Mr. Speaker, the committee's mandate is to deal with public safety issues. Witnesses who work for the department, various agencies, and the RCMP regularly tell us they cannot provide specifics in response to a given question. That is the nature of their work. I do not always like it because those agencies certainly have transparency issues, but that is a debate for another day.
I want to set that aside for now. Those people exercise good judgment in deciding what they can and cannot say publicly. Most of the time, that is exactly why they are in those jobs. In answer to my colleague's question, it may be that the Liberals themselves doubt Mr. Jean's ability to appear before the committee and exercise his judgment about what he can and cannot say publicly. Lastly, I said it before in my speech and my response to the Liberal member and I will say it again and again: the media is the most public forum there is. When politicians are considering whether a statement is appropriate, they ask themselves if they would be comfortable saying it on the record. That often happens automatically. If Mr. Jean felt it was appropriate to say those things in a press briefing, I think he can say them to parliamentarians.
Regardless, none of that changes the fact that this whole affair shows the trip was badly managed from start to finish.