I have just a couple of thoughts to add.
It's the first time that we've sat as a committee. In my experience—and I've been around for a long time here—the regular committees get bogged down oftentimes in other things and don't have enough time to do substantive studies based on evidence. If we've learned anything over the last couple of years, it's that we're in a world where information is everywhere. There's a lack of clarity around what information is actually evidence-based and what isn't. We have an opportunity to shine a light on that.
If you take a look at the last couple of years, the sad thing is that our committees haven't been functioning for much of the last couple of years. If you take a look at this last stretch, by the time we sit meaningfully as a committee, it will have been eight months since most committees actually sat. In the middle of a global pandemic, our Parliament was shut down. Then we went to an election. We were delayed coming back. We hit the Christmas break, and it will be from June to February before we actually sit to study things.
We have an opportunity as a committee to take a look, certainly, at broad-based issues. I think there is going to be an importance to studying those things. I also think we have to take a look at the issues that are front and centre in our country at any given moment and aren't getting the spotlight shone on them. In the health ministry, for example, there are many issues competing for the health committee's time. Because we probably won't be as busy with legislation as other committees may be, we have the opportunity to take those big issues and give a really good, hard look at them as a committee, sort of pick the biggest issues of the day as they come forward.
One thing we probably want to be careful about is going after issues that might be important to one of us individually at committee, in our own world, in our own constituency. We might want to take a look, in the general interest of Canadians, at putting a spotlight on the issues that affect our society broadly and that are under-researched.
We can use the one that's so obvious, right in front of us, the COVID response. One of the biggest challenges we have had in the country—we all just went through an election campaign where we were knocking on doors—is confusion and lack of clarity around what the evidence shows. I think we have an opportunity as a committee to tackle that and to pursue a conversation around that, if that's where we decide to go as a committee. We could invite some of the top experts in the world, many of whom are working right here in Canada, to have conversations. Some of those experts may not agree with each other 100%. We have the opportunity to bring them to the table together and have that discussion and ask questions as a committee. If we take our responsibilities seriously as a committee, we can, together, do great things for our country.
I'm really looking forward to the opportunity to do that.
The last thing I would say is that our researchers, if I've learned anything.... I'm not a researcher myself, but I've been around for a long time and I've worked with a lot of world-class researchers, particularly—as you would know, Kirsty—on the autism file with some of the top autism researchers in the country. Those researchers don't necessarily want to see us just arguing about money in the House of Commons. They want to see their research actually being used for meaningful action on behalf of the Canadians they are working with and the communities they're working with. We have an opportunity to do that.