Senator Housakos: I want to remind my colleagues on the Transport Committee — and on all committees — that when senators do their work at committee, they have the right to put forward motions. They have the right to amend motions. They have the right, in a fulsome way, to debate those motions.

I can assure my Deputy Chair of the Transport and Communications Committee that I will continue to respect those principles as chair. As I said, very often in a democracy, a parliamentary setting or a committee, the majority — you have come to the assumption that 8 out of 12 wanted to pass the bill yesterday, and, well, we want to do the work and respect the motion before this committee, and do it in a wholesome way. I will allow even the minority voices to ask the questions they want to ask and to request the documents they want to request, and I assure you that we will respect the motion of the chamber. We will respect the date line of the chamber. But we will also allow for democracy — at least at the Transport and Communications Committee — to function.

[Translation]

Hon. Leo Housakos: Thank you, senator, for the excellent question.

The committee itself will decide when to start its work. It is at the important stage of planning its future activities, and as the senators who are members of several committees in this institution know, we can’t move forward without a good plan, so we need time. As you know, the steering committee hasn’t reached a consensus yet, and the work is ongoing. The committee will start by establishing a plan before going any further.

[English]

That is the tradition when it comes to work at the committee level, and as we all know, colleagues, committees have a degree of independence in this place. They take guidance from this chamber. Of course, I recognize that this is the ultimate superior authority when it comes to giving direction to committees, but as has been expressed over a number of weeks and months in the chamber by colleagues like Senator Cordy and Senator Downe, committees are masters of their own destiny. So we are going to allow the Transport and Communications Committee the leeway that they need in order to come up with a plan, to come up with directives and try to follow, of course, the guidelines that have been given by this chamber.

The last time I checked, the motion that you have questioned about has no particular date or timeline. The government has given us the flexibility to do the robust study that needs to be done on such an important bill.

[Translation]

Senator Housakos: Absolutely not. There is absolutely no willingness on the part of the committee to refuse the will of this chamber. The motion has been embraced. We left all the work aside, and we dove right into it at the first available moment. The first meeting that we had, colleagues, last night, we dove right into preparing a work plan.

I do appreciate that sometimes the majority laughs when the minority asks important questions, but yesterday there were a couple of motions put before us in order to do the work as diligently as we can. Senator Quinn has a motion that he put before the committee. You may laugh, but he requires certain documents, and I agree with him. Maybe it’s just a minority of senators who might agree with him, but he has the right to request those documents. We have the right, democratically, at committee to pursue our work.

She asked the question; I want to give a robust, lengthy answer. Senator Lankin, I appreciate that sometimes some of us —