete the report. It's clear from the original version of the subcommittee report that Liberals in particular are trying to block, bury and suppress the report that has been prepared on the Bernardo prison transfer. They didn't want this study to happen in the first place and they want to prevent this report on why and how Paul Bernardo was transferred to medium-security prison from ever seeing the light of day.
We are opposed to the covering up of this information. We are opposed to Liberal efforts to bury the Bernardo report. That report must see the light of day. If other parties are prepared to agree that the report must see the light of day, then we have a lot of room to talk about the other items in this amendment. However, we will have a hard time finding consensus if the government, the Trudeau Liberals, persist in their posture of denying victims the opportunity to be heard through this report.
With that, Chair, I would like to be added to the list again, because I have a few other points I want to make, but I know that Mr. Shipley is keen to weigh in, so I will cede the floor for now. Please add me back to the bottom of the list, and I look forward to hearing what my colleagues have to say on this.