I wouldn't feel competent to put a number on it. Let me tell you how I think about the bill.
These are institutional questions you're dealing with. You're creating new officers of Parliament who are going to be there for the long term, or so you hope. You're creating new procedures. And again, this isn't a quick fix. This is something that you, as parliamentarians, and officials, and ministers, are going to live with for the foreseeable future. It's not as though it was really urgent to pass this bill because people were stealing money hand over fist. Canada is not that kind of a country. You're not trying to deal with larceny or fraud in regional offices or on the part of anybody in politics.
Coming back to Mr. Dewar's comment about morals and values, every year there's an organization called Transparency International that publishes a so-called corruption perceptions index. It's got 170-plus countries on it, and Canada is always in the top 10, with the Scandinavians, the New Zealanders, and the Dutch, and good folks like that. So it's not as though we have a question of rampant corruption that it's urgent to deal with; you're dealing with longer-term matters.
I don't know, I have no idea, what the right number of hearings is. I might venture a suggestion just from my own experience of some past legislation. Once you get into clause-by-clause, and where you're not having partisan arguments but you're actually figuring what the best way to do this is, you may find that's more complicated than you have thought. But that's speculation on my part.
I would not want to prescribe to parliamentarians what is the right amount of time to give this. I would express the more general opinion. This is long-term legislation. I hope you won't feel that you've got to come to too many conclusions in the short term, but I wouldn't go further than that.