Mr. Speaker, my concerns are much deeper than that. By nature, any chair who comes out of Parliament is going to be a partisan person. That is life. That is part of why the government wants a committee of parliamentarians. It is putting value in that democratic oversight, if that is what it is doing. My concerns are much deeper than that.
I think people have a sense that somehow a committee like this could have some substantive oversight. Let us take, for example, a serious intelligence failure, where we had questions about whether our national security agencies had done the right things. Could the committee actually go there with this, if it cannot ask for information and cannot investigate things that are part of an ongoing operation?
Let us take the 9/11 terrorist attacks as an example. The year 2001 was a decade and a half ago. Guess what? Investigations into that in the United States continue. There are people in Guantanamo Bay still today related to that in one way or another. There are folks around the world where they are trying to come up with cases for prosecution to pursue them. These things are all still very active a decade and a half later. By definition, an intelligence failure that would have led to an event like that here in Canada would be foreclosed from investigation by this committee because it would be dealing with an ongoing operation.
The fact is this is a committee that exists in name and decoration only with absolutely no powers. That is what the Liberal Party is proposing. It is very different from what anybody believed the Liberals were proposing when they were asking for the support of Canadians to form government.