Senator Omidvar: Fair enough.

Hon. Ratna Omidvar: I don’t wish to take any more points. I believe the point of my question was made, and it was more about the mechanics of Senator Plett’s proposal and exactly how it would work, given our true and tried principle of proportionality on the one hand, the fact that the Government Representative Office, or GRO, does not have an assigned number of seats on committees, nor do they have numbers of statements.

I’m wondering if you could explain your vision for all the non-affiliated senators being embraced by GRO as members of their caucus. I’m not quite sure how I would see that working.

Hon. Ratna Omidvar: Honourable senators, I wish to thank Senator Tony Loffreda for his very gracious and kind comments about me yesterday. I was, sadly, not in the chamber. Let’s put it down to the vagaries of Air Canada. But I do really appreciate them. I should tell you that he, too, was a rock star, especially as he placed his substantive comments in the context of his own compelling personal narrative. Senator Loffreda, I’m happy to go with you on the road again any time. We do a good two-step.

Substantively, I came back with three distinct but interconnected challenges. The first is the incredible rise in global displacement. These figures are not to be taken lightly, colleagues. We’re now at 100 million globally displaced people. Along with this unfortunate rise in global displacement, there is another disturbing trend, which is the global meltdown in governance and solidarity.

Second, there is the looming challenge of climate migration. In 30 short years, the International Metropolis Conference, or IOM, has estimated that we will see 1.5 billion — not million — people be displaced. We don’t know where they will go, and we don’t know how they will get to safety.

Third, there is the growing number of so-called low-skilled workers moving for work and filling labour market gaps in essential work — in OECD countries — without certainty for their future, as well as without any predictability for employers. In Germany, I was reminded by Germans about their field experiment with their guest workers, the Gastarbeiter. They paraphrased it to me as, “We wanted workers; we didn’t realize we were getting human beings instead.” Let’s keep that experience in mind.

In each of these buckets, sadly, there is less and less multilateralism, when, in fact, we need more and more. If there is a silver lining I came back with, it’s at the bilateral level. It is the policy coherence and values alignment between Germany and Canada, whether it is energy policy, trade, climate change or migration. As a member of the German-Canadian Parliamentary Friendship Group, I look forward to deepening these bilateral ties in the next couple of years under the capable leadership of our chair, Senator Boehm. Thank you.

Hon. Ratna Omidvar: I am curious about Senator Plett’s proposition. I don’t have as many years in the Senate as you do, but I know enough about the Senate, as it is constructed today, to understand that the government leader and his team have certain responsibilities. However, they do not have what the other groups have, which is the authority to make statements. They can always rise up and make statements, of course, but they don’t have the capacity, let’s say every day, like three members of your caucus or two members of our caucus.

More significantly, while the members of the Government Representative Office, or GRO, have ex officio status on committees — where the real work gets done, I think we can all agree — they don’t have a committee seat. I think that is what Senator McCallum is asking for. I have certainly heard both Senator McCallum and Senator McPhedran, whilst they were members of the ISG and whilst they were unaffiliated, rise up on many occasions —