If I could offer something, we have an opportunity through the presentation of motions to develop a landscape of the things that we see as important and worthy of our consideration. The scheduling and stages of when we talk about them can certainly be up to the subcommittee. Between now and the date that we've picked, August 15, the field is open for people to submit as many motions as they see fit.
What I detect—and I can stand to be corrected—is that there's a sentiment that if we accept a motion now, we've nailed it down to the schedule and it's going to be first. Based on what we've seen with the changing situation in the relationship with China, I think that's probably not prudent at this point. It's unnecessary, given that we're not going to have any substantive work on it anyway for some period of time.
In other committees, we've adopted a fairly open approach to bringing forward all motions. Bring them in. Put them into the hopper. Let's see what the interests of the committee in total are and leave it to the subcommittee—or the whole committee, as we see fit—to determine the sequencing of these motions.
It's also been a practice at the committees I've been on that we spread it around. We'll take a motion from the Bloc and then a motion from the Conservatives, the Liberals and the NDP, so that each of us in turn has an opportunity to marshal the committee's energies behind a certain subject or study.
As chair, I'll make a suggestion that we invite motions, put them on the table and put them into that landscape that we're creating in order to find out what the interests of the committee might be.
Are there any thoughts on that?
Go ahead, Mr. Brunelle-Duceppe.