Thank you, Mr. Chair. It's nice to be back here in Ottawa, actually. It's nice to see everyone in the room.
For Ms. Jansen, I absolutely agree with you, and I think we probably all agree that we all want to get back to business. Getting back to business for me, at this moment, means that we want to get right to pre-budget consultations.
I'll just remind everyone once again that on October 8 when we first met, within the first few minutes of our actually convening the committee, I did introduce a motion for us to get started on pre-budget consultations. I will tell you that if we want to get right down to business, we can get down to business ASAP if the point of privilege that Mr. Poilievre introduced after my motion to start pre-budget consultations were withdrawn. There is absolutely no delay on our part.
There was a motion that I'm very grateful to Mr. Poilievre for putting forward today. I will say to you, though, that it was given to us during committee. If this were something that we would have wanted to already have decided on, it would have been.... Often, it's not uncommon for us to be given these motions beforehand. We could have contemplated it beforehand. We could have already read and reviewed it and then have come here today for a decision, but that was not done. It was given to us during our meeting.
Again, I am very grateful that Mr. Poilievre has proposed something. As my colleague Mr. Fraser has indicated, I think it looks promising. I think there are a lot of elements that could get us to where we all want to end up, but we do want a little time to actually reflect on it properly.
My understanding of what Mr. Fraser has proposed and what our chair has actually tried to relay is that we've proposed something very expedited that maybe could set us back on track by the time we get here on Thursday. If I heard my colleague Mr. Fraser correctly, he has indicated that he is willing to start working on this immediately this evening, in addition to a couple of other things he has on the table, and that he has offered a phone call tomorrow to whomever would like to discuss it—from all parties—so that we could maybe answer some questions and continue to proceed toward what we are hoping is some sort of agreement.
I think I heard that we could also figure out—if we do find some agreement—a way to deal with it procedurally at the onset of our meeting on Thursday if we are not able to find an available meeting space tomorrow, if one doesn't miraculously come free. Then we can actually get down to business and hear from our governor and deputy governor this Thursday.
I didn't hear anybody trying to say “let's just keep on waiting”. What I heard is, let's try to move as quickly as possible, let's fairly have a chance to actually look at this motion and let's make sure that we understand it completely. We're going to start working on it right away. We're willing to actually meet on this by phone call tomorrow morning and try to figure out all the steps we need to be able—if we have some sort of agreement—to resolve it within the initial part of our Thursday meeting so that we can get right down to business on Thursday.
That is what I heard, and I don't think that in any way is us trying to delay or any further delay tactic. I think that is just responsible on our part in terms of reviewing the motion that was presented to us here at committee.
I also want to address Mr. Poilievre. He always makes me laugh with some of his references. I just want to correct for the record that there was no one who was bringing up the Quran or the Torah or some of the other references he was mentioning earlier today during our last few weeks. I think we were desperately trying to find a compromise, and we had proposed a subamendment that we had hoped would address the issues raised by the opposition—