—organizations. Of course, the leadership on this bill is the same leadership. Mr. Angus was the NDP lead at that time. We heard from more than 70 organizations. We have put forward a plan to hear from 60 more organizations, so it will be more than 130 organizations.
Mr. Simms makes the point that the Liberals actually support the bill and want to see it passed, yet his colleague, Mr. Regan, introduced a motion in the House of Commons to kill the bill. Basically it was not a motion to change it in any way; it was just a motion to kill the bill, so clearly the Liberal position is that they actually don't want to see the bill passed.
When you get a chance to read the testimony, you'll see that witness after witness came before the committee last time and spoke about the urgency of getting this bill passed, saying that we need to pass this legislation.
This cannot go on forever. I think most reasonable people looking at this process would say that giving more than 130 witnesses and organizations the chance to testify is eminently reasonable. In fact, I would be hard pressed to find a piece of legislation that had more witnesses testify in the last several decades, probably.
If what you're saying is that we need more than 12 hours a week to do this, do you know what? Members on this side of the table would be willing to maybe meet 16 hours a week, if we need to--that might be a compromise-- but we have to get this bill passed. It's important that we get it passed.
Last time around, just to be clear, the members in the three opposition parties voted to limit the testimony to four hours a week. I know it's hard to believe, but they voted to limit the testimony to four hours a week. We said we would meet eight hours a week to try to make sure that we heard everybody who wanted to be heard, so that we could pass the legislation, but they voted to make sure we limited it to four hours a week. That's just not going to happen again.
Mr. Benskin, you mentioned that you might want to ask questions of people who had been before the committee before. Well, certainly, the bill hasn't changed. They have come forward and testified before the committee or have made submissions to the committee on the bill, and it hasn't changed. As you review that testimony, you can phone the witnesses directly. Most of them would take your call, I'm sure, and you could take your five minutes to ask them whatever questions you want. You could even take 10 or 15 minutes to ask them questions, if you want, so you'd get the opportunity to ask the questions you want to ask.
We have a month and a half scheduled from now until the end of the bill. It's a month and a half. I can't remember a piece of legislation that we've studied for even close to a month and a half—maybe with some breaks, such as a Christmas break in between—but we have a significant amount of time scheduled to study this piece of legislation. All we have to do is roll up our sleeves, get down to work, and get this bill passed.