Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
First of all, I'd like to welcome the witnesses who are with us today. I hope we'll have the opportunity to hear from them very soon. If we don't have time to hear from them, I hope we'll have an opportunity to invite them back.
With respect to Ms. Lewis' motion, I must say that I'm not a fan of conspiracy theories, but I too sent a list of witnesses to the clerk and they all declined the invitation, with one exception. So I share the disappointment of my Conservative colleagues. I would have loved to see these witnesses. If they couldn’t come last week or today, at least they could come later, so we could do the work we need to do in this committee.
I won't start doing the same thing as my colleagues, but I think it's unfortunate that my colleagues are making very long interventions, which means that the time we have goes very quickly. We're wasting valuable time that could be put to good use.
So I'm going to move quickly to my amendment to Ms. Lewis' motion. I hope my colleagues will support it. It is to add the names of the witnesses I had proposed, but who declined the invitation: Annie Ropar, chief administrative officer at the Canada Infrastructure Bank; Steven Robins, head of Strategy at the Canada Infrastructure Bank; Aneil Jaswal, director of Sector Strategies at the Canada Infrastructure Bank; and Bill Morneau, former Minister of Finance.
I hope we can get back to work and be productive as soon as possible.