Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Maybe you were right at the offset; perhaps allocating half an hour for this was the right course. Thanks for the welcome, as well.
I wish to pick up on what Mr. Jean mentioned. He referred to having two ministers here--two ex-ministers, or current privy councillors. As such, Mr. Chair, I am quite obliged by Mr. Jean's desire to be helpful, but in my estimation, a committee need not have an intermediary to have information sent to it. If we as a committee--through you, Mr. Chair--accept a motion and request that someone come and talk to us or tell us about the current status of an investigation, without talking about the investigation per se, surely to God there's generic information that can be shared with the committee. Again, I'm sure that if the minister and his parliamentary secretary wish to advise us, they should; that's fine, but we don't necessarily need the information to be conveyed through them.
So I certainly intend to support this motion, and I think if the investigators are not done, they might be able to tell us when they expect to be done and answer some generic questions. If not, then we'll deal with that at the time. A committee has authority--I mean, we are mandated by the House of Commons to have an oversight function over the government and its administration, and what is before us is purely acceptable in terms of that mandate.
In terms of the contract, again, if somebody wishes to tell us they don't want to tell us information, I'd want them to come and tell us that themselves. Again, I suspect that on a particular individual contract, there might be some reticence. I can understand some of that, but surely there's also some generic information, some policy questions, that can be asked that may not pertain specifically to a contract but might be very enlightening.
So on both counts I think the resistance we're sensing from Mr. Jean is not meritorious, and I certainly will therefore support the motion before us.