Point of order, Madam Chair.
This process, quite frankly, is severely flawed.
We were given the bill on Monday night and told to have amendments by Tuesday. Which clearly isn't enough time. The government members have all the resources of government staff. It's completely unfair to the rest of us to not have the same consideration.
It's actually quite absurd that we had to request the sponsor of the bill to appear before the committee. This is a standard practice. The proposal for the sponsor not to appear should never have been brought forward by the chair without consulting committee members.
Furthermore, a bill should not be brought forward without witnesses and passed at the same meeting.
We have a number of technical questions for the sponsors and officials that we need to address. Only once we receive those answers is it possible for us to draft our amendments. The fact that there's no Q&A in this particular, as I see in the agenda here. The sponsor is suppose to speak for 15 minutes. There's some staff there and then we go to clause-by-clause without questions. We have questions about this particular bill.
The idea that we should have to submit amendments to a bill before it has been discussed at committee and without members having the opportunity to have officials or at least the sponsor respond to our questions, is quite simply wrong.
We will be requesting that clause-by-clause be delayed to the next meeting to give us adequate time consider the responses to our questions and draft amendments based on that information. If we move this bill this particular way, this sets a very bad precedent for further bills.
That's my point of order, Madam Chair.