Thank you, Chair.
It's important to underline something that Mr. Beech spoke to, which is the amount of time that's available to us to meet if we so choose as a committee. It's important to remember that. I know it seems like a short period of time, because it's a week, but the reality is that the amount of sitting time and the amount of working time are the equivalent of weeks of a committee's schedule under normal circumstances. That's the first thought. There's adequate time for us to do the work we need to do, to ask the questions we need to ask and to hear from the minister for two hours, in addition to her opening remarks.
As Ms. Dzerowicz pointed out, the bill's been available for several weeks.
The other thing to point out is that from past experience in observing this committee, some of the members' work on this committee and other committees, and the legislative process here in the House of Commons on legislation that wasn't expedited, we've seen that many of the amendments are prepared, thought about, considered and drafted, in many cases, before the minister presents.
Speaking to Mr. Poilievre's point that we need to wait for the minister before amendments can be drafted, in my view and in practice, that's not how the committees typically work. Typically, the minister's input is important, of course, and it's important to consider it, but much of the work on those amendments is done well in advance. There's adequate time for the minister's input to be considered and for the final tweaks to those amendments to be made, whatever those happen to be, if there are any at all.
The other thing that I want to address is a point that Mr. Poilievre made around the fact that he appreciated that during the pandemic, we had to act with haste. I think those were his words, or something along those lines. He appreciated that we needed to act with haste then. Presumably that's because people needed supports and they needed them urgently. Where we are in the pandemic today is that a smaller group of people need those supports urgently. This legislation is meant to help that group of people. If we felt that it was important to act with haste in the past, I would suggest that it's important to act with haste now as well.
Those are my thoughts, Mr. Chair.