Thank you, Chair.
I appreciate the opportunity to speak on this motion. I find it quite disappointing after a meeting that dealt with very serious legislation. Mr. Caputo seemed to be silent on that as well, which is interesting, and instead decided, when it comes to foreign interference, that he would instead prefer to focus on political antics.
Mr. Chair, although the blues have not been released for that meeting, it's very clear, because there's video, that the Conservatives are misleading, frankly, this committee with this motion and the language around it, because the intervention with Mr. Genuis was very clearly only about heckling.
Mr. Genuis was upset that I had heckled Mr. Caputo, and in fact interrupted Mr. Gaheer's line of questioning. There was no mention of the NSICOP report. There was no mention in this interaction of the findings and the report. It was simply about the fact that Mr. Caputo was upset that I heckled him. It's an ironic point, given that in that very same meeting, Mr. Cooper was admonished by the chair for berating a witness.
While I would acknowledge and say that heckling is certainly not ideal, it does happen all of the time, and I would for sure apologize for heckling during Mr. Caputo's intervention. However, what happened and what took place subsequent to that meeting was that the Conservatives have now spun the interaction away from the actual issue, which was a debate over heckling, and spun it into something it's not, and now they're including the point about apologizing to diaspora communities and making the issue about the NSICOP report.
Again, anyone can watch the interaction and see that the Conservatives did not raise diaspora communities, did not raise foreign interference. They did not raise the NSICOP report. All they talked about was being upset that Mr. Caputo was interrupted by me.
It's this hypocrisy that I find so egregious, given the lack of respect that is provided to all members, and in particular by some of the Conservatives—in fact, the mover of this motion, who has heckled and interrupted not only Liberal members but Bloc and NDP members at different times.
We can have a debate about decorum, but what I won't accept is this mis-characterization of the events when it's very clear on the record that the Conservatives never even mentioned foreign interference in that intervention. To now purport it to be something that it's not, I find egregious.
I had to wonder why the Conservatives would try to spin something that is very clearly provable through Hansard and through video, frankly, because all of our meetings are recorded, and then I realized it's because the Conservatives would rather speak about me and make this a political exchange—