Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to continue some of the debate we heard last time on this motion.

I think one of the challenges we had was that the commissioner indicated that the information he learned in the news article was new to him and that he would look into it. That turned into members stating that this is a new investigation and that reports about that matter happened. It's easy to see how things can grow a lot bigger than they are.

I understand. We all see and know the impacts of social media. One of the big challenges here is bringing people forward, people from general professional workplaces, to answer questions. I believe other colleagues stated that this isn't a courtroom. Sometimes it can be viewed as one, and some of these comments or questions that arise here can ultimately put implications on people when they're frankly doing their jobs. Then they're, as a result, met with a barrage of social media attacks with people's names put in the forefront. Those are some of the big challenges that we have when we're trying to bring people forward.

I believe the commissioner indicated that he would look into the matter. We've said this before: We should let those processes follow their course and allow the commissioner, if there's a complaint put forward, to look into the new information and, after whatever investigations or processes take place through their work, the office of the commissioner's work, come back to us with a fulsome report. We can look at that.

To have members from the professional community come here—and we respect the tough questions that are asked of people, of course—to put light on questions in advance of knowing all of the information could imply that they had done some wrongdoing. That is sometimes a challenge, and we've seen that. We've seen documents being asked for that have resulted in a lot of.... As we've seen in other committees, we've asked for a number of documents to be presented and nothing really comes of it. If we're going to move forward, we should have all the information that was looked at by the Ethics Commissioner. We know that he does a thorough job. We've heard him a number of times inform the committee of how that work is done and what the processes are. The results of those processes are reported to us here, where we can formulate better questions and have a strong understanding of what took place.

We sometimes take the extraordinary step of dragging people into extra meetings, and that has resulted in a lot of extra discussion. Sometimes that time could be used in a better way. If members have concerns—and we've seen letters written to the office of the commissioner in the past—maybe they can put forward some of those questions in a letter, in a complaint, so the thorough details of those questions can be worked out through the office, which can come back to us to report back on what we're looking at.

I think we should be careful about who we're bringing in front of the camera, in front of Canadians. We should ask questions without impacting their personal lives in a negative way, quite frankly, as they may have nothing to do with any wrongdoing. Sometimes the questions we put forward automatically put these people in a bad light, just by bringing them before the committee. That is a big consideration we should have. We need to make those considerations before we look at a motion like this.

Thank you.

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