Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate my colleague's thoughts and comments. I agree with him that we can definitely disagree without being disagreeable, and this committee has shown that in the past.
What I want to say, because people have raised the issue of law, is that what you wouldn't do is ask for a charter statement in the middle of amending a contract. This is the real issue here.
We have a clause that has come out. We have other clauses that might go in or might not go in, depending on the vote of the committee. I'm totally okay with the idea that at the end of the committee's work, when all the amendments that the committee wants to consider go forward, we ask for an amended charter statement and we don't send the bill back to the House, and in the event that we find that there is an incongruity of what we have done vis-à-vis the charter statement, we go back and fix that. It does not make sense to say that the charter statement should come right now, before we've adopted all the amendments that we intend to adopt on the bill, because then we're not considering what might come in after something else has gone out.
I'm going to vote for Ms. McPherson's amendments to put a 10-day time limit because I believe it's an improvement over the initial motion that had no time limit. However, I still will support further amendments to change this motion to actually make sense. One would be to remove the stopping of the clause-by-clause study and to continue clause-by-clause study so that we get to a point where there can actually be a proper review by the Department of Justice of what the end result of the bill is, instead of looking at the bill with half of the work done and half of the work not done. All that means again, of course, is that we can adopt another amendment and then somebody can say that there should be a charter statement now because that amendment changes the previous charter statement.
I will support this amendment, but I will support and propose other amendments until we get to a place where, to me, this makes sense, which is a charter statement that comes after all the amendments to the bill are actually adopted and we learn what the overall effect is, not what the effect is in the middle of the process.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.