What I was getting at is that I think it's not appropriate to call a particular witness for, in my opinion, clearly political purposes and to hold up the work of this committee any longer.
I'm also a little concerned that once we run out of time at this committee, we also have the Minister of Finance, who's scheduled to come on Thursday. If this continues, then we're going to lose that time as well. At some point, we're going to have to come to an agreement about how we schedule our time. Our time is limited.
I haven't heard the Conservatives dispute, in any real way, the need for the government to get this budget passed by the end of June, before the Senate rises in the summer. I think we all realize as parliamentarians that this what the norm is, and that's what we've done. After 15 years of being in Parliament, I know that is what has happened every year. It has to be done then for all sorts of reasons.
Reasoning backwards, we have only a limited number of meetings between now and then. I'm going to exhort my colleagues to be creative. I did amend the motion was put forward by Mr. Turnbull to give us an extra two meetings of six hours. That's 12 hours of meetings. Altogether, that comes to 16 hours of meeting on the budget. If we don't come to an agreement on that quickly, we're going to lose the next two meetings. We already lost one today. Mr. Morantz, I think, was right to point out that we lost an hour today.
I don't think I've ever filibustered at a committee in 15 years. I think I can honestly say I've never caused any of my colleagues the disappointment that Mr. Morantz felt by not being able to ask questions. I've been in many meetings where the Conservatives have filibustered, while witnesses are sitting there, so that the rest of us have not been able to ask questions, and it's not pleasant. I don't think it's fair to the witnesses. I don't think it's fair to us as colleagues. I feel his pain, but I also want to point out that it was the Conservatives filibustering in the second hour on this motion that caused us to not be able to ask the questions for the last hour. We could have voted on that motion quickly.
My final point is that this is a minority Parliament, but we still live in a democracy, and in a democracy, the majority rules. That doesn't mean you get your way all the time; it means you have voice.
The question I would ask my Conservative colleagues is this: If you don't like this motion, why not move to amend it? Let's vote on it and let's live with the result of the motion. You may not like the result. I've been in opposition 15 years, and if I had a dollar for every vote I lost, I'd be retired. It's important that we do come to a conclusion on this as soon as we can.
I think the motion by Mr. Turnbull is reasonable. It gets us everything that we need to do to move forward. We could be grilling the finance minister of this country on this budget in two days. We could be putting forth witnesses, probably dozens of witnesses, by the end of this week, and we can have them scheduled two weeks from now, and then we could put those important questions to them.
We could also be working on the amendments. I think this motion would give us a minimum of 12 hours to debate amendments. That's lots of time to debate amendments. We just did it with the FES, the fall economic statement, which is a document similar to what we have here.
I don't know what we're fighting over at this point. Is it an extra meeting or two? I'm not sure. However, I think the Conservatives, if I'm not mistaken, put forth a motion to call Mr. Carney, and I think it failed. If it didn't, I would invite them to put forth a motion, and we'll let democracy rule. If the majority of people in this committee want to call Mark Carney, then we will, and if they don't, we won't. That's the way it works. Holding up the process because you hold a minority opinion and don't get your way is not appropriate.
I'll conclude by saying that I want to bring it back to Canadians, some of whom may be watching, although most will not be. We are all here as finance committee members to try to pass a federal budget that brings the best possible benefits to Canadians and to Canadian businesses. The only way to do that is to call the witnesses to move this forward, to ask the penetrating questions that need to be asked and that I know my colleagues on all sides will ask, and to move the amendments that we think need to be proposed, if that's the case.
Thanks.