Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I would like to hear Mr. Desjarlais' rationale behind this motion because, at first glance, I'm failing to understand why we are putting a witness....
Let me just back up here. I've served on other committee, including the ethics committee, and it was a disturbing trend to me to see that witnesses were being subjected.... These were witnesses who are ordinary, private citizens for the most part, and yet they must appear in front of any committee. They must. Normally we ask them to appear and it's only failing that when the committee decides that it needs to go further and subpoena a witness to cause them to appear.
There were a number of occasions, including a study where we were dealing with sexual aggression, online cyber sexual sensitive material and so on, where indeed some witnesses wanted to present to us and others did not. I would be very uncomfortable that we could not make that decision as a group on a what has normally been done in this committee—Chair, you'll agree with me here—namely, by using a consensus-type of decision-making process in which we would respect the desire of a witness to appear privately. If there were a member here who for some reason of their own was going to insist that a witness testify publicly on information that we could just as well obtain in camera.... Doing so in camera would not hamper our work in any way whatsoever. We could obtain the same information and we'd be able to use it. We have very responsible procedures in place to get the information that we need as parliamentarians, but at the same time respect the witness.
I have great difficulty with this motion and I cannot support it.