Mr. Speaker, the point is that there is a lot of important work that gets done in the parliamentary precinct outside of the official proceedings of a committee or the House of Commons. This work is lost when ministers are able to literally phone in, when they are able to stay in their ridings and not be here. It is a lot easier for them to put up gatekeepers of staff and departmental officials to prevent members of Parliament from literally getting right in front of them to say, “Take a look at this. It is an important problem with what you are doing or something you have overlooked.”
That is not nothing. Those are not just small peripheral issues. A great deal of what members of Parliament do is advocate for their constituents outside of debate and outside of giving speeches in the chamber. We need to be able to have access to government ministers, and not just through the phone or through intermediaries like staff. We also propose for committees, while we would have supported hybrid committee meetings, that when ministers come with their officials, they should testify in person for similar reasons.
At this point, I will move on to what our proposed solution is, which is to make a series of amendments to what the government has proposed. These are common sense proposals that would alleviate the concerns that we have while still addressing some of the benefits of having a little bit of flexibility around the parliamentary routine.
I move, seconded by the member for King—Vaughan, that the motion be amended by (a) deleting paragraphs (a) and (b) and substituting the following—