Thank you, Mr. Chair.
If we go back to when we were first looking at this issue, we will see that we agreed to have one meeting on it. That was what we were supposed to do. Then it turned into two. Then we wanted the minister. Back then, I used the term “mission creep”, and that's exactly what is happening.
We recognize why we're doing this the way that we're doing it. We have offered to have committee business time. We've even offered to have a subcommittee deal with this. We recognize that every other motion that.... When I was the chair of this committee, we always would do committee business in the proper way. This has become a political stunt. It has become a political stunt by the opposition. It's a fishing exercise. There's no other way to describe it.
I'm sorry that once again the opposition has decided to do this when we have witnesses on important studies. I said when this came up at the beginning that we were in the middle of an incredibly important study on women veterans and that this was what veterans want us to focus on. They're watching this and they're shaking their heads. They want us to be studying the important aspects of what their challenges are, what their barriers are.
We agreed to bring in the minister. We agreed to bring in Daoust and to hear the story, and we've done all of this.
What are we doing? What is this? This just seems to be one more.... Every time we expand this, it becomes something else. Every time that we agree, it's like, “Well, okay; now we want to do this.” This is wasting the time of this committee. It is now wasting the time of veterans in this study.
We are seeing such disrespect for veterans that we had to collectively do sensitivity training because of this—