I think it's pretty clear what Mr. Badawey is tabling. Usually the steering group, which hasn't met since the first time, would take a look at all the proposals for topics, and then we would prioritize them. What I find troubling is that we're only looking at Mr. Badawey's proposal. We're not looking at all the ones that were tabled previously.
What I would prefer is that Mr. Badawey's proposal be in the hopper. It may well be the one people prefer to go with, but I think that as a committee, we should be deciding which of these we want to proceed with.
My second concern with this one is that it's essentially Emerson all over again. We know this two volume report. This is going to take our committee two to three years. I need to have more information on what we're planning, considering this, and how we're going to constrain this review to make it of any value. Emerson worked how many years on this? There was a whole team, with full-time, paid researchers. I remain totally puzzled about what we as a committee can do with very few resources. I don't know if we're going to use Emerson as the framework or use the same headings. Are we going to do what Emerson didn't do?
That term “hubs” is to me very much for corporate trade. If it's corporate trade routes, we want to make sure that infrastructure and transportation needs are addressed. We can probably deal with that. We talk to the main trade sectors. We talk to the main transportation parties and maybe the provinces. But that's where there's a rift.
We now have a Prime Minister who's saying that the municipalities are going to be able to tell us directly where the money is going to go. Then you have the provinces saying that they have priorities, and quite often they are these hubs.
I need more clarity in order to throw out names of witnesses. If this is going to be somewhat circumscribed and not go on for many years, I need to have a clear idea of the exact focus of what we're looking at that is above and beyond what Emerson has already done. If the main interest is looking at the corporate trade interests, it helps a bit, but that excludes a lot of other things. I just need to be clear in my head if I'm supposed to start proposing witnesses.
What exactly is our end objective? Whose needs are we serving who could potentially speak to the committee? Then we could consider that and then possibly make some recommendations.