—but if we had gone ahead and voted on Mr. Anderson's motion, as we should have done, we then would have had a new motion on the floor, which itself could have been amended.
In fact, does anybody in this room believe listeriosis is not a food safety issue? Is that what the parliamentary secretary is trying to argue, that listeriosis is not a food safety issue? Of course, Mr. Allen's motion made the point on listeriosis, because if you go back to the discussion and you go back to the original motion that was made at committee, it started with the “whereas” by talking about listeriosis. So it in fact had to be part of the discussion.
The bottom line, in terms of my argument, Mr. Chair, is this. We believe, number one, the subcommittee should have got started a lot faster than it did. Why the delay happened, I do not know. We know that on the schedule at the moment there are seven potential meetings, if we get started right away. We know there are 47 potential witnesses. The food safety issue is a huge, broad issue. We believe it can't be done by the end of June, so it could be scheduled into the fall. We'll do the best we can to get it done by spring, but I think the schedule, as laid out yesterday, was an opportunity for us to go ahead and do our work on food safety.