Mr. Speaker, I certainly understand why Canadians are throwing their hands up in the air, because as a parliamentarian, I often feel that I have to throw my hands up in the air and do not realize what is actually going on at committee.
Yes, in this place, there is theatre. There are questions. There is dodging. There is political jockeying going on. Everyone says that we have a great committee system; get something into committee and we will do well.
From my experience in the six short years that I have been here, I do not see the committee system working any better than Parliament does during question period. That is what is so frustrating. We hear this report. We spend hours and hours of time on a report. We get near the end and we think in good faith that the government will say to the other members of the committee, “Here are some avenues that we can give on. Here is what we definitely want to see in it. Do you agree with those? Let us go through the recommendations.”
In this particular one, we had some 100 recommendations brought forward, 75 of which were from the commissioner. One would think we would go through them one by one and see if we had consensus and maybe we would have 10 that we are not going to get consensus on. That is how things should work. They did not even try to get consensus on any of these recommendations.
What the Conservative government does time and time again in committee is it comes in, takes out the pages from the analyst with the recommendations, throws them out, inserts its own pages and passes it off as a report of Parliament.
It is really sad to see that our committee structure is not working and functioning as it should.