Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'd like to take a moment to just draw on some experience I had in another committee that had a prolific number of document requests.
Through you, Mr. Chair, does anybody around the table have any idea, based on appendices or anything, of how many documents we're talking about? The reason I ask is that I would like for this committee.... I would assume that this committee would like to see the documents before we commence the study. I think that would be an obvious first step. We would receive the documents, and then we would have the study, rather than call witnesses before we've seen any of the documents.
If that's the case—and we're talking about documents in the thousands, or as in my other committee, tens of thousands—I would caution that this would require a translation service that might prove to be onerous for the purpose of this study. We need to ensure that the French language is protected at all times within the House of Commons, and that bilingualism is protected as a foundation of the country.
My concern is that, if we're doing a demand for documents that includes tens of thousands of documents, in a very practical way it would be very unlikely that we would get to this study before at least mid-2024. That's what I'm dealing with at another committee.
I'm wondering if there's any light on exactly what it is that we're talking about in terms of the scale of the documents.