Chair, I want to make it very clear that the government does support a water study. As you pointed out, the last Parliament ended with a look at water and the oil sands, and we look forward to further witnesses coming and further discussion on that.
It has resulted in the motion that I presented two weeks ago. The government recognizes the legislative requirement to do a SARA review. I have found it frustrating that this is not moving forward when we do have a legislative requirement and the government supports this. The whips of the opposition need to get together and support this. It is a legislative requirement.
As I pointed out a number of times today, we have a limited number of meetings, approximately 22 meetings, so I was trying to move the agenda along. But I also want to work collaboratively with our members in this committee.
We have heard concerns that they want to allow the opposition whips to meet with the government whip and agree to move this forward. It's important that this move forward, so I encourage the members here representing the opposition to talk to their whips and tell them to move this forward.
I then will back off and remove this motion, but again, the clock is ticking and we have meetings next week that we need to prepare for. This week, we are meeting today and we are meeting on Thursday, but what are we going to do next week? Monday, we have the steering committee. Tuesday, we'll have a report from the steering committee and we'll be rehashing what we're doing today. So what are we going to do on Thursday? I was proposing that we start SARA. I'm open then to start a water study.
You yourself, or Chair James Bezan, with the clerk, have the witnesses' names. We need to trust the chair, and I would then propose that we plan for Tuesday or Thursday of next week. Likely Tuesday we'll be hearing from the steering committee, so Thursday of next week we can begin the water study, start moving on that and use constructively the limited number of weeks we have. At this point, it seems we're stalled, and I think there is a desire from everybody here that we start moving and start having productive meetings.