Okay.
I just want to say that the reason I have repeated over and over that we can extend our hours, that we can work, is that there's nothing that says these two weeks for Easter are a holiday. We are MPs. We work. Other committees work through it. Last week, when we had the week off, one of my colleagues emailed me something or other and then said he couldn't talk to me on that because he was at a standing committee meeting in the holiday.
I don't want us to ever walk away from the idea that we could work during holidays. Other committees do it. I've done it. I've been here for 22 years. I've done it time and time again. It is in fact in the standing committee rules that one can do this as a standing committee. I'm suggesting that we try to really discuss if we cannot fit this in by extending our hours and by maybe even looking at.... We have two weeks off coming up, the weeks of the 18th and the 25th. You know how everybody likes to say that teachers take a whole summer off and never do anything; we don't want people suggesting that as MPs we take all these weeks off and never do anything. We could come for one day and spend five hours.
The other thing is that you don't need to have four people presenting per meeting. I have been at standing committee meetings in the past where we've had round tables. In other words, we would say “let's just do the academics”, who were going to give us definitions and so on. They can be a round table; they don't present, but it is an interactive thing where we ask them questions pertinent to what we're doing and they answer them.
There are a lot of ways in which we can conduct this study within the allotted time if we decide that's what we really want to do. I'm suggesting this because as a chair I feel that I've gone through this for all this while and we're still putting a lot of people on hold for this. They have been waiting. When we come back—and who knows when in September we're coming back—we have until November. We don't have a lot of time to get other people's things done. The other studies are waiting.
I must say that Mr. Van Loan has been extremely generous with us, because we have bumped him over and over. We still have Ms. Dabrusin, and we have Mr. Van Loan, and we have to finish stuff this year.
Anyway, I'm saying that there are ways, Mr. Anderson, in which we can cut our coats to fit the cloth, as my mother used to say. We can fit our work into the time we have.
Mr. Waugh—
Oh, I'm sorry. Would you like to move your amendment now?