Let me clarify that. In normal times, we normally could. I talked to the clerk, and I am told that there is no space available for us tomorrow. That's a problem, given what we're dealing with in the COVID world we live in and having to deal with Zoom and scheduling, etc. in here. Normally, we could meet five days a week as a committee, but we're not in those kinds of time frames now, and that's a problem. I didn't change my mind. I just had to face the reality, I guess, that there's no space for us tomorrow.
I do have Ms. Dzerowicz on my list, and then we're going to go back to the subamendment, but just to give committee members something to think about, I really do believe that if we work at it, we can have a solution to this issue for the Thursday meeting.
I want to mention this just for members to think about, because I know that we all want to get to pre-budget consultations. We want to read the 793 submissions that have been submitted. There are a lot of good recommendations in them. We've seen some of the briefs—at least some of us have because they've been sent to us directly.
This is just for the committee to think about. Under our normal standing order, we would have to report on our pre-budget consultations by December 8. There are, as I said, 793 briefs that have come in prior to August 15, so we would have those to work with.
I know that the analysts have been working on them and trying to get them into summary order so that we could have a look at the recommendations, etc. That would mean that we would have hardly any time, I guess, to really hear from witnesses in person, and we would probably need two or three meetings—three, more than likely—as members to propose recommendations, discuss them and agree on recommendations. That's scenario number one. That would be a possibility.
The other possibility would be that we could ask for permission from the House to table in the first week of February. To do so would actually require getting permission from the House for the allowance of virtual hearings beyond December 11, because I understand the motion that's in the House allows them only till December 11.
If we went with that scenario, we'd have a few time slots between now and December 11, but after December 11 other committees are not meeting, or I don't think they are. If we were to hold three-hour meetings or more on December 14, 15, 16 and 17, in a three-hour slot we could hear 12 witnesses, six in each hour and a half. That would allow us 48 priority witnesses. It would give the analysts January to draft the report, and we could do our work in the last week of January to get our report done and in. As I said earlier, they are working on an appendix on the written briefs that will be very helpful to us.
The other point I'd make—and this, as I say, is just to think about, because we do have to get this work done somehow to benefit Canadians—is that the analysts have also worked on our COVID-19 hearings in the spring.
I've seen a bit of a summary of what the analysts put together prior to prorogation. They have now continued on that work. There are a lot of good suggestions in those COVID-19 submissions that we've seen. They have put together a comprehensive summary of the COVID-19 suggestions. We could also bring that forward—either report it as a summary to the House—to give the Minister of Finance and others the opportunity to see what others said in those hearings in the spring. That would be in addition to whatever work we may decide to do on pre-budget consultations.
I'm just taking the leeway as chair to lay that out there. I do think people need to think about where we're going and how we can do the best we can to get the information that Canadians spent time on when writing and submitting briefs to us and appear before us in the spring.
That's just there for your information.
Ms. Dzerowicz, you're still up for Mr. Poilievre's motions proposal. It's not really a motion that's allowed on the floor, but we'll allow you in. Then we'll go back to the subamendment.