Madam Speaker, it is indeed a question of integrity. Two points were clear. First, the minister was not only involved in private discussions with myself but of course with members in his own caucus and with our colleagues in the Conservative Party who were on the committee. All of us understood that the minister had seen these proposed timelines for acting, along the lines I just described. It could have been done within this Parliament, even before an election came down and that is why we put the dates in there that we did.
We wanted to prepare a report that could be acted upon. We did not want it to go off somewhere in the dim distant future and so the commitment was made. There was an understanding.
The second point I made was that I did not know if the minister himself, frankly, went to cabinet and said that he promised members of the committee, including members of his own caucus, that the schedule of events over the summer, if they were started in July, could be done. Did he make the case and was then defeated by his own cabinet? Did the cabinet say, too bad, Mr. deputy House leader, that he may have made the commitment on behalf of the government back in June but that cabinet would turn it upside down? At the very least, that is what has happened.
I do not know if the minister was responsible himself, whether he changed his mind over the summer and reneged on the commitment, or if it was the cabinet that changed his mind for him. One way or another, as my colleague pointed out, there is an integrity issue here.
When ministers of the Crown make commitments to members of the House about a certain course of action, we have every reason to believe those commitments will be lived up to if there is a sort of honour and integrity in politics. I for one am deeply disappointed that we have seen in this case, as we have seen in others, that there seems to be a complete disregard of the normal consideration of ethics and probity in politics in this chamber. It is not acceptable.