Thank you, Chair.

I just want to raise the fact that I'm ready to go in terms of dealing with our routine proceedings. If all we're going to do today is elect a chair and vice-chairs and then do the routine proceedings on Thursday, it raises the question of why we are even here today. Why did we go to all this trouble? All of it could have been done on Thursday.

For the life of me, I don't know why there was this big rush, this big announcement that we have to get PROC in place and “Let's go, boys, it's critical”. Fair enough, but here we are and we're not doing anything except administrative matters, so I'm a little unclear as to why we aren't proceeding to do some real work right now, since we have lots of it.

While I have the floor—because I don't know when I'm going to get it back—I also want to raise the fact that earlier Mr. Lamoureux went out of his way to be consistent with his government's announcement that they're looking at pulling parliamentary secretaries off committees, because as we all know, it hampers the independence of committees if the parliamentary secretary is sitting there with the control of the majority votes and telling the committee how they're going to vote.

That's a great idea. I applaud that, and Mr. Lamoureux mentioned to me and to others before the meeting started that it was his intention to not be one of the six on the committee but that he'd be coming by.

Then as we sit here now, I see Mr. Lamoureux, the parliamentary secretary, sitting in the key lead position and, in my view, in a position that is completely contrary to what the government said they were going to do with parliamentary secretaries. I thought that when Mr. Lamoureux said he was going to drop by, he'd be over there, which is normally what most people do, because any member can come to any committee. But when I see the parliamentary secretary sitting right where Tom Lukiwski used to sit as the parliamentary secretary to the House leader, I see the same thing that we had last time.

Therefore, through you, Mr. Chair, I'm asking Mr. Lamoureux this: where's the change, given that you are sitting where Mr. Lukiwski did and doing exactly what he did? In fact, no other member of your caucus has spoken yet except you. In fact, I don't know why, but the chair even felt the need to look over and check with you on something.

I'm sure that was just a reflex that will stop now that he's our independent chair, but I'd still like to know through you, Mr. Chair, what the intention of the government is vis-à-vis parliamentary secretaries, because they seem to be saying one thing and doing something else.

David Christopherson

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