Mr. Speaker, I want to assure my friend who is the chair of the committee that I take his committee very seriously. He does a wonderful job chairing it.
When we brought some of our amendments to the committee, these were substantial amendments. They were amendments to do crazy things like ask the government to explain how the money would be spent. Is that so unreasonable? I think it is appropriate to bring the bill back to committee, so that when we are talking about spending almost $5 billion, the government might take a few minutes to lay out a few ideas on how it would spend it.
We also tried to amend it and actually had the amendments accepted, although the government turned it down ultimately, along with the NDP. One of the things that we wanted to do was put a condition on the money that went to the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. We wanted to insist that, before the government got the money to spend on post-secondary education for aboriginals, the department respond to the year 2000 Auditor General's report that expressed concerns about how money was being spent on post-secondary education for aboriginals. I think that is pretty responsible.
I want to point out that we had a terrible time getting witnesses before the committee. The chair of the committee will remember that we invited 25 witnesses, 21 of them were from the government. We could not get anyone from the government to appear initially except for the Minister of Finance. None of the ministries that would be affected by the spending, housing, labour, and post-secondary education would appear before the committee, so we had to filibuster until we got a few department officials and ministers to come, but not nearly the number that should have been there to explain the expenditure of $5 billion. I think it is reasonable to send the bill back to committee and make that happen.