Mr. Chair, I find this pretty surprising, when the whole gist of Mr. Richards' argument has been that he wants the veterans to be able to ask questions and wants them to be able to get answers. We not only have the deputy minister, the ADM and several officials in the back, but we've also had a minister here.
This is the opportunity to get to the questions. It's about supplementary estimates, if anybody who is not watching the political shenanigans but actually wants to know and is trying to watch to see what the budget has for them and what the estimates show for them, and we're supposed to derive questions out of that to find out what program is enhanced, what program might be cut back, where the resources are going or what needs to be done.
I find it appalling that they just want to make a political statement. Nobody's suppressing their Twitter or their Facebook or their social media feeds to say whatever they want. In fact, they do that regularly, and if that's what they want to do, they should continue to do that, but to take away time from asking questions of our very learned and very astute officials who have given their time, as they're duty bound to do, to answer those questions.... The minister was here, and even during that time, we heard more statements from the opposition about their allotting and their stuff than actual questions, and, when questions were actually thoroughly answered, they were quite afraid and actually shut down their questions really quickly, which is strange, since the value of that time was so immense that we need to do a motion right now to show that there's only one hour.
In fact, I think the minister gave ample time, but I don't think the time is here to give statements, rhetorical statements, for themselves. They can do that whenever they want. It's the time to ask questions. If they're indeed asking questions for the veterans, they should be asking concrete questions about programs, concrete questions about delivery and concrete questions about how we can move forward to make their lives better.
I have 5,000 veterans in my region. I have the only new Veterans Affairs office after the nine were closed down by the Conservatives. Not only did our government reopen the nine of them, but we also opened a new one. Out of the whole country, I think my riding has the most. I don't have those veterans coming to me stating these types of concerns that this motion suggests. I have them coming and asking me to help with the amazing housing complex that we did. I—