Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.
Just for the record, I want to say that I was on the previous list. Before Mr. Davies made his amendment, I was next on the list, but I then put my hand up again for this amendment, and I did come in after Monsieur Ste-Marie, so I was indeed second on the list.
I just want to say thank you so much. I always like hearing the wise wisdom of my colleague Monsieur Ste-Marie. I always like to hear his thoughts.
The first thing I'm going to say is that I very much agree with Mr. Davies' suggestion. I'm not sure how he did this. I think he was stealing all my notes, because just about all of his comments he was making were about everything I was going to mention, so we are very aligned.
I will say first that I appreciated Mr. Davies' looking at how many hours we used in considering the BIA last year as well as in 2022. Indeed, his proposal does keep us in line with that. I want to let Mr. Davies know that I'm very much in agreement with what he has proposed for the week of May 20.
I would say to you, regarding Monsieur Ste-Marie's comment, that there would then have to be a bit of an adjustment around possible amendments. I think that is something we have to think about as we move towards what the final schedule on this budget implementation act.
The second thing I will also indicate, and I'm glad Mr. Davies has brought this up, is that we do have only seven weeks left. We do have to pass the budget before the end of June, for all the outstanding reasons my colleagues Mr. Turnbull and Mr. Davies made in terms of the importance of various aspects of the bill. There are a number of things I could put on the table as well that are important to my riding, but I will leave it, as I pretty much agree 100% with both colleagues and their excellent lists.
I would also say that I would encourage us to try to reach some sort of consensus today. We do not want to lose the opportunity to hear from our Minister of Finance and our Deputy Prime Minister this Thursday. If I heard Mr. Turnbull correctly, she is available this Thursday. I tend to like to have our minister at the front end when we are considering the budget implementation act. It allows us the opportunity to ask some questions of her and get some of her thoughts before we continue asking more specific questions on each of the sections of the budget implementation act.
I agree with Mr. Davies. I think that Mr. Ste-Marie made some thoughtful comments about timelines for the amendments that I think we have to consider. I do know that we all appreciate that we have a timeline to getting this budget passed, and there are only so many weeks left. I would ask for all of my colleagues' consideration that we find a solution today to this, because we do want our Minister of Finance in on Thursday and we want to get going on this testimony. There are a lot of excellent sections to this budget implementation act. I know that I have a lot of questions that I really would like to delve into, so I hope we could reach some sort of agreement today.
Thanks so much, Mr. Chair.