Mr. Speaker, it is quite rich to hear the government attest its good intentions of how interested it is in following through on the Liberal platform.
How about the Liberals balance the budget four years into their mandate, as they promised? That would be something that is very important to Canadians. There are so many platform commitments that Liberals are completely ignoring.
I want to ask my friend a specific question about the role of parliamentary secretaries on committee. The government has said it was going to take parliamentary secretaries off committees, and now, it is trying to put them back on, not in place of a Liberal member but actually to effectively increase the number of government members present on committees.
This is a real concern for me, because we have seen cases of the government appearing not to want to have members of the opposition present at in camera discussions if those members are not formally members of the committee. This opens the door for the government to effectively exclude all other members of Parliament from being at in camera discussions, except the ones who are members of the committee or parliamentary secretaries. It is a way for the government to grow its contingent on committees while leaving parliamentary secretaries involved.
I wonder if the member could comment on how it strengthens committees if the government has through this—I want to say “back door”, but it is actually pretty explicit what it is doing—tried to increase its representation on committees.